TED is a small non-profit devoted to ideas worth spreading. It began in 1984 as an annual conference about technology, entertainment and design—but in the years since, its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, the UK, where the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers are challenged to give the talk of their lives, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project, the new TEDx community program, the annual TED Prize—and now, this year’s TEDIndia conference. TED India 2009 will be the first ever conference of TED in Asia. In these chronicles, Lakshmi Pratury, co-host of TEDIndia, will talk about her personal experiences with TED and provide a curtain-raiser for TEDIndia.

I see TED as the string that connects together my diverse personal escapades. In high school, I was good at math, painting and debating. There was a war at home on whether I should pursue painting or math. I did what society told me would lead to success, and success meant a good, stable financial position.

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After attaining what is close to salvation for any teenager in India, which is to get into IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), I left after a year to pursue a business degree, much to the dismay of my family and friends. As a graduate assistant at my second MBA (master’s in business administration) in Portland, I also pursued a minor in theatre and acted in plays—much to the bafflement of my professors and later on colleagues at Intel. Even my hobbies had the same variety—snow- and rock-climbing for two years, river rafting for one year, marathon running for two years and so on.

I am listing these events and activities not to demonstrate that I am proficient at so many things, but to show that I know a little bit of each of these things but never felt the urge to master any of them. I acted in local theatre but never went to Hollywood, I ran a marathon at a 12-minute mile but never tried to break any record, I scaled snow peaks of 10,000 ft but never planned to climb the Everest, I write an occasional blog post or newspaper article but never pursued that great book that is yet to come.

And then comes the story of my career. I was under one gigantic umbrella called Intel for 12 years, but held eight entirely different jobs. I loved evangelizing new ideas and figuring out how to make them long-lasting products. Initiatives such as mobile computing, PC games, and e-commerce have become lifestyle-defining businesses, and a few other ideas have silently disappeared in the corporate corridors. When an initiative became a division, my boss would ask me to stay so that I could be promoted to the next level, but I was always drawn to the next idea that no one else cared about.

At the peak of my career at Intel, I left my job, only with the desire to do something related to India, not knowing exactly what. I instead pursued venture capital, and just when I settled into a large office with a window, I quit my job to become a social entrepreneur, wandering the most remote parts of India setting up Internet labs in schools. After five years of that, I left to start my own company, once again reinventing myself.

I always left the comfort of the known for the pursuit of the unknown, and when I look back over the 20-plus years of my career, I have many memorable moments: being onstage in Ntozake Shange’s powerful play, travelling across the US holding the first six laptops ever made, creating online shopping demos and pulling together the pieces that made them a reality, learning lifelong lessons from seeing Andy Grove at work, watching His Holiness the Dalai Lama every day for the one month that we worked out of his private office, having my three minutes of fame on the TED stage, meeting Robert De Niro, Kofi Annan and Herbie Hancock—all part of the job.

I loved every minute of my career, but always felt conflicted. “Why am I interested in so many things? Why can’t I just stick to one thing? Why am I unable to pursue that path to be the CEO?” were constant thoughts. There was a subtle message from society that surrounded me that wealth is the meaning of success; but I had a nagging feeling that success was something else.

At TED, I found that different definition of success. I went to TED for the first time with my then-boss Avram Miller. For three days, I stayed spellbound listening to individuals of every possible discipline. I saw 3D (three-dimensional) visualizations and new development in robotics, learnt how to create a television show, heard a new musical composition and held a python in my hands—all in the same session. When my friends asked me why I spent so much on a conference, and why I was so keen to attend it every year, I could only describe it as the best brain massage one could get.

TED was a place where I felt celebrated for all my varying interests and pursuits—a home away from home, where I chanced upon a group of people with whom I could relate without interacting on a day-to-day basis. It had the warmth of a family without the burden of the routine. TED was walking away from a mind-boggling conversation, and picking it up a year later.

So besides teaching me pieces of information, giving me many entertaining discussions and tutoring me on how to connect the dots between all the interests in my life, TED did something else for me: It showed me that “jack of all trades, master of none” is the term that describes me best—except for one thing: I’m not a “master of none,” I’m a “master jack”.

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