All right, I think we can start. There's going to be some people that come in. The good bit of this presentation is later on anyway, so it's OK. OK, so just before I get started, I want to call out that this is kind of like a short and down version of our talk that we're going to give on Thursday here at KubeCon. So if you're watching this in recording or in the stream, go ahead and check out the talk on Thursday for the full, unedited, extended cut of this talk. Let's start with some introductions. My name is Ben Lambert. I'm a senior engineer at Spotify and a maintainer of Backstage. I have also Patrick with me. Hello, my name is Patrick.  Cool. So first off, I want to call out some new project areas since the last time that we spoke in Amsterdam earlier this year. So we've got three new project areas to call out with some dedicated people taking ownership of these parts of the code. I should talk a little bit about the difference between the incubating project areas and I guess you can call them graduated project areas. Incubating is basically also going to be partly maintained by the maintainer team too. So we're going to help kick things off and still be a part of that project area until we feel comfortable from both sides that we can hand over more of the maintainer cost for that area. So there's an open API project area, which Aramis has taken over. This project area is looking at how we can improve the open API tooling and open API specs for the entire of the Backstage back-end plugin ecosystem. So this is things like providing typed clients for communication with back-end plugins like the catalog and also doing request validation and things like that in Express. There's a scaffold to project area. For those that might have seen me and Patrick speak before, you'll know that this is kind of a project area which is kind of close to my heart and I'm especially interested in. It's a heavily used feature of Backstage that's grown in complexity since we first built it basically. So it's great to get both Paul Cowan from Front-End Rescue and Bogdan Netshi Parenko from ball.com, who have been super involved as contributors from the early days of the scaffolder and its inception. So it's great to get them on board to help us maintain it and take it further. And lastly, there's also the permissions framework and all the permissions packages that go with it. This has been taken ownership by the Imaginary Goat Squad at Spotify, who are the original authors of the RFC and the actual implementation. Don't ask about the squad names at Spotify. They're all very strange. They mean nothing. We work in math mammals. Yeah, it's strange. But yeah. Cool, Patrick. All right, thank you. So that was a couple of project updates and now we are moving on to talking about what we have been working on for the Backstage Front-End Framework. So since the beginning of the Backstage project, you've always had to integrate plugins using TypeScript code. Typically, you'll find one or a few snippets in a plug-in readme that tell you to import a few things, render them, and so on. And it's fairly simple, but already there. There's a few points of friction, right? If you're someone that wants to set up Backstage and you're not familiar with TypeScript React, you might not even need to know how to code at all or be that familiar with it. That's a lot of friction. But even if you have that knowledge, it can get pretty complicated as your project grows. One snippet of code is at a time and eventually you're here. You're sifting through your entity pages, trying to figure out where to add that card for your Java services. So what we have been working on is a new way to integrate plugins into a Backstage application. In essence, what we want to do is get rid of these snippets of code that you need to use to integrate your plugins into the app. So we still want to keep the flexibility though of allowing you to customize your app for your own needs. Now, we call this overall solution, declarative integration. And it's worth noting that this is something that we work on for both frontend and backend plugins. But with the changes to the new backend system, there's a lot less work to be done there. So what we've been working on recently and what we're talking about today, it's completely the frontend bit of the system. So if you've been around, you know that we presented declarative integration as part of our roadmap at KubeCon earlier this year in Amsterdam. We've been working on the implementation since just after the summer. So what you see here today, it's work in progress and it's subject to change. So as we sat down to design this new system, we had a couple of goals in mind. So first and foremost, we wanted to remove the need to write TypeScript to integrate plugins. But we didn't just want to shift it all over to YAML or something like that. We wanted to make sure that plugins can provide defaults so that the only configuration you need is for the customization of your app. We also wanted to clean up the composition patterns, making it easier to build plugins that extend or compose with other plugins. And finally, we wanted to work towards the possibility of dynamic plugins as a first-class citizen of the backstage framework. So that essentially allows you to install new plugins in a running app. Now, to be clear, dynamic installation is not part of what we're building right now and what we're talking about today, but it's something we had in mind when designing the system. Okay, so that's some background. Now let's talk about the design of this new system. Now, this is a very high-level overview of the new framework. At the root, there is an app instance. So that's responsible for wiring things together and providing a base to build upon. You populate it with content by installing plugins, but plugins are also just lightweight containers and they contain extensions. And it's in the extensions where all of the functionality actually lies. It's when you take these extensions, wire them together when you actually get a backstage app that you can run and use. Now, if you're familiar with the current system, you know that a lot has really changed here. This is more or less what it looks like today and even apps and plugins in the new system are, they kinda look the same, at least from the outside. Now the big difference in the new system is the extensions and the way extensions talk to each other. So that's where we're gonna focus now. So let's return to our snippet of code for installing an extension in our current system and we're gonna look at how we've changed it with the new system. So in the new system, each extension provides its own attachment point. Now, attachment point is what we call the location in the app that an extension is installed at. So in this case, we're installing the GraphQL page as a top level route of the app. Now, in the new system, extensions can provide the attachment point themselves. So we can get rid of that. Extensions can also provide a default integration configuration. In this case, it's the route path that we want our page to be rendered at. So let's drop that bit too. And we have also moved away from React as a first class building block. Now, it was nice to easily be able to introduce extra React elements in places in your app, but it was also really confusing at times the way we used React to compose the app. Extensions are now just plain values that you import directly into the app instead. And finally, we have added the option to automatically detect plugin packages and import them into the app. So you no longer need this explicit import either. Cool, so that's all code gone. Great. How do we actually build an app out of that? So to understand the new extension structure, we'll start by looking at the structure of an existing backstage application. So what you see here is a thin slice of an app. It's a tree of React elements. They end up determines the structure of that. Some of these elements are provided by extensions. Some of them are provided by plugins. Sorry, some are provided by plugins. Some are provided by the framework itself and some are just React components. And as a side note, it's this mixing of different type of React components that we'd like to avoid. So we're instead going for a cleaner separation between the backstage core framework and React. But all right, so what does this look like in the new system? If there's no code, there's gonna be a lot of YAML, right? Yep, so to the right here, you can see the structure of the app or what it's represented as in the new system. You no longer have an explicit tree. Instead, you have a flat list of extensions with each extension declaring its attachment point. Now, it's not until runtime that this is all resolved into an actual structure and this tree structure you actually had before. Now, however, the good thing about all of this YAML is that you don't need to write it. All this entire structure is provided by us from the plugin and from the framework itself. That means that in an actual app, you'll have something that looks closer to this. If all you want are the defaults, your entire app can more or less be defined by just the dependencies in your package JSON. Of course, we want to be able to customize apps too, so we're gonna show you that in just a second. But first, I wanna talk about something else here. So one of the main strengths in our current system is how well it visualizes the structure of the app. You can look at this code and you can kind of see where everything is rendered, what routes and so on. And it was actually one of our main design goals of this system. And of course, now in the new system, we really can't have that goal because we wanted to remove code, so yeah. But