TEDxPalermo - Tishani Doshi - The Luxury of Slowness May 13, 2011

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The TEDxPalermo's Talk by the Indian poet, writer and dancer Tishani Doshi was in the middle of a rainy April30th. The location due to bad weather was changed at the very last minute and studio427 were welcoming our event. The Time is the focus of the Talk. She explain us that there are many kinds of time, there is cosmic time, cyclic time, linear time, calendar time, day time, night time, work time, dream time, permanent time and impermanent time and we understand that time is a strange thing because sometimes a day can feel like a lifetime and sometimes a lifetime can feel like a dream. The obsession has to do with an age which is incredible fast, she explain us something about slowness we are almost losing. She shows us her dance work, just one production in 10 years, as a performance done with the Chandralekha's troupe (which by the way also performed in Palermo once) and tells us that Slowness has the only Luxury we have been left in our time.
Tishani was born and lives in Madras, India. Being the product of two cultures (Gujarati and Welsh), and the middle of three children. At 18 she left India for the US to study Business Administration at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina. During her undergraduate years she worked as a baby-sitter, house-cleaner, librarian and cashier in the student's snack bar. Shei moved to London in 1999 and landed her first and last fulltime job as the assistant to the advertising department at Harper's & Queen magazine. In 2001 Tishani moved back to India and at 26, she began a career as a dancer. For the next five years she performed with Chandralekha's troupe in India and abroad. She also worked as a freelance journalist, tinkered with poems and began working on a novel. In 2006, she won the All-India Poetry competition for her poem, "The Day We Went to the Sea." Tishani published her debut collection of poetry, Countries of the Body, to critical acclaim in 2006. The book won the prestigious Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Tishani's first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, is published by Bloomsbury in the UK and USA, and Penguin India. It is currently being translated into German, Spanish, Italian, French, Serbian, Croatian and Polish.
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