MY LEARNINGS FROM WISE CONFERENCE

MY LEARNINGS FROM WISE CONFERENCE

BY REHAN ALLAHWALA

Recently I attended the WISE Conference in Doha, Qatar, WISE is an annual conference held by the queen of Qatar. Millions of dollars have been spent in organizing this conference.

1200 people worldwide came to attend this conference, the best thing I saw in this conference was that people had positive energy, people were happy and some had come with a view to change the world. I got to learn a lot and I felt good attending this conference.

The highlight of this conference was that I met Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, he is the Chairman and founder of BRAC, and he has 120,000 people working in his NGO. He runs the world’s biggest non profitable NGO and they are doing an amazing work, you must definitely google BRAC and read about it. Sir Fazle Hasan has invited me to Bangladesh and I do wish to go there and have a meeting with him and videotize their system so that we can further spread BRAC. Sir Fazle Hasan also told me that once he had dinner with Steve Jobs at his home and he said that why did you take so much time to get out of Bangladesh to which Sir Fazle Hasan replied that this is what I knew and that is what I did.

I also met Mr. Arun Gupta, he is a nice and an amazing man, I spent lots of hours with him and I also met Mr. Jim Gordan, an amazing Phycologist. I met a lot of amazing people and felt good meeting them. I was invited in a meeting which had the technical group, people related to UN and UNESCO had come and I was happy to be in that meeting to learn how they functioned, I was the only technologist and I did also give my comments to them and my comments were to an extent very blunt. I requested all of them to use face book and Linkedin so that when we come out of this room we can be in touch with each other, this is what I felt missing all over in the conference. The platform that was available it did not have the links of face book, twitter and linkedin. The platform must be integrated with face book so that the normal users of face book and linkedin can get linked with the platform.

The most interesting comment I felt was that a gentleman stood up and said , what is the use of doing masters and PhD because the university degrees have become useless. That was something I found interesting, I clapped and many other people also clapped for him. Education itself is going through extreme changes.

I also met Mr. Atif Khan who is the education minister of KPK, I also met the education minister of Pakistan. I met Mr. Allah Baksh Malik, who has written 16 books which was a big highlight for me. I knew that education is going through transformation and this conference confirmed it for me that in the coming 5 to 10 years education would be totally transformed.

I feel like stopping my 2 kids from going to school, because the schools have a certain limited setup and they function according to it and they think that this is right, the teachers are not ready to learn, and then how would I expect them to make my children such that they are ready to learn. Today whatever we know after 5 years that would become obsolete and change is constant.

Human history did never see such changes before that are happening in the present time, whatever knowledge or information you need,

you can get it instantly. The most essential thing is the drive or the want to gain knowledge, how would you speak to your mentor and how would you listen, this is what schools do not teach our children, this is the core of humanity that we have to become human.

The most important thing we have to teach our children is to become good human being who listens to people and can make people understand what he is trying to say and who does not become angry and does not use foul language or do injustice with people, this is what should be total education if this basic is provided then the other things can be learnt anytime.

It is very important to let our children become what they want to be, we should make them a good human being and must help them in finding their purpose in life. This is all what I have learned from this tour and I would definitely like to attend this conference next year. I would like to invite you also to attend this conference and benefit from it.