we do still recognize that it's very important to be able to see the structure of an app and visualize it for debugging and just generally be able to work with it. So we instead plan to build tools for that purpose. Okay, so let me show you what that looks like. And the overall app structure by jumping into a demo. All right, so what we have here is a very lightweight backstage application, just a couple of plugins installed, we have a few cards on our entity page and so on, nothing too fancy. It is all running in the new system. So this is all extensions and whatnot in the new system. And we can see that using our visualizer down here as well. So this is the entire app, that's the structure of the entire app. All of the square blue boxes represent individual extensions in this application. You can also see edges between them. The rounded boxes are inputs in the edges and the inputs form attachment points. So every single extension in this app is attached to a parent extension to form this tree. All of them except for this root app extension here. You can see it has a couple of inputs, among other things, you can see that we have two different themes installed in this app. So extensions are no longer only react elements, we can also have other kinds of things installed as extensions too. Now we also have a more detailed view. So every item here is also an extension, it's the same view, but a little bit with a bit more details. We can see here for example, we have the catalog page extension. I can navigate to it here. So the catalog page extension provides all of the content that you see here to the right on this page, everything except for the sidebar. Now these colored dots here to the right on these extensions, they represent outputs. So you can see here, among other things the react page, catalog page outputs a react element. And this output is passed to the parent extension through the attachment point and this is how extensions communicate with each other. And this goes on all the way up. So you can see the routes here, also outputs a react element, all the way up to the root of the app where we output the single react element that we can render the entire app with. All right. There we go, magic key points for that. One second, I'm just gonna take a drink. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about how you actually use this new system. So we mostly skip over how to set up the app itself and the plugins, because they're gonna remain fairly similar to existing system. It's that we'll focus on what it looks like to create extensions and how to configure them in the app. So let's return to our very simple example from previously. So far we're using the defaults, right? But what if we wanna change the path for the settings page instead of the preferences, right? So in the old system, of course, you can just update that in the JSX directly in the directory. But with declarative integration, you can instead change the path by passing configuration to our settings page extension. And we do this by referencing the extension by its ID and then passing the extension specific config to update the path. Now, this next example is a little bit trickier. So what we'd like to do is disable an extension in a certain environment. And in the old system, there was no real great way to do this and you'd end up coming up with your own switch or feature flag or whatever. And for simplicity, we're just commenting it out in the example. But with declarative integration, you can simply disable the extension by providing the config that you can see on the right. Now, these are just two small examples of how you can customize your app using declarative integration. Extensions can, of course, declare their own configuration schema to make any form of static configuration possible. And you're also able to change that attachment point of extensions and, of course, completely override any extension yourself. Let's look at how you can create your own extensions. So almost all of the time, you're gonna be using these predefined extension creators like create page extension here. This predefined extension creators come with a useful set of defaults and an implementation and all we need to do in this case is give it an ID, a path and a way to load the page component itself. Great, so we can create our extension but how do we install this in the app? So, as mentioned before, we use plugins as containers for extensions to install these things into the app. So the recommended pattern is to stick to one plugin per package and by making the plugin the default export of that package, it will automatically be picked up and installed in the app. So there's also a lower level API here, which is called create extension. So this is what you're gonna use if you wanna make your own extension creators or if you simply want a little bit more detailed control over an extension itself. So you can see here, or what you can see here is the definition for the core layout extension. So this extension is like the shell for the entire application which you can see in backstage and it renders like the navigation and the content for the page that you can see and it's all wrapped in the sidebar page. You can see that at the bottom with the factory bit. So you can see when using create extension directly, we've got a lot more control over what we actually want to do in the extension. We have to declare an ID, an attachment point, some inputs which are gonna be the navigation sidebar and the app content and then our outputs which is the react element. We could also define configuration schema in here but for this example, we kind of skipped over that to make it a little bit more simple. You should now kind of see it in your head how you can build up this tree of inputs and outputs and compose different extensions together to form the app. So obviously in these examples, we're taking inputs of react components and then output in a react component but they don't have to be react elements like they can be any form of data type, whatever you like. And again, this is a lower level API. You'll mostly be using these predefined extension creators and whilst we're not gonna be using create extension directly today, I want you to keep this core layout extension in mind because it's gonna come in useful in the demo, which I'm gonna go into now. Okay, let's write some code. Where is it? Here it is. Okay, so this is the example app that Patrick was just showing. I'm just gonna go ahead and go to the example website component. So this is the app config on the right. Can you all see that? Anybody not see that? Good, cool. So this is the app config that you just get with your backstage application. You might have seen it before. And we've got a list of extensions installed. So you can see here we've got the entity cards. So for extensions that are order important or that they depend on the order, we disable these extensions by default so that you can enable them in the correct order or how you wanna see them in the app. So if I was to reorder one of these extensions by doing this and then save, we should say yes, that it updates, changes the order on the left. If I wanna disable an extension, I can just pass in false and this disables. I can also provide additional configuration. So the entity content to do here, we can see this to do plugin. Yes. This is a extension which basically lists the to do comments inside your application. We have default config here, which is the tab title. I can go ahead and override that by doing some more config here. Oops. Oops, today's it. Config and then title. And then let's say we wanna override this to be roadmap instead. Cool. So now it overrides it. What else? Okay, so this is configuring extensions that are already installed in the app. But let's say I wanna add some more extensions, right? So I'm just gonna go to our themes here. So we can see, as Patrick mentioned earlier, we have the two themes that are installed in the app. So we've got the light theme and the dark theme. So let's say I wanna add a new theme. Let's just scroll to the bottom of this. Cool. I'm just gonna go and add, I think it's fine. Add our new internal theme package. If I could spell, there we go. So by adding this to the package, and what it's gonna do is it's gonna automatically detect there's a new extension and then bootstrap it into the app for us automatically. So you might have seen, you eagle-eyed people there, that we have now a new theme, which is the aperture theme. And it's already been enabled in the app. I can go ahead and click it and then see that this has already been configured for us and easy to use. I'm just gonna switch back to the light theme again. So the call layout extension that we were talking about earlier, an override in extensions. So what I can do here is also I can install another extension which is gonna replace the implementation for other extensions that are provided by default or provided from elsewhere. So I'm gonna go ahead here and add our new one, which is called top nav. So what this is gonna do is it's gonna replace the call layout extension and replace the navigation component to give us a top navigation in backstage. So override in extensions, super easy, super simple. What about removing extensions, right? So I can just go ahead and do yaw and remove at internal top nav. I hope this is gonna work. And then by magic, it just resets. That's all good. So this is configuring extensions and basically adding and removing. What about building our own extension? So in the index.jsx here, this might look a little bit different from what you have already. It's normally a lot of JSX. This is kind of how we would configure it in the new system. So we have a create app call here, which passes in a plugin to the feature detection. So because this is not a separate module, we can opt into discovering this manually by adding it to the features property here. And then we've got a plugin and our extensions are raised empty. So I'm gonna go and create an extension now, which is basically just gonna render, I don't know, some welcome content on a little page, right? And now we're gonna do that. So we're gonna use that create page extension that we talked about earlier. So I'm just gonna do const, welcome, this keyboard is so low. Equals create page extension. We need to give this an ID, so I'm just gonna call this welcome.page. We need to give it a loader, which is gonna tell us how to get the react component that we wanna render. I'm just gonna cheat a little bit here and just do promise, oh my God, not resolve, if I could spell again. There we go. And then h1, welcome. And then we also need to give it a default path. So this is the default configuration that you'd get from the extension. You can of course override this if you want, but we're just gonna provide this with a welcome path. And then what we wanna do is add this extension to our plugin, save. And then hopefully, if this is all worked, I should be able to go to welcome here and we get a welcome page. Yay, great. Yeah, so that's kind of what I've got for a quick demo here. I'm gonna pass back over to Patrick now. All right, so good demo.  