In 1949, in the Colorado mountain town of Aspen, a Chicago businessman named Walter Paepcke organised a gathering unlike any that had been held in America till then.
The world was just four years past a war that had killed millions of people. The atomic bomb had been dropped and its horrors were still reverberating across the world.
Paepcke’s response was not a conference or a symposium in the conventional sense. He called it the Goethe Bicentennial Celebration. He invited thinkers, artists, musicians and leaders from across the world to come to a mountain and talk. To think out loud together. To ask, in the ruins of the century’s first half, what humanity’s best impulses were worth, and whether they could be recovered.
Out of that gathering grew the Aspen Institute, and five decades later, the Aspen Ideas Festival, one of the leading annual intellectual gatherings of the contemporary world.
The Hay Festival of Literature and Arts has been running for close to 40 years in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. It has been aptly called the ‘Woodstock of the mind’. Hay had been to Thiruvananthapuram twice—on the same Kanakakkunnu Palace where AGORA will take place.
TED has been popular with the tagline ‘ideas worth spreading’.
What can shape the future better and more effectively than ideas? Ideas that are disruptive, iconoclast and full of the firepower to ignite and inspire thoughts to shape the future.
Why ideas
matter
AGORA as a festival of ideas begins with the realisation that the world is at the threshold of a wave of disruptions across all possible facets. Like ‘in the beginning’, the world is now in a state of fluidity. There is way too much information and data. We are digitally naked, and don’t know where to hide for privacy. Our jobs are being taken away (or, are they?), the very planet is under threat of destruction, there is poison in food, there is greed in the heart, eating into our very existence like cancer.
Social media rewards speed over accuracy. Journalism has shrunk under commercial pressure. Education has drifted away from the kind of open-ended inquiry that produces citizens rather than credentials. Political discourse has become just performance.
In this environment, a festival of ideas is an act of resistance. This is what Paepcke understood in 1949, in the rubble of a century’s catastrophes. That the conversation between people who bring different expertise to a shared problem makes the difference.
We need to talk.
We need conversations.
We need to create and confront the ideas that can shape our future.
It gives clarity.
It gives hope.
Kerala has a tradition of public intellectual debate — in the newspapers and media; in the coffee houses and reading rooms; in the political discourse that, for all its partisanship, has never given up on ideas that matter. Kerala has produced scientists and mathematicians, poets and novelists, philosophers and filmmakers, in numbers largely disproportionate to its size and its position in the global economy. It exports, through its diaspora to the Gulf, to Europe, to the United States, some of the most educated labour in the world. In return it receives, through those same diaspora channels, global experience and perspective.
AGORA discusses climate-change, jobs; mobility; education; the brain, AI, the crisis of democracy, geopolitics, science & technology, spirituality, business, health, history, books, etc.
Asianet News has been part of Malayali public discourse for three decades — it has been a witness to the political arguments, the cultural debates, the crises and the recoveries that have shaped this state’s modern identity.
The vision is to contribute to the development of the state and its people as both move into a disrupted future by asking disturbing questions and by leaving a tangible proof of the discussions and ideas in the form of AGORA Editions.