Inviting suggestions for inspiring people as speakers for TEDx Chennai 2011. Please suggest names.

Dancing with joy, Ananda Shankar Jayant, one of the much celebrated and renowned dancers of the country; imbues technique and grammar with a sparkling quality, bristling with life. Hailed as an intelligent and thinking dancer with contemporary sensibility, Ananda, with her grace, vivacity and inner luminescence draws the viewer into the inner spaces that she paints, leaving the audience deeply touched.

A breathtaking performer, brilliant choreographer and erudite scholar, Ananda has polished her art to a fine pitch, where the rigor and intensity of training, deep dedication and commitment meets a finely tuned intellect, that blends with ease traditional structures with contemporary inputs.

Ananda’s much acclaimed and intense body of artistic work, spans, rich mythologies historical chronicles, searing commentary on gender issues, as well as secular & philosophical presentation.

She was conferred with the prestigious Padmashri, in 2007 by His Excellency the President of India, Shri APJ Abdul Kalam . She has been selected to receive the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi award for Bharatanatyam this year, and will soon receive the award from The Hon’ble President of India.

She is also a much sought after speaker on dance, art addressing social issues, classical arts in a contemporary society, gender issues, women studies, multi tasking, climate change and breast cancer.

She calls herself a Breast cancer conqueror, having battled the disease over the last two years, and supports other breast cancer survivors, as the Convenor of Asha a support and advocacy group for breast cancer.

T Chendil Kumar or CK as he prefers to be called, is a corporate trainer and a guest faculty at IIM Bangalore. With over 20 years of experience in sales and marketing and entrepreneurship, CK took a decision to switch over to training and speaking at the age of 45. He doesn’t regret it one bit because he now does what he enjoys best – connecting with people and enabling confidence in them.

He calls himself “Chief Catalyst” of his organization simply because he doesn’t nurse any grand illusions of changing the landscape. He feels he can create an awareness and ignite a spark in his audience by challenging them.

CK is an avid Toastmaster and a much sought after speaker. He has sponsored more than 10 Toastmasters Clubs in India.

A redeeming feature of CK’s talks has been his sprinkling of relevant humor in his talks and programs.

He has been conducting workshops on using humor in Public speaking to a wide variety of audiences in India, USA, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Dubai, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia tremendous feedback.

He maintains his sanity by dipping regularly into Asterix and PG Wodehouse.

Wildlife and Conservation Filmmaker

Shekar Dattatri's lifelong fascination with wildlife began at the age of 13 when he joined the Madras Snake Park as a volunteer. This led to nature photography and, later, to wildlife and conservation filmmaking.

During the last 25 years his films have won several national and international awards and many have aired around the world on channels such as National Geographic and Discovery.

Moving away from television production Shekar has spent the last 10 years working closely with conservation NGOs to produce several hard-hitting advocacy films on conservation issues, some of which have helped bring about change. These include ‘Mindless Mining – the tragedy of Kudremukh’ and ‘The Ridley’s Last Stand’.

He has several popular articles on wildlife, filmmaking and conservation to his credit and is the author of two children’s books on wildlife, ‘Riddle of the Ridley’ and ‘Lai Lai the baby elephant’. He is a founder of the Trust for Environmental Education, a registered non-profit organization. In 2004, he was awarded a Rolex Award for Enterprise for his wildlife and conservation filmmaking. Until June 2010 he served on the National Board for Wildlife, a high level advisory body chaired by the Prime Minister.

More information on his work can be found at www.shekardattatri.com.

Peak performance coach & Bestselling author

Rasmus Ankersen published his first book “DNA of a Winner” at 22 years old. The book became a bestseller and led Rasmus to follow up the success with “Leader DNA” and “Raising a Winner”. At age 25 he wrote three bestsellers. His desire to understand the code that unlocks World Class performance led him to be head coach of the first soccer academy in Scandinavia, which has produced several international top players. Also he was a mental coach for the Danish youth national soccer teams and has also and still is working as personal coach for several World Class athletes. The latest six months Rasmus has been travelling around the world visiting the world’s most successful performance hotbeds. The result is his first international book “Shocking Truths – how to grow a super-athlete” which will be published World Wide this year.

Also in the business field Rasmus’ work has had a huge impact. He is speaking about “The Gold Mine Effect” for organizations and companies all over the world. Last year he spoke at the famous TED University in Oxford. Also Rasmus is advising executives how to create an environment, which fires up human potential. In his home country Denmark he has been awarded as one of the three biggest business talents and recently the prime minister invited him to contribute with a chapter to his upcoming book, which is going to define “The Danish Dream”.

Today Rasmus lives in London from where he controls all his projects. Based on his findings in The Gold Mines around the world he is just about to build one the most visionary soccer academies ever seen. Late 2010 he will launch the first part of it in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Another vision is to build a running academy in Ethiopia with the ambition to take running to a whole new level. Together with his researchers Rasmus is also working on another book release in 2011, “Hunger in Paradise”, about how the rules for motivation and leadership will change dramatically in the future.