So we're gonna skip this section on compatibility. I'll give you a summary. So what our idea for being able to migrate existing applications is a top-down approach where you can switch out a, in an existing app, you can switch it to the new system at the root and then use a compatibility helper that lets you use the existing react-based structure of an app and import it into the new system. Once you got that, you can start migrating plugins one at a time until your entire app has been moved over. But as Ben mentioned, on Thursday, there's a talk where we go into this entire section. Okay, so let's look back at this timeline. I know a lot of you are gonna be curious about this. Our hope is to be able to ship an early alpha release at the end of this year, but no promises. Now, this is still going to be a very early release and you should not be migrating your production apps, but there will be a complete system to try out and play around with and we are looking forward to your feedback. Thank you. Awesome, Patrick, Ben, thank you so much. Do we have any questions, the maintainers? So thank you so much. I think you kind of touched a little bit up on this. So are we saying that at some point when this is something that everybody can, like adopters can start using, we can have like a hybrid of like old system and new system? Yes, so both the core APIs that you use to build plugins will have forwards compatibility and work in the new system. So if you have old plugin code, the use API use route of those kind of things, that will work in the new system. So all your plugin code is essentially going to be migrated by code mods. But of course you have the glue of the actual extensions, the way you define how a plugin is integrated into that, that you can ship duplicates of in a plugin. And then inside the app itself, yeah, you can mix two systems, not really mix, but you can import the old system into the new. So effectively have a mix. Any other questions? Hi, great talk. So how quickly do you expect to mature this? We expect to refactor early in 24. So should we go for the alpha or would you calm down and, yeah, wait a little bit. Yeah, be calm I think, be calm. We don't know yet how, you know, all of the existing use cases and plugins and so on, how well they translate to the existing system if we need to make more changes to allow for things that plugins need to do that the system doesn't support yet. So we want to discover all of those things, make sure it's also a little bit for broader usage. Yeah, I think that it's also changed quite a lot dramatically over the past few months too. So it's kind of, yeah, it's a moving target I still think at the minute. Let's give it time to settle it and then we'll reach out. Sure. Any other questions? No? Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.


to eForum Creative Zone. My guests today are not just iconic ad makers but I call them as creatives who shown the industry the power of product innovations and providing real business solutions to clients. More importantly they are creatives, they are one of the few creatives who said how it is. So I am pleased to welcome with us today, Kaval Shure and Naveen Talreja from the group. Hi Kaval, how are you? Hi Naveen, how are you holding our lockdown? Good, good, good. It's all good. Just about getting good down for a walk so that helps. So Prasily, I want to speak to you about how have you been grappling up with shooting and creating I mean remote captivity? Okay. Whoever would like to take that up? Yeah, no so I think it's been a journey, I don't think it's, I mean it's changed since the time we started. So we have shot a couple of pieces, one for Sipla, which good morning friends and Bob shot. That was typically in our Indian way, a Jugaad shoot done. So Bob literally found, found that whose dad was a DOP and whose mom was an art director and they shot in that house. And Bob sort of, excuse me, directed that film over Zoom and then we made that other film for Saregama with the Saregama in-house team. But that was, I think, Saregama was about three weeks ago, Sipla was I think another five weeks ago. But now we are pretty much normal in the way shoots are happening. So we're shooting something for another client of ours next Monday, Tuesday in Goa actually. So that's a normal shoot, normal in the sense that normal with all the rules being followed with regards to 33% crew and so on and so forth. But it's a normal shoot, it's a full-fledged shoot which Amit Saregama from Chrome is shooting for us. So yeah, so I mean that's how it's sort of transpired. We've continued to work except for the physical proximity, we've continued to work as we would have if we were all in office. So we've continued to do the strategic pieces, we've continued to do the creative development in a way so that we'll be ready to shoot when the lockdown opens up. So we have a five or six sort of campaigns in the group and all the different stages of production. So in some cases, we'll be working towards it. But yeah, largely that's how it's transpired in the last sort of couple of times. Who are amazing and you're not finally traveling to Goa as well. So traveling after Goa and shooting after long physically? I don't know if we are traveling yet, but we're shooting for sure. So that we're figuring out. Exciting. Super.  Anytime agencies are just going back to their clients with some kind of solution, something that the brand can do in this scenario. So in terms of your work for Saregama Caravan, I wanted to understand that did you come up with that idea or did Caravan like Saregama Caravan come up with a brief to you and how did it all come together if you can just take us with that. Because that's a beautiful piece of work. You want to go? So okay, so I mean, we've spoken about this in the past, we don't work typically how agencies work with clients. So we are very sort of deeply involved with what the clients are doing on a daily basis. So really it's not, you know, in these COVID times or non COVID times, we never sort of, we don't expect a client to give us a brief. We don't expect a client to give us a brief and that's across clients, not just Saregama, it's across clients. So this as an opportunity came up because that was the reality of older people. The senior citizens were while others were still being allowed to sort of move around and move out with masks and all the necessary protection. The senior citizens, it was very clear that the mandate was that they cannot move out of the house. So I think in that sense, it was an opportunity that came through the client and we spoke about it. We felt it's an opportunity for us to try and in a way alleviate this loneliness and boredom that the older generation is going to struggle with. The brand has always been about that. It has been a loneliness buster. Old songs have that ability to do that. So in a way, it all sort of fell together in place. So to go back to your question, was it a brief or did we go proactive? I think it was a conversation based on an opportunity or something that came up in the environment and we co-created that piece with the client. So lockdown took us all by surprise and so I just wanted to understand are you still working from home and what were the initial hiccups when you first started working from home? What were the operational challenges that you guys were facing? And how is it now? No girl. I think it was the same for all of us. Nobody, none of us in an environment like this worked from home before March 17th, March 18th was one sexy term that we thought people would do it. We had never thought that this would become a way of life. And while we are not averse to technology, like many people who would be our age, we're actually very happy to embrace technology. But the thing with technology is that when you're remote conversing with people, it may be okay for certain businesses like in accounts and finance or where you do the work and you just come in for meetings, meetings are very transactional, it's easier to do conversations remotely. But our business is slightly different because our business is built on conversations and it's actually built on small talk or not even big talk. Big talk happens, yes. There is the small talk where people let down their guard when they expose themselves, when