All roads, railway tracks and air routes led to Mumbai earlier this year, as an enormous and mind-boggling set of participants converged on the city for the World Social Forum conclave. The ‘carnival of ideas’ served up a veritable smorgasbord of issues, people and politics. Ammu Joseph gives a first-hand account of the week when Goregaon went global.

Mela of the marginalised…Carnival of the unlettered and the dispossessed… Crusaders’ caravan…. A variety of colourful epithets have been used to describe the World Social Forum (WSF), which passed through India earlier this year on its long march to another world.

It is not clear what, if anything, Mumbaikars – let alone fellow Indians elsewhere – made of the WSF. Most appeared to be so absorbed in their newfound role as resource persons unveiling the mysteries of Indian social and cultural life to international visitors that they may not have had a chance to figure out what exactly had attracted such an unusually large contingent of foreigners – from an estimated 150 countries – to a single, far-flung, somewhat undistinguished, corner of their city.

With most news reports and visuals showcasing celebrity participants, on the one hand, and highlighting the quaint, the exotic, the controversial and the bizarre, on the other, the average reader or viewer could be excused for assuming that the event was nothing more than a gigantic jamboree.

In the process, the serious nature and purpose of the event, as well as the many critical issues it sought to address, were somewhat eclipsed, especially from the view of those watching it from afar. Even for those who undertook the long, hard daily trek to the site, and valiantly dealt with the heat and the dust, the noise and the crowds – not to mention the paucity of toilets – it was understandably difficult to get a sense of the mammoth whole.

It must be said, however, that even in its present avatar, with all its faults and foibles, the WSF is a unique phenomenon that provides those who wish to build a more equitable and just world an arena where they can periodically share concerns and experiences, revitalise themselves, gain strength from each other, think through old ideas and come up with new ones.

Meanwhile, those who believe that opposing globalisation, in its present manifestation, is nothing but tilting at windmills might like to ponder these words from Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, quoted by Indian feminist activist Kamla Bhasin on the first day of WSF 2004:

“They can cut all the flowers,
But they cannot stop the coming of spring.”