Dr. Tara Thiagarajan is a scientist whose interests encompass understanding complex systems and using a science based approach to solve large scale human problems through scalable for-profit enterprise. She is the Chairperson and Managing Director of Madura, a company providing microfinance. The company also provides knowledge and market opportunities through its Microeducation and Micromarkets products to 400,000 women in rural Tamil Nadu. Driving Madura’s strategy is a large scale initiative to understand and engineer the socioeconomic networks and the propagation of information, ideas and innovation among the rural poor as key drivers of progress. As a microfinance provider Madura has the distinction of the highest cost efficiency worldwide (recognized by Forbes in its earlier avatar of Microcredit Foundation of India) and is a highly profitable company offering the lowest rates of interest any microfinance institution in the country today.

Tara is also a visiting scientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore where she works on understanding how distributed electrical activity gives rise perception and behaviour. She has a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University and did her post doctoral work at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD (USA).

Prior to becoming a scientist she did a BA in Mathematics at Brandeis University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management where she was an Austin scholar and worked in the textile and pharmaceutical industries in various roles including marketing, project management and strategic planning. She blogs at physicsofpoverty.com.

Peter Van Geit, born and raised in Belgium, is settled in Chennai for the last 12 years, working as a Project Manager in CISCO Systems India.

An explorer by nature, Peter has driven over 50,000 kms across India on his bullet and has conquered the Himalayas thrice. A few years ago, he founded the Chennai Trekking Club (CTC), a non-profit volunteer based group of trekking enthusiasts who explore mountains and jungles across South India nearly all weekends of the year. This Chennai based group has currently close to 8000 members and is rapidly growing with 500 new members each month being the largest and most active trekking community in India. CTC is a place where like-minded strangers come together in a open, volunteering and collaborative environment - overcoming challenges together as a team, pushing oneself beyond his physical and mental limits, surviving by their own means, breeding a selfless volunteering attitude, mentoring organizational skills and come out as friends for life and recharged human beings.

Peter, an expert in map reading, navigation and GPS, has taken thousands of trekkers to many previously unexplored locations and discovered hidden waterfalls, beautiful gorges, ancient forts, jeep trails hidden deep inside the jungles.

G Rajendran hails from Kozhippara, Palakkad District, Kerala. He works as a Middle School Teacher at the Government High School in Kozhippara, Kerala. Having been through the education system as a student and as a teacher, Rajendran became increasingly aware of the demerits of the current education system. Questioning deeper, Rajendran realised that the problem was in classrooms and the way children are made to learn. His solution: make learning sub-conscious as well as a need for the child and the child will construct his/her own knowledge. If the child conscious that he/she is learning, there is probably no learning happening!

In this mission so far, he has been a member of core panel that set the curriculum for schools in Kerala. He was also a member of the apex training body in the state and has trained over 28,000 teachers.

Along with his close associate Sriram, Rajendran works under the banner called "IgniteMinds", training teachers across both urban and rural schools, particularly focusing on the latter. His methods turn the existing classroom norms on their head: no alphabet teaching, encourage children to talk, ask questions rather than answer, appreciate when they make mistakes, etc.

Dr. S. Chinny Krishna co-founded the Blue Cross of India in 1959 and the Chennai-based non-profit group is now one of India’s largest animal welfare organizations. Under his leadership, Blue Cross pioneered the ABC – AR (Animal Birth Control and Anti Rabies) programme that humanely reduces the dog population. Chennai has recently been declared rabies-free thanks to these efforts. The Blue Cross “Adopt a dog” programme began a mass movement that promotes adoption of Indian dogs from streets and shelters as an ethical choice.

Chinny Krishna has also been at the forefront of advocacy and has successfully helped ban the export of frogs’ legs, made dissection optional and introduced compu-graphic alternatives, banned the export of monkeys for research purposes following a 14-year campaign and introduced pet therapy to children with special needs and senior citizens.

Chinny Krishna and BCI have been awarded the Queen Victoria Medal, the Prani Mitra Award, PETA’s Proggy Award and Humane Society International Award amongst others.

He holds a PhD & M.S in Management and is the Managing Director of Aspick Engineering Pvt. Ltd

Hiphop Tamizha is an organisation that aims at the development of hiphop culture and it helps in developing all the five elements of hiphop – bboying , emceeing , Djing, graffiti, beatbox. We propagate tamizh hiphop which uses elements of hiphop and intersperses it with tamizh culture and language.

Hiphop Tamizha was founded by Adhi , the pioneer of Indian Tamil Hiphop along with Yogi B , the godfather of Tamil Hiphop. Hiphop tamizha is also backed up with advisors like Dr.R.Venkatapathy, the principal co ordinator of World tamil classical conference .. Hiphop tamizha has followers all around the world and many leading hiphop artists around the world are supporting hiphop tamizha and it serves as a major platform for tamizh hiphop artists in India.