they make it with their expressions, with their emotions is when something new comes out. And actually we realized initially that Zoom or whatever technology we use was the enemy of small talk because the conversations were very purposive. And it took us a while for everybody to start chatting in the casual sense. But I think over a period of time, we've become comfortable with it. So much so that I think we end up working more now because even the gap between meetings is not available. So you would travel from one client office to another and you'd have that 45 minute for yourself. Now it's just back. It's just relentless. And by the end of the day, pretty fagged out. So in a way, it's productive. We also realize the benefits of not having to travel to cities to have a meeting. So those are great things. In the last week or 10 days, we realized that we had a great conversation. Our teams hadn't cracked the beef right. And then we asked some people to stay back on the call while the rest left. And then we said, yeah, what's going on? Is there something that's coming in the way? Is the breach not working? And that half an hour actually was fantastic because we just spoke about the little things. And Naveen and I then later chatted here, yeah, she's up and missing. When it comes to the office. So yes, in most creative industries, which depend on collaboration, not just ours, I think the power of the small talk, we can't underestimate. And that happens best when people are together. We are making do with what we have. Ideally, we'd rather be together. I just add one sentence. I mean, small talk, usually when we, you know, we both sit in the same room in the office, right? Now we are fixing meetings with each other. We are fixing times with each other, which is not normal at all.  And it's only in these three months that we've had to take an appointment with each other to have a conversation, you know, which is bizarre. Yeah. Tell me about it. It's been very, I've been talking to Maria, man, she's like, I can't get these people together at the same time. It'll be very difficult for me. So yeah. So the next question, I've always called the womb as a purely independent agency. And right now you'll put a great show at Epis as one of the most independent agency, Epis Asia Pacific. So I know that the womb doesn't work for awards, but what do you think, what do you think has worked in your favor? And how did you crack this code? How do you crack the Epis code, maybe? And what do you attribute this to daily? Actually, you know, Ms. Ma, we got to know about it. We didn't plan for it. We got to know about it. We didn't, there was no code to crack. We got to know about it as we were getting some client. And I happened to browse through one of these industry websites and we were pushed to do some of the most effective agency awards. So there is no code to crack. One thing which is great and one thing which we'd like to change. So one thing which is great is that Saragama Karva has contributed a lot to us winning that because being quite a landmark, I wouldn't call it a campaign. It's just the entire initiative, the product through the campaign and so on and so forth. And the success is part of the market. We're very happy about that. There are a couple of other grants that contributed to our ranking. So that's great. What we'd like to change and we know that's not true. There are about 13, 14 clients that we work at and we know that for each of those clients, we've done a first class product, whether it's strategy or creative. But for various reasons, and you know, I mean, it's natural. Sometimes the budgets are not good enough. Sometimes different things come in. So many of the other pieces of our work hasn't gained traction as much. That is the thing we'd like to change because we know that's not true. But it's okay. Even if you were to look at the biggest agencies, not just in India but around the world. And if you were to look at the brands that contribute to their fame and to their success, you can actually count the brands on the fingers of one hand. And you can, I don't want to name names. And in a good way, you know, because that's true. That's true everywhere in the world. Whether it's a widen that became famous for Mikey, it was Droga in New York, which became famous to Underama and two or three others. It always happens that way. Where you wish that all of your clients keep hitting jackpot at the effectiveness awards. Can you plan for that? Hopefully, there'll be a day when that happens. But on winning the effectiveness independent agency in Asia, in a way, it's just the reaffirmation of where we started from. Okay, so just to put things in perspective, we don't hate awards. There's nothing to hate. Everybody likes to go on to the stage, but you should go on to the stage for the right things. When you really deserve it, when the world thinks, yes, you deserve to be on the stage. We wouldn't want to be on the stage for things that win at a certain award show and clients outside don't even know about it or care about it. That's not something so we're very happy. Mr, were you there or you dropped off? There was there was a lag. So, but I was just saying that if you if you just speak to our clients, the one thing they vouch for is that we do not move forward without having first personally spoken to consumers, understood the problem, tried to find various ways to solve the problem. So there's a there's a degree of I think integrity to the solution that we provide the clients with. And because of that, because of the because of the process that's been followed in the integrity with which we approach it, more often than not, clients have reposed their faith in the solutions that we are offering them. And those solutions have gone on and sort of been effective in the market with regards to business which has gone on and helped us win. Yeah, so I also want to now understand that, you know, how a client budgets now and how are your clients responded to this situation?  So what is your general mood like, because a lot of big events are cancelled, production, TV shows are not happening, it's stopped and all that. So now where are marketers investing in as things open up? And what is really happening to these allotted budgets? Where do you see them going? And what is the general mood like? I think it's different. I think it's different across categories. I mean, if you look at pharma essential items, then the mood is not so sort of despondent. Even I would say in general, most marketers, at least the ones who are working with us are now sort of raring to get back, get back to sort of, you know, communicating about themselves and getting the business going, because in many ways, you've pretty much lost one quarter. So you have now nine months to make up what you would have otherwise done in 12 months. And therefore there is intent, we can feel that from marketers and clients saying we'd like to now move on and do stuff. And we can sense that because I mean, like I said in the beginning, we are in the midst of five or six productions waiting to get on. I think the challenges and what maybe stopping them, if at all, is just this gradual opening up of the country, gradual distribution. What will also hold them back in some categories is the consumer sentiment of wanting to go to a store and shop. Whether it is for a can of deodorant or it is for a white good sort of product. So that consumer sentiment is something that everybody is looking for. Everybody is watching out for to say, you know, will consumers come back to the store? So on and so forth. So if you look at China, US, yes, they've come back. But like you said, television, the GECs, television shows are just about getting shot. And I would say it will take about a month for new episodes to start coming through for women to sort of go and start watching those stuff. From a male audience perspective, there is no sport happening. And sports and news typically movies tend to be the big sort of genres in which the male audiences are advertised for. And there is no sport is conversation about some India, South Africa series happening in August. There's some conversation about IPL happening. I think if those events happen, you will see advertisers coming back and spending substantially enough. I would say in terms of awareness or the share of voice that they would have would be high, the share of expenditures would be high, except that maybe the rates themselves, I don't know how the demand supply equation would work out at that time, the rates themselves might be slightly suppressed, depending on the properties that are being advertised. If I were to just, this situation does not apply equally to all categories today. So if you go to look at online education, for instance, that's going month on month. You look at the dairy and cookies and pistachio. On the other hand, you look at big-ticket items like automobiles, real estate. They're not. A lot of categories that are used outside the house obviously are not. So even let's say, for instance, a deodorant, if you're not stepping out of the house, that category has a lesser role to play in that. So this situation hasn't been the same for everyone. For some, it has been actually very good. Because people like, for instance, people sitting at home and consuming a lot of junk stuff is coming through in some of the research that we are doing. Because there is nothing else to do. So things like technology, so laptops and printers and those kind of things are on the rise. But social categories and high-ticket categories are two that have suffered enough. So this situation has led to far more digital adoption while digital was already having a moment. Now it's increasingly a lot of, even