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So this is Ana Hazareh.

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Ana Hazareh may well be the
most cutting-edge

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digital activist in the world today.

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And you wouldn't know it by looking at him.

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Hazareh is a 77-year-old Indian anti-corruption
and social justice activist.

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And in 2011, he was running a big campaign

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to address everyday corruption in India,

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a topic that Indian elites love to ignore.

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So as part of this campaign,

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he was using all of the traditional tactics

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that a good Ghandian organizer would use.

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So he was on a hunger strike,

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and Hazareh realized through his hunger

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that actually maybe this time,

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in the 21st-century,

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a hunger strike wouldn't be enough.

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So he started playing around 
with mobile-activism.

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So the first thing he did, he said to people,

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"okay, why don't you send me

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a text message if you support

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my campaign against corruption?"

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So he does this, he 
gives people a short code,

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and about 80,000 people do it.

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Okay, that's pretty respectable.

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But then he decides,

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"let me tweak my tactics a little bit."


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He says, "why don't you leave
me a missed call?"

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Now, for those of you who have
lived in the global south,

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you'll know that missed calls

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are a really critical part
of global mobile culture.

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I see people nodding.

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People leave missed calls all the time:

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If you're running late for a meeting

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and you want to let them know 
that you're on the way,

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you leave them a missed call.

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If you're dating someone and 
you just want to say "I miss you"

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you leave them a missed call.

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So a note for a dating tip here,

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in some cultures,

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if you want to please your lover,

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you call them and hang up.

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So why do people leave missed calls?

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Well, the reason of course is that

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they're trying to avoid charges

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associated with making calls
and sending texts.

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So when Hazareh asked people 
to leave him a missed call,

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Let's have a little guess how 
many people actually do this?

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35 million.

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So this is one of the largest coordinated
actions in human history.

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It's remarkable.

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And this reflects the extraordinary strength 
of the emerging Indian middle class,

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And the power that their
mobile phones bring.

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But he used that,

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Hazareh needed up with this massive 
v-file of mobile phone numbers,

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and he used that to deploy

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real people-power on the ground

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to get hundreds of thousands of
people on the streets in Dehli

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to make a national point on 
everyday corruption in India.

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It's a really striking story.

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So this is me when I was 12-years-old,

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I hope you see the resemblance,

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and I was also an activist,

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I've been an activist all my life.

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I had this really funny childhood

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where I [tropsed?] around the world

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meeting world leaders and 
Noble Prize winners

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talking about third-world debt,

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as it was then called,

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and demilitarization,

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I was a very, very serious child.

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And back then,

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in the early 90s,

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I had very cutting-edge
tech-tool of my own:

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the fax.

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And the fax was the 
tool of my activism.

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And at that time, it was the best way

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to get a message to a lot of people

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all at once.

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I'll give you one example of a fax
campaign that I ran.

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It was the eve of the Gulf War

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and I organized a global campaign 
to flood the hotel,

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the Intercontinental in Geneva,

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where James Vacar and [name]

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were meeting on the eve of the war,

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and I thought that if I could 
flood them with faxes,

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we'll stop the war.

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Well, unsurprisingly,

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that campaign was wholly unsuccessful.

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There are lots of reasons for that,

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but there's no doubt that 
one sputtering fax machine

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in Geneva was a little bit
of a bandwidth constraint.