Can our differences of opinion bring us closer together
a few years ago
i joined flat earth 24 7. a community on
the internet
where people that believe our planet is
flat as opposed
but don’t worry i was undercover in fact
i didn’t even want to belittle their
views i wanted to understand them
and how people ended up this way
in the end of the day my problem with
the community was not even their views
it was the fact that the second i
introduced a contesting opinion
i was immediately banned from the
community
this got me thinking to the founders of
the internet
who imagined a town square for the
global village of tomorrow
or a tool that would cross barriers and
connect cultures
is flat earth 24 7 really something they
would be proud of
now this community might not have used
the internet in the best way
but its potential to connect people and
impact change in the real world
is something that’s always inspired me i
wanted to use the power of the internet
to bring two of my interests together
one is the internet itself
and the other is environmental
conservation
the idea for what i wanted to do started
out with the view from my window
sometimes when i looked outside i saw a
lake on fire
that’s right i’m talking about
bangalore’s infamous belundu
well how does a lake catch fire lakes
are supposed to put them out right not
start them
in short it’s something called
eutrophication
where plants release methane instead of
oxygen which is
combustible i wanted to help out
but i didn’t know where to start so for
a period of time i just jumped into the
issue
and tried to learn as much as i could
about it i interviewed activists
such as sema sharma who’s been a guide
throughout my project
scientists such as dr tv ramachandra who
taught me about freshwater ecology
and even some politicians that i could
access
i learned a lot through this process
about policy
and science but i think my biggest
learning
was the fact that there’s absolutely no
lack of passion in bangalore
people want to help they don’t like
these problems either
but the problem was that they had no way
to get connected to each other
and no way to get turned their passion
into actual impact
now i wanted to bridge this gap between
a desire to do something and actually
doing it
and i thought i knew the perfect way
using the internet
with the help of the one million for one
billion foundation
i developed savebelondolake.org
an organization centered around a
community website that had blogs not
only written by me
but by activists and scientists and
politicians
and problem forums where people could
discuss problems with the lake
solution forums where they could ideate
solutions
and i even organized photography
competitions just
to get the youth involved and sensitize
them not only to the problems of the
lake but
to a vision that it could be beautiful
one day i soon noticed
that on the website there was a lot of
push back to ideas and a lot of conflict
of opinion
some people wanted to change the lake
into a water park because
at least that way it would get cleaned
others
wanted to turn it into a wetland because
that would support a strong ecosystem
and fishermen
and farmers in the area many people
wanted to build
parks around the lake and we were trying
to decide which was the best idea
early on i saw this all as a distraction
why were we spending time
arguing when we had such a pressing
issue to deal with at hand
what i didn’t realize though is that the
only reason we were a vibrant community
was because of this conflict of ideas
the only reason
we had good ideas is because the good
ones rose to the top
and we let the others fall to the bottom
soon
i was even able to advocate for belando
lake at the united nations
this got me invited to the belandur
career group the most prominent
conservation group
to do with lake issues and other
environmental issues
in bangalore we work together with the
media to pressure the government into
action
and it even worked for about a year now
the government’s been desilting the lake
in short
removing excess sewage and beginning the
cleaning process
and that was amazing but i want to take
this opportunity to say
that i was never the one that knew the
most about any of these issues
i wasn’t a professional scientist i
wasn’t really an activist
and i definitely wasn’t a politician but
what i could do
was notice the fact that conflict of
opinion
actually brings us together after all
the internet can lead to a lot of
different communities
flat earth 24 7 was a perhaps benign
example of this
but we’ve seen several riots around the
globe prompted by social media
what you should notice all of those
started off with people echoing the same
opinions
save balander lake on the other hand was
born out of a crucible of conflicting
ideas
and pushback and i think that’s what
made it great
so we should notice that sometimes
disagreements can bring us together
and lead to impact and change in the
world
the internet really is a huge
marketplace of ideas and opinions
it amplifies the voices of even the
smallest communities in the world
and sometimes this conflict can be
really intimidating
but what i’ve learned is that it’s these
differences of ideas and opinions
that actually bring us together so let’s
use the internet
use these difference of opinions to
continue to change the world