creative agencies are getting into digital and they are getting into things like social engagement, enhancement of social engagement, lead generation and all that. It's no more about just tracking a TVC. So while there are already agencies that specialize in this situation, how equipped are creative agencies now to take on these things? Yeah, I don't want to comment on any other agency. We have always believed that you need to stay close to what your specialization and your core expertise is. I mean, yes, everybody can do everything. We can get into lead generation. We can get into everything. But our job, as we define it for brands that work with the boom, is to provide strategic direction, big brand platforms that can then get executed across different mediums. We do a few mediums. We do a lot of digital, but yes, we don't get into the performance marketing or whether it's lead generations. We don't do that. And I don't think we would ever want to go into that area because we are not the experts at it. If a client says, listen, I need a campaign that will generate leads, we would partner with the best lead generation company, learn from them and we go create with them for the client. And that's something that we've done through the five years as and when clients have come to us with different sort of leads that they have. We've partnered with the best that's available in the industry. But to do everything on your own, I think that's old world thinking. I think time today is of collaboration. One agency having all services and a client expected to use all the services. You don't have the best talent in all the services. So in a way, you're actually just in some cases offering BS to clients and that's something that we don't do. So my last question is that, you know, COVID-19 is a humanitarian crisis and many award shows have spoken about not factoring in work, actually created for these times. So what would be your take on how brands and agencies can create a conversation on COVID-19 without being exploitative and just using it as a mere marketing product? So I think there are two questions that I missed, but one is about awards. I think it's I'm just trying to find the most polite word.  I'm sorry, there are many freaking people who have died and we are concerned about, you know, which what work will enter which award show and largely this is creative. And I know which show you're talking about. I think, you know, I think we should not waste our time in this interview talking about it. Your second question. Can you just repeat that? I didn't get that. Well, I don't know if you picked that up. So it's just about, you know, many brands want to be a part of the conversation as they just want to be a part of that conversation. But at the same time, what do you say? What do you say and how much do you say at this time when it is a humanitarian crisis? And how do you say it without being exploitative? Cover, you want to just talk about that journey? Journey from the beginning to now, what's happening? Yeah, so we're doing some work with consumers and on this situation, on the COVID situation, in fact, we were lucky to have an idea. On the day the lockdown was announced for the first time. So in a way, we got together on the same night when it was announced. And the next morning, we started off conversations with about 60 consumers across different kinds of segments. So from blue collar to factory workers to maids to white collar to home makers and so on and so forth. What we've done is we went to them on the first day, we went to them in the middle of the lockdown and we went to them on the 60th day to look at how human minds change over a period of time on the same issues. So the things that were exciting initially, how are they like right now? So I just deviated from the question that you asked to say that look, there is some work happening on understanding where India is and Indian hearts are the lockdown. So we don't want to become armchair commentators and look at social media feeds and give you my toolkit on where India is and the advertising industry should. So there's some real work happening. Hopefully in a week or so, we should be able to share that. But on how should brands become a part of this conversation, I just personally think it's a very pathetic, I sympathize with those brands who think like this. Brands need to sell and I think consumers can call a bluff from a mile now. So if and if you're doing an honest job selling and I think people are saying we need to be sensitive and we need to make ads that reflect the current sentiment, I can tell you we've been in touch with all these consumers.  Now, if you ask me of all the stuff that has happened by other agencies and I've seen a lot of COVID related work that's come out. For some reason, I just love the seemingly mindless work that Amul seems to be doing on charts and the C and it's trying to sell. It's just such a relief to see some happy faces on the screen. I really don't care what the quality of creativeism, the quality of storytelling is, of connecting emotionally with consumers in a way that sells their products is even more important now and I just want to so there's a fluffy things like brand purpose and all those things surrounding us nowadays. The purpose of the brand is to build the client's business. That's it. There's no other all consumers can do without the brands that they use, all consumers. So, if you ask consumers a question, nobody will care to hoots about brands. They will find other things. Yeah, maybe an Apple or maybe a Times of India or maybe an Amul. There are some brands that just become part of your life. And I think those brands are lucky, those brands have done the right things over a period of time. But others, a detergent saying, I can get husband and wife together. To me, it's a little obnoxious. True. Thank you so much, Kavala Naveen for this very, very candid conversation. You said it how it is. And that's the reason I love speaking to you. Thank you so much for joining us today. I think there's been a lag in the consumers. But brands that have had a consistent voice on that issue have garnered more respect. But if you've been opportunistic, you're going to get people you can see through that. So authenticity, just say authentic. I think consumers will respect you even if you don't say anything. I don't know, there has just been some kind of a lag. So what I'm going to do is that I'm going to share the overall video with Latika and with Mariam. It all looks fine. But just in the middle, there are some spaces. So I just might need to clarify with you later on. So I'll just share that with you. Even I go to message saying the meeting's been ended by the host and now you're using some unlimited no, no, something that some message came through. I assume that was okay. How are you doing this book? Yeah, I just asked the same question. How are you doing? Perfect. It's been good, but it's been just too much work. It's been too much. It's very tiring.  So it's a pretty crazy day right now. And I don't understand how creatives in this situation kind of bring out work that inspires. That's the reason we came up with this series because it's so difficult every day. Yeah. Yeah. It isn't easy. That's true. Will yourself to come and look at the screen for nine hours every day. Video fatigue is real because video is a very intense medium. Yes. So that's pretty crazy. Yeah. Otherwise, what is the plan like when I am planning to start office operations the next next month or something like that? Or are you planning to take more time? No, waiting and watching actually. We'll watch. I mean, let's see what's happening outside in terms of cases, etc. There's no point, you know, 2015, 20 of us getting to office, one of us falling sick and then the entire office getting quarantined. That's not going to serve any purpose. It's going to, you know, in way, interrupt our operations quite drastically if that happens. Makes sense. For us, it's, yeah, for us, we're going to sort of wait and watch. I don't think we're going. No hurry to like get back. Yeah. We haven't discussed it, the two of us, but I don't think before 15 July, we are even considering it. We'll see we'll take it as it comes. Because in a way, you know, except for the fatigue, except for the moments where you feel that you'd rather be together for some brainstorming, a couple of those things. Actually, none of the work stopping new plant conversations, so focus groups, depth discussions, expert interviews, everything is happening. So the only thing actually that us and I'm sure everyone in the industry suffering from is that they've been taking work to the level of the script and then it gets stuck because there's no production. Yeah. So once hopefully in the week or two that stabilizes, then I think we can pretty much pull on for some more time. Perfect. Thank you so much for your time. I'm very lucky to have got the time, both of your time together and I'm very grateful to you for making this time. Not at all miss, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. I'll come and see you at your office someday once only if I get back to normal. Yes. Yeah, yeah, please do, please do. All right, take care. See you miss Pa. Bye.


