Javed Jabbar
Looking for excess baggage
In symbolic and in substantive terms, the Eurasia Media Forum becomes the apt means to represent the sharing and the merging of continents and of visions of the future, as also the lines and contours that sharply demarcate territories of the mind and geographies of the psyche.
For a part of Asia that is also, in many ways, the heart of Asia, and one that has remained for much of recent history, inaccessible if not also invisible, there probably could not be a more appropriate location for the Forum than Kazakhstan. As much as a country can be large (i.e. approximately the land mass of India, with a population of only one of India’s cities!), the sheer scale and splendour of this land provides an awesome and dramatic landscape in which to set the Forum. The formidable physical dimensions of Kazakhstan threaten to make both the participants of the dialogue in the Forum and the event itself, diminutive and only momentarily able to secure attention while the seamless continuum of the place carries on as it has done through most of time.
Yet, when people from different parts of the planet, from continents as close to each other as next-door neighbours who can also be as distant as strangers, come together, the event assumes a modest significance that is distinct and irreplaceable: the opportunity for a direct, face-to-face exchange of information and analysis, of views and perceptions on issues that may be described as “media issues” but which reflect basic and vital concerns of all human beings.
The value of these inter-personal communication opportunities afforded by the Eurasia Media Forum become the greater even as communications technology and the wonders of digitalization make tele-conferencing and pictorial cell-phones affordable to hundreds of millions of people.
Participants bring a wide range of data and information to events such as this Forum. After being provided an opportunity to express what they bring and after listening to, and debating the data and the views that others bring to the same venue, each individual, hopefully, goes away with unquestionably enhanced information and awareness, not just about respective continental perspectives, but about issues and themes that are global and universal.
Some may not want the facts, and especially new facts and new perspectives to get in the way of their opinions. The baggage they bring to Almaty may return with them from Almaty with the same weight and pre-conceptions that it originally contained. For this participant at least, I know in advance that my suitcase on departure from Almaty for home after the 2005 Eurasia Media Forum will be heavier than what I arrived with: and I am quite able and willing to pay for the marvellous new “excess” baggage!
Site developed