TED Talks

As part of India Week, we are looking at one of the most successful Indian businessmen in the UK, the founder of Cobra Beer, Lord Bilimoria.

Lord Karan Bilimoria was born in Hyderabad in India before coming to Britain to study Law at Cambridge. After graduating in 1988, he found that his cultural heritage helped him to see an opportunity for a business venture. He saw a gap in the beer market. For people who enjoyed the refreshing taste of lager with curry, but found that traditional ones were too fizzy to go with food, there were no options on the market. This led to him to found Cobra Beer in 1989.

Cobra Beer was a huge success and became one of the most popular and well known beers in Britain. Through his work with Cobra, as well as a number of other projects, Karan Bilimoria received a CBE for services to business in 2004.

Last year, he was invited to speak at a TedTalks event about the future of global business. He explained his vision of what needs to stay the same and what needs to change for business to flourish over the next twenty years. You can watch his talk below.

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending a conference on the future of education in Britain. It was an independently organised event arranged by TEDx London- a branch of the TED Talks network.

TED Talks is a platform that invites speakers from various fields and professions to share innovative ideas, and since the talks started being streamed online their popularity has been phenomenal.

The Current State of Education

The event was inspired by a famous TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson in 2010, where he called for an ‘education revolution' and the need for educational institutions to fundamentally change the way they operate.

At the talk, participants were presented with three areas of discussion, and firstly, responding to Ken's analysis of education, speakers looked at education's current state.

Various speakers shared their views on how education fails to engage young people due to the curriculum's lack of relevance and the rigidness of educational models that are currently being used.

An eloquent address by 14 year-old student Georgia Allis Mills described how the education system needs to adapt to the mind state of young people today, whilst artist Goldie shared his thoughts on how education fails to prepare students for the ‘real world'.