Today here, we wanted to, we are not sure how familiar you are with the Uyghur Genocide, so it will be like more one Genocide 101 type of panel. And we have, first, let me introduce myself. My name is Alfida Iltebir. I am the president of Uyghur American Association. Uyghur American Association is a non-profit organization in D.C. It's a community-based organization established in 1998. The goal was, when it's established, was to preserve and promote Uyghur culture, Uyghur language, Uyghur religion and identity, basically, and promote Uyghur with democracy and other values. However, starting 2016, we were shifting our focus because of the ongoing genocide in our homeland. So we are trying to do some advocacy, raise awareness events, besides the cultural events. So here today, we have other Uyghur Americans. One of them is Tursunay Ziawadun. She is a camp survivor. So she was a detainee in China's concentration camps, and she was lucky enough to escape the camp and came to Kazakhstan first, and then Turkey, and then to U.S. Because her husband was a Kazakhstan citizen, Kazakhstan government help, and she was able to come out. And since she came to U.S., she gave interviews to BBC, CNN, and other important medias about what she saw and what she went through in China's concentration camps, including torture, sexual abuses, and she will talk about the details soon. Second speaker is Diliar Sepidin. Diliar Sepidin was just a student who came to U.S. to continue his education. He was just a regular student, like most of you. However, he was left with no choice to be an activist because his father was taken detainee to the concentration camps a couple of years ago, and it's been three years, I believe. He's still asking a simple question like, where is my father? Is he alive? He's going to share his personal story as well.  Her story is also unique because her sister was taken to the concentration camps years and years ago, and just for having a religious book in her hand, in her house, and also she was present to 17 years. One of the excuses was to have Koran, the religious book in the house, and the second reason was praying at her father's funeral. Kalbenur also became an activist in trying to be a voice to her voiceless brothers and sisters back home for the Uyghurs, and she had met former Secretary Pompeo. She had given media constantly, giving testimonies and asking for, again, the same questions, where is my sister? Her sister is in, recently we learned that in forced labor camps and working long hours and making clothes that the factories were built inside the concentration camps. So we'll talk about those details, they will share their personal stories. I want to talk about, I have a PowerPoint slide I can go through real quick, but before I want to talk about what happened to the Uyghurs all of a sudden, so I want to start with saying that the assimilation, the discrimination, like being treated as a second cause, you know, citizen is not something new for years and years. We were, you know, dealing and being oppressed by Chinese Communist Party. It's just starting 2016. We realized our relatives, our loved ones, our friends were getting disconnected from us through from the social media channels. That's the only way we communicate usually.  And we were wondering what's going on. And then one by one, our writers, our professors, our scholars, our artists, singers, like all the backbone of our society, one by one, getting disappeared and detained. And we still didn't know what was going on. And China was denying the detaining Uyghurs and not giving any explanation. However, after the Canadian researcher showed the satellite images of those new camps, then China had to give explanation.  We are educating Uyghurs there. But those Uyghurs are already educated ones that they detained first. That's what they said. And after the testimonies given by the camp survivors and other, you know, documents, Adrian Zan's reports, the Xinjiang police files, the pages of pages of hacked Chinese police documents and also the 10,000 photos of just one county, the detainees photos, all those evidences and proofs showed that it was definitely not different than prison. It was a concentration camps and so many things sort of going on. So let me share my screen real quick. And I will go through who are Uyghurs, why this is happening with you guys so we can look into the root cause a little bit closer. Let me make this view slide showing. All right, I hope everyone can see my screen. So I'm going to go very quickly. So we will talk about more the Uyghurs, why China oppressed Uyghurs, Uyghur lives before the camps and inside the camps and outside the camps. And also what we can do about this. So as you see is Turkistan. That's how we like to call our homeland and China called Xinjiang, which means new territory, because we were independent until 1949. We had 5,000 years of history and in recent years in 1933 and 1944, we had East Turkistan Republic. However, in 1949, we were occupied by China and then renamed our land as Xinjiang, which is a new territory. So why China oppressed Uyghurs? So first of all, as you know, China has a huge population. So our land is also big. It's a 1,664,000 square kilometers. So it is a free land for their massive migration, their expansion of their population. And also our land is very rich, mineral resources, the cotton fields and oil. It's very rich land. And geopolitically, our map, as you saw earlier, is in the west part of China, which means we are the door for China to open to the Silk Road, open to the One Belt, One Road initiative. Basically any products they make, if they want to sell to Europe and other parts of the world, they have to go through our land. That's why it's very important for them to control so strict and harsh for them for their economical reason. And other reasons, the Chinese Communist Party cannot tolerate any diversity. We already have enough evidence and documents from the Chinese government that says absolutely no mercy, strike hard policy. And basically they're saying that they cannot tolerate any other nationality in their land. They want everyone to be like strict, un-Chinese, who follows everything the government say. So we words are different. We're different language, different religion, different history. That's why they couldn't assimilate us so far. And that's why they continue to assimilate and make one nation, one land policy. And I want to go a little faster. So as we already talked about how their gas pipeline, have their trade line, everything go through our land, is Turkistan. So as you see in the streets, we have very unique, like thousands, you know, I'm exaggerating thousands, but so many cameras on every street so they can capture every single part of our lives. We are living like a surveillance state because of the facial recognition and everything they want to follow what the Uyghurs are doing. So many things are going on before the camps. Anyway, before this recent genocide started, there was forced abortion. My mom was faced the forced abortion multiple times. It's like drug check in the morning, government employees, you know, doctors come and round up the ladies and checks. And if you're pregnant, you have to do abortion. You're not allowed to because in the past in 1980s, there was one child policy to control China's population. And because of that, there were two child for minorities and one child for Chinese. So because under the debt guys, that rule, they were doing forced abortion and forced contraception. And then on Uyghur language schools and our language, we're no longer teaching our schools, Uyghur and Muslim or Turkic names were also banned, like Mohammed Fatma, they're banned. So we don't link to our roots, our history and then on practice of religion, definitely China looks at religion as a disease. They think it's a threat to their government's stability. So they look at it like there are other religions too, not only Muslims, right? There are Islam, there are Judaism, there are Christians, there are Buddhists. However, the government doesn't recognize religion and they're against religion and they don't want religion to unite people. And separation from Turkic and Muslim root, definitely they're doing that. They rewrote the history books. They rewrote the Quran that fits in their own ideology and the communication with outside China was always controlled, listened and you know, cut. And life inside the camps, let me be faster so others can speak. We don't have much time. So this is the camp, the photos you see in the bottom. This is the camp. As you see, this is their bathroom inside the room. It's a bucket basically, very small room, crowded, not enough room. Those people sleep on that bench, eat on that bench, learn on that bench, learning, meaning political indoctrination. They do everything in there and their cameras, no windows. It's strictly watch 24-7. Even at night, the lights are not off. And so political indoctrination, what our people are going through. A number of the people inside the camps is one to three million. I say that because State Department said it is two millions and the Pentagon's and it's up to three millions, but however, we would believe it's much more than that. So there are political indoctrination going on, their torture, their sterilization. In fact, the Camp Survivor, Zumrat Davut, was sterilized as well. That's one of the evidence we have. She has even the paperwork that shows that she went through sterilization. And there is rape, gang rape. And also, as I mentioned earlier, they built factories inside or near the camps. So there's forced labor and organ harvesting, unfortunately, separation of family and children when the parents are taken to the camps, the children are taken to the state run orphanages, boarding schools and kindergarten. And they're raised as a hand Chinese stripped away their identity, their language, their culture, their religion. And I am afraid of our future in 20, 30 years, how our future kids will be.  