By Hakimi Asyraf

“Everything that you have been told, is a scam!” – Umapagan Ampikaipakan, book lover and critic, presenting at TEDxKL 2014

Now that’s good opener to get your attention buzzing.

The first time I attended TEDxKL was back in 2012. It was not the first TEDxKL session, but still one of the most impressive with a smaller audience and great speakers. Well, who am I kidding, all the TEDxKL sessions since its initiation way back in 2009 have been superb and TEDxKL 2014 was no less impressive.

In fact, with over 2000 people in the crowd, 18 international and local speakers in ranging from 10 to 60 years old, from a child prodigy and a malaria detective to a urologist, outstanding is an understatement.

Be the Ripple Effect.

This year’s TEDxKL theme was “The Open Future”.

Liva Sreedharan, Program Officer with the Anti-Trafficking Team at Tenaganita, shared her experience fighting human trafficking and how in the current world, we can be blind to modern slavery. Fabien Bouhier, Regional Sales Manager for Twitter in South East Asia and quantum physics enthusiast, shared how his interest in space sparked his quest for knowledge on space experiments and quantum physics, despite his day-to-day social media work.

My utmost respect goes to Ann Khoo, a fair employment advocate who shared her journey of conquering Tourette’s Syndrome and is now a Senior Campaign Manager in one of the top South East Asian e-commerce retailers. Who would have thought that David Beckham also goes through life with Tourette’s Syndrome?

All in all, it was an immensely fun, informal yet professional exhibition of experiences from a group of people trying to change the world for the better.

Thank you so much to Upstream CAA for enabling us to have such a wonderful experience.

“Happiness is about what you give, much more than what you receive”.

Link: https://upstream.petronas.com.my/leisure/Pages/articles/tedxkl.aspx