Global Issues TED Conferences

Remembering and responding online: Lakshmi Pratury at TED2013

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Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Lakshmi Pratury: The lost art of letter-writing Lakshmi Pratury: The lost art of letter-writing

Once, Lakshmi Pratury says, she was deeply troubled by the public lives of young people on the Internet, but now she has hope — because the same kids who post their party pics online are also posting their political outrage.

Her talk turns to a sad and shocking recent event: the gang-rape and torture of an Indian woman on a bus in New Delhi and her eventual death in Singapore. The public was outraged, and it quickly turned into an international online movement to raise awareness against sexual violence. For the first time in India, Pratury says, people were using the Internet to galvanize a political response. Pratury launched a forum called Billionaires of Moments to help the woman’s memory live on, and to keep an archive of similar moments of tragedy that need to be remembered. Her wish is that someday, along with the Fortune 500, there will be a list of 100 Billionaires of moments.