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Four friends are uniting the kingdom’s creative minds under one roof this Saturday to share ideas as well as open intellectual and cultural discussions.
TED is a non-profit organisation devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks in 18 minutes or less.
Several TEDx-style events have taken place in Bahrain since 2010 associated with schools and various associations; however, this is the first to be linked to a local university, namely Ahlia University in Hoora.
University graduates, Hassan Al Hariri, 25, the university’s internship co-ordinator and Dunia Mudara, 23, the marketing manager of McDonald’s Bahrain, decided to launch this event at Al Areen Hotel & Spa alongside their friends, Sara Abdulla, 25, a development manager at Al-Mawred Education Consultancy and Mariam Mahmood, 26, an events co-ordinator at StudioMaster.
Miss Mudara said: “We are big TED fans, watching Ted Talk videos online almost every day.
“We had to get a license from the TED organisations to stage the event, follow their 170 pages of guidelines and get interviewed by their people to make sure that we were ‘TED worthy’.
“We wanted to be associated with Ahlia because we wanted to put one of the first private universities in Bahrain on the international platform.
“Our theme ‘Re-’ comes from the idea of recreating, reinventing, redesigning, reinterpreting and even rewriting current ideas. We aim to challenge people to create their own ‘Re-’.”
To create a buzz and get people excited about the event, the team, together with sponsors Words BookstoreCafé, sent out 100 second-hand books to 100 individuals and asked them to re-create them into something new or different. The designs were then posted on their Instagram account @tedxahliauniversity and on Twitter @tedxahliauni.
The event, which runs from 10am to 8pm, is limited to 100 audience members, handpicked by the Tedx Ahlia University team. The audience represents a mixture of backgrounds with Bahrainis, Pakistanis, Saudis and Singaporeans aged 15 and above among them.
Miss Abdulla said: “Some will be invited as bloggers or entrepreneurs because we really want to see what is Bahrain’s demographic. Our eight speakers are very diverse in topics, age and profession so we really want our audience to reflect on that.”
The youngest speaker is Ahmad Al Rawi, 19, a University of Bahrain student, who will present his robotics invention.
Ahlia University associate professor of psychology and sociology, Dr Samia Costandi, will share her thoughts on ‘what would happen if educators were paid as much as chief executive officers?’
Miss Mudara said: “We not only aim to bring in all the thinkers under one roof but to also identify them in the kingdom. We could have easily approached comedians and famous people in the region and given them this platform to talk on. But that’s not what we are interested in.
“We are interested in every-day people, businessmen and women, inventors. We want to give these people a stage to talk and present their ideas in an uninterrupted manner where people in the audience will definitely be paying attention.”
There will also be an activation alley, which is usually a corridor or hall at Tedx events where sponsors and other members get to feature new technologies and products for the audience to explore as well as network.
For details, email tedxahliauniversity@gmail.com or visit www.tedxahliauniversity.com
