Below is a snippet of the keynote along with a link to the entire speech.
“In the days when butter was hand-churned and cream-colored, my grandmother’s eldest sister Vade Masiji called me Mukkhan, meaning butter. One day she held my arms with hands twisted from arthritis, and asked, “Mukkhan, what does “Bore” mean? How do you be Bore?” I told her it was an uninterested state of mind, one I’d experienced while reading the Oxford History of India. 1 The next evening, Vade Masiji informed me she had tried very hard, but had been unable to accomplish Bore. Maybe, like the rest in the Partition generation, she had been too busy striving, caregiving and feeding us to have time for it. Maybe she never expected a constant stream of entertainment. But no matter how boring was the Oxford History, Vade Masiji could not have attained Bore or Boredom even with that tome. She was always interested in other people. Close your eyes and imagine a world without people. Can you? That would be a world without stories. Today, even Corporations, those fictional characters created by business people, have biographies. Corporations tell their stories every day in ads, press releases, web sites, law suits, and tweets, just as we do. Animals and plants have stories, buildings have stories, objects have stories. Our genes have a story… anything with a name has a story. “
