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One speaker. Five minutes. 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. A new Mumbai event, Ignite, promises to give the concept of presentations a whole new meaning. DNA meets the group who’ll talk a blue streak this week.

On a regular day, amateur stand-up comedian Karan Talwar makes good conversation. He tells you about his job at a shipping company that can get quite mundane, his stint at a US school or how one’s first stand-up show must bomb so you know better the next time.

But how exactly he will argue that for a woman in rural India the most important criterion for selecting a prospective suitor is a home with an indoor toilet is something he will reveal only on the stage later this week. He will also prove how the Indian male’s reluctance to choose a right-sized condom leads to women contracting AIDS rapidly.

Talwar will have exactly five minutes to do all this with the help of 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. He and eight others will speak at the new city event, Ignite Mumbai that kicks off this Saturday at Bandra’s Café Goa.

Ignite is a global event started by O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis at Seattle in 2006 (the city had organised 9 Ignite nights till date). It is now held in more than 50 cities the world over, including Dublin, Vancouver, Seoul, Strasbourg and Sydney, with 150-800 people egging on 10-15 speakers as audience almost everywhere. In India, Chennai, Pune and Bangalore have held Ignite events over last year. Its motto, aptly so, is ‘Enlighten us, but make it quick’.
 
Mumbai ignited
As I meet the Ignite Mumbai group at a lounge, the organisers and participants seem to be treading carefully. “Well, I know we are kick-starting an event that’s all about talking non-stop, but, you see, some of us are meeting each other for the first time…” says Aviraj Saluja, organiser and business developer at a web services company, a tad sheepishly. 

The next moment, Saluja realises the delight in the situation and adds, “That’s what Ignite does. You spread the word that anyone who’d like to speak can jump on to the stage and so many sign up without any qualm.” Last year, after attending the Ignite event at Boulder, where he was studying MBA, Saluja says he just knew he had to bring it to this city. His friends Maneesh Madambath, founder of a digital media agency and Suyash Trivedi, a scriptwriter, doubled up as co-organisers.

Within days the word spread and an eager bunch of speakers came together. “People I hardly knew were keen to participate - and most hadn’t even heard of Ignite,” he says. Some signed up because of the event is similar to Pecha Kucha (a similar style of presentation started by two architects of the Tokyo-based firm, Klein Dytham Architects in 2003 to help designers, creative heads and architects network better). A few others had watched Ignite videos online.

Sixty passes were booked in a matter of hours last week. “And no, we haven’t given out passes to just our friends to fill the space,” quips Saluja. Ignite Mumbai will be organised every two-three months, and half the speakers for the subsequent events will be chosen through viewer votes. Once Ignite Mumbai finds a foothold, tickets for the events will be sold at a nominal rate.

Get, set, speak
For most speakers, the excitement beats the anxiety. Mansi Trivedi, a strategic planner at an advertising company, says she’s too keen to speak about a pet topic to let her nerves get the better of her.

“When I was studying abroad till two years ago, I realised I wasn’t the only who felt displaced in a new city. So I started an online, collective story-telling forum (www.dsplaced.com) where people explored their relationship with their cities. Ignite will be an important platform for me to tell people to not just live in a city, but to listen to it too.” Tweeting and blogging she adds are not the same experience as watching a live audience listen to your point of view.

Expectedly, Trivedi gets a few nods from the group itself (which is now loosening up).

The topics, as I gradually discover, are emotional, cheeky (How to hack a BEST bus seat/How to prevent a couple fight from becoming a break-up fight) or intriguing (Power of Online communities: The wisdom of the crowd/Not another NGO —Building a modern social movement in India/Interesting observations about urban India behaviour).

Amanda White, a programme and communications associate at Shop for Change Fair Trade, who will speak on how NGOs can further their causes by building a positive public image, came to Mumbai last year. Apart from professional networking, her motivation for participating in Ignite is to meet a creative crowd and share the idea that social change needn’t depend on the charity model alone.

“Today, change is all about how you use your strategy and activists. The NGO sector here can teach and learn a lot more,” she explains. White says she is glad that Ignite is about meeting people and sharing ideas — and doesn’t double up as a platform for professional pitches.

Aditya Rao, who will speak about the power of online communities, agrees with White. “Imagine, you can keep your audience interested even as you tell them how to break a chocolate slab perfectly or why Super Mario Brothers is the best game ever.. I’ve chosen to speak about the wisdom of the crowd by referring to Star Wars and Isaac Asimov — and how communities will decide the future. Today, for instance, Starbucks depends on communities of customers to vote for its menu and products. Wikipedia has only 32 employees and depends on the ‘crowd’ for its content. I want to share this idea at Ignite, and hopefully inspire someone in those five minutes,” he says.

Whether Rohan Joseph can use Quentin Tarantino’s wisdom from Pulp Fiction (f*** pride) to salvage a relationship fight, or Asfaq Tapia can ensure that you do manage to grab that BEST seat, Talwar says he’s sure of one thing — there will be no yawns
during the evening.

For details, log on to
www.ignitemumbai.com. To participate in upcoming Ignite events, submit your entries at www.igniteshow.com.