The photos on the right on the top, as you see, that is an airport in Urumqi and Kashgar. A report on the floor says a fast lane for organs and organ transport. You imagine how much of the organs are being transferred from Urumqi from Uyghur region to other side to the hospitals for the world demand. That they need a faster lane at the airport. In Holocaust, after the Holocaust, they count the schools to see how many people were died. But China is smart enough. And what they're doing is building crematoriums around the camps. And they're burning those bodies. So in the future, we can't tell how many people they killed.  So China has a massive data to use for the organ harvesting, for the organ transparent market. So this is the photos. As you see, it was just a mountain in 2015 and 2018. There we go. We have a camp that can hold 70,000 people, only inside Urumqi. And we have over 570 camps in our land outside the camps. So we talked about the camps, what they go through outside the camp. Also, people are surveillance state. As I said, the cameras everywhere, they can't trust anyone like they constantly afraid of speaking up naturally sterilization still outside the camp. It's going on forced abortion going on forced marriage. So as I mentioned, China had the one child policy starting 1980s. So what they were Chinese were doing is doing abortion for the girls so they can keep the boys and continue their last name, continue their route. So what happened at the end of their 10, 15 years is there's so many patriots, so many male proportion, much higher than the female. So with this, you know, discrepancy, they need more female. So they were looking around the countries around. And of course, Uyghurs are there for them. And they were government itself has ads and said if Uyghur marries the Chinese and there is an incentive, they will give a house. They will, you know, increase their salary and things like that. And unfortunately, some of the ruler areas, the Uyghurs, when they reject, they're threatened by the government saying that their parents will be taken to the camp if they're not taken yet. Or if they're in the camp, they will be killed.  And this is a one sad tragedy that as you see on the photo on the right, who will be that upset and crying on the wedding? Unfortunately, this is another truth going on. And the Chinese relative plan on the photo you see on the right, the camp survivors in Red Doubt also, you know, witnessed, but she had Chinese relatives in her house. So the government came up with a systematic plan that they send the government cadre to the houses of the villages and rural areas that they stay at one Chinese man stays in the house of Uyghurs and reports everything they do. Are they praying? Are they saying against something against government? Are they, you know, reading Xi Jinping's book or not? You know, those kind of things or even the kids, they're asking you kids question, your parents, do they pray, do they fast, that kind of things? And unfortunately, it's unbelievable that a stranger in your house stays with you for months and reports everything you do. But that's going on in our homeland and transfer Uyghurs to inner China, according to Adrian Zenz, a report with Associated Press, 1.6 million Uyghurs unwillingly, you know, willingly transferred to inner China to the factories as a forced labor unit.  Like it's so sad for us to see things like that.  We already talked about it. And this is the birth rate again, the forced sterilization and abortion and birth control. We talked about it. This is again from the Adrian Zenz report, AP report that the birth rates fell 60 percent from 2015 to 2018 and 24 percent in 2019. The kids were sent to, we already mentioned, the state run orphanages and boarding schools and kindergarten, unfortunately, not given to the grandparents or others. And like some Uyghurs in exile, Uyghurs in diaspora recognize their child from those photos, unfortunately, that they were in the basically child's camps. As you see, Uyghur culture is such a rich culture. I told you, we have a history of like five thousand years of history and kingdoms and even republics. Our architecture is so beautiful. The houses is like so in details, as you see on the left. But that is all being destroyed by Chinese government as well as you see in the bottom and on the right side. It's because that shows again, our rich history, our rich culture, and they want to destroy that. They're against something different than their culture, than their history, than themselves. And mosques, as I said, the religion is also considered as a threat for them. So they kept a couple of mosques as a symbol to show to the tourists or the media, but they demolished so many mosques that are historical mosques and beautiful mosques in other cities and states. And the Uyghurs, outside... I apologize if you hear that voice. I think outside somebody is moaning their life. Outside China, outside is Turkistan, our homeland. Uyghurs are also suffering. We call it transnational repression. Unfortunately, most of us are getting threatening messages from China's police and China's longhand. And basically, the Chinese government hold our loved ones, our family as a hostage and trying to control our activities outside here. And what do they do? They call us and say, don't go to political activities.   So that's what they're trying to do and constantly make us uncomfortable, make us scared, make us think about our loved ones back home to try to silence us, basically. This is a guy, Yusuf Cennet, in Turkey. He was also forced to be a spy for Chinese Communist Party, Chinese embassy in Turkey. When he had rejected it, later on, he was also shot. That's one example I was just sharing here. Another tactic they use is all the students outside China, Uyghur students, they're trying to bring them back and they arrest them. So what they do is, when your passport expired, they don't renew and they say, you need to go back to homeland, you have mainland, and then you need to renew with there. And when you go there, you're arrested. Why? It's because the students who visited outside China, especially Western countries, they now know they're exposed to democracy, they're exposed to freedom of speech, they're exposed to freedom of religion. They know Western ideology, how to be free and democracy. And that's what China is afraid. And they're afraid when they allow those students to go back, these ideas will spread, they will tell other Uyghurs and they will teach others those values. And they're afraid that that's going to be the end of Chinese Communist Party stability. And that's other reasons. So recent updates, both Trump and Biden administration declare what's going on in China, the China's oppression as genocide. And after that, seven other government followed Canada, UK and other parliaments and EU also said that it is genocide, it's crimes against humanity. However, we still see the Muslim countries and African countries and other countries silenced. US put many AD or AD sanctions, visa restrictions and business advisors put up there. And two bill passed in the US is one is Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and second one is Uyghur Human, Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. We would like to thank US and our Congress members for this because the impact in China by human rights condemnation is not gonna work when we hit their pocket, when it hits their economy, when it impacts their economy, then I think they react and maybe they change their policies. So we believe in that and we continue to advocate for the bills, current bills are Uyghur Human Rights Protection Act, which gives a refugee P2 status for Uyghurs and other bills are like the Disclosure Act and we can talk about these details later. And UN recently published a released a bachelor's report. So it says it's a serious risk of crimes against humanity and international crimes. So after that, now UN also has its responsibility. Mostly Western countries are trying to support just recently, Canada read the statement by 50 UN countries siding that Uyghur genocide and to do something about it, to hold China accountable. Otherwise China is still enjoying impunity in the UN and in the world because of their economic power. There have been silencing African countries and Muslim countries with the trade incentives and other, you know, threats. That's why it's still six year, the genocide of ongoing people are still in the camps and this is going on. What can we do? We can raise awareness, you know, just like this, have an, you know, event in universities and colleges and tell your neighbors, tell your friends and basically tell them what's going on in China and why Uyghurs are being oppressed. Support Uyghur organizations, human rights, Uyghur American Association, Uyghur Human Rights Projects, you know, their campaign for Uyghur, many Uyghur organizations trying to do the same thing, be voice to their voiceless people. Donate them if you can, contact your Congress member, tell them you support Uyghurs and you want your Congress member to stay with Uyghurs and stay with justice, stay on the right side of the history and advocate for Uyghur bills and, you know, contact us, work with us to do advocacy work and lobbying work at the Hill. That's all I said, sorry if I take too long and I am, we are going to take questions at the end but I would like to now ask Tursonay to briefly share her personal story so I can translate it for you guys. Tursonayede, I'm this is Ikeldi, Gheksans buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu kene. Tursonayede, with all respect to your time, let me go to Kalbinur next and then I will go back. I know I'm not following the orders but we will hear from our sister Kalbinur whose sister is in the camp and then we will go back to Tursonay. Aslamu alaikum. Oh, okay, all right, all right. Let's take back. Alaykum salam. Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Beş Minotlam Gheksak buldu, Ber Goodnight, Hello everyone, greetings. My name is Trusan Aiziaudun. I am China's concentration camp detainee and at the same time survivor and witness to the concentration camps. I went to camps twice, 2017 and 2018 and total I stayed one year inside the concentration camp. First time when I was taken to the concentration camps, I was on the street. There was no explanation. They just said there is a meeting and they took me, arrest me from the street and take me to the concentration camps. And there were around 1000 people there. There were old ladies, there were young girls and we are very crowded and I was among them. The first one when I was arrested, they put us in a big room and they took our headscarves, they forced us to eat pork, they told us that we were not supposed to say we are Muslim and also we were learning like indoctrination documents and materials that was denying our religion. The main reason I understood later that the reason was that I was Uyghur, my identity. But the excuses they were given for us, for all the ladies, I think she was in the ladies camp is because some people read Quran, that's why they were arrested. Some people were wearing hijab, that's why they were arrested. Some people were wearing long dress, that's why. And some went outside China, like went overseas, just like me. And those are the many, one of the reasons why those people were arrested and put into concentration camps. Also, one of the reasons was to have more children, like three or four, was also a reason to be taken to the concentration camps. First time when I was arrested, it was very bad condition. For example, there were not enough food, we were always hungry. I lost consciousness because of the malnutrition, I was sick and that's how I was out on the first time when I was inside. And what they were doing is basically brainwashing, like teaching us the Chinese ideology. Second time when I was arrested, it was much different. As soon as we were taken to the camps, it was a big building, it was different. There were so many police with weapons armed police and armed police. And the condition was different too. Then second time when I was arrested, I faced the torture, I was hit by sticks and batons and I went through so many bad memories, I went through so many bad things. If I had been arrested for a long time, I would have been arrested, but there was no place for me to go, it was just a very small place. I went to the hospital, I had a doctor and I did a medical examination, and I was treated and I was arrested, I was treated. But the first time I was arrested, my father was in a hospital, I was taken to the hospital and I was treated and I was held in a prison. And the first day, when I was arrested for the second time, I remember there was one old lady who had a headscarf and it was taken and she was hit and so bad and she was undressed. It was very sad that the atmosphere was also different because it was so overcrowded, men were in the other section, women were in the different section. And it was totally unacceptable view. They were very rude, they were very harsh. Even the earrings on my ear, they wanted to take it out and they just pulled it out. My ear was almost bleeding. They put me into a room that is like a four meter square feet. We were like almost 20 people inside that small room. And then in the next couple of minutes I was supposed to leave the room. But when I was in the apartment, I couldn't open the door. The condition, the hygiene in the room was terrible, there is a bucket in the corner and that is our restrooms. And everything is being watched. Unfortunately, we don't even have enough time for the restroom breaks. It's only three minutes. If you pass you will get hit. That's how we stayed there after a month. They start to interrogate us, taking us to the questioner interrogation room and questioned. And every time we go, we get hit, we got tortured. Unfortunately, another sad thing I witness is at night. The police were coming and saying that they were taking us to the questioning room. And the young girls were disappearing. They were selecting girls and taking out sometimes they never come back. Sometimes they come back as like almost dead position. And we didn't know what was going on. There was a demanding interrogation going on. The person who was in charge had to be kept waiting for 10 or 15 days. The whole process was under Thomas's administration, and just the rest of the people, and the rest of the people was caught. the rules there was constantly changing they didn't even know what's going on they uh once they took us at the beginning and shaved our head to cut our ears after like 15 days then they took all of us to a different room and they did forced sterilization and even forced abortion for one of the lady who was pregnant um so i was i thought the the girls disappeared at nice being tortured and one day they also called me and i was out and i witnessed what was actually going on um they sexually abused us and even in front of me they raped the other young girl and then she didn't want to talk about more details they forced us to do it so that nobody else would be mistaken for some who was actually losing their brain because they were supposed to be dead their hearts are hoping that they will find them and that they will never be able to die again and again no one is actually living in peace again after all they were not even able to make a living again and again It was unbearable at night, you hear screams, you hear people bagging and help for the help. And I cannot describe what I went through every single night we went through this and it was very scary. And it wasn't just females that were going sexually abuse, it was also the men side. You could hear men screaming, yelling too. Sometimes it's so loud, so different that you can't even differentiate if it's animal or human or what's going on. We are just like on like leaving like that in that situation. And I even witnessed once that they made me pass through a room that a man or a man was hanged outside and there were so many cuts on his body and there he was tortured. We went through all this inside the camps. A couple girls died. I witnessed their dad with losing too much blood and I know after they called me I know what they went through because they are their torture is inhumane. They use those baton and sticks to your private area to torture you and I went through that and because I went through then I understood why those girls were so silenced and all as unconscious. Inside the camp is there is a small hospital when you like very terrible they take you there or sometimes they check your blood they use for the testings and things like so when I went there I also witnessed a very unacceptable reality. I seen people in those hospital rooms that not just women they were being sterilized also men were going through sterilization and they were just destroying us. Lastly I want to say there are so many things I can tell it takes long time but starvation was another big issue in there because so many workers are in the camps and not enough food and so many times I lost conscious and not didn't get enough food and I was bagging them to give me bread and those are the things that I went through there. I would like to thank everyone who organized this event who allow us to talk and share our stories. I hope you know what's going on now that you can say I didn't know and I hope you help the raise awareness of this we were genocide you help those innocent people because we are very helpless and thank you so much. I would like to thank for Trusunay Hades speech because of her husband being Kazakhstan citizen she was able to come out and now we would like to go to Kalbanur and share her personal stories. Hi, good morning everyone and firstly thank you so much for organizing this event for Uyghurs and also like same as Uyghurs and I would like to thanks to like giving attention to Uyghur cows and my name is Kalbanur Ghani I grew I born in China and then I lived in China until 2015 so I think most of the general part already covered by Alfida and also Trusunay so like my part I would like to give testimony what happened to my family during this Uyghur genocide and from my family during the last five years at least 12 of them and including my sister and then my six of thousand brothers and sisters and two uncles so this is my sister photo and this is her son my sister Ben Agul Ghani she was teacher in the primary school and government primary school she's art teacher she had literature and also art painter literally paint every day and teach children how to paint she was detained in 2017 for the mass concentration camp and along with a lot of teachers together any given any any and after she stayed in the mass concentration camp like two and a half year later like she two and a half year until like in of 2020 and they give sentence her 17 years seven years that she prayed at our father funeral my father's passed away in 2013 and then additional 10 years for she kept a religious book which is actually there is a no book found and after I when I asked my family members this is the only excuse to come and use it to give a long sentence to and then other derivatives and I have one another cousin brother 25 years old his name is Manmachan Yusuf he was detained in 2017 too and like in the 2017 and 2018 I believe there's mass detention for the Uyghurs like I think at least millions of was detained they detained first for a few years until few years they just tortured whatever they want to do just do and then after that they they come one by one and then some of them like few of them was released some of them most of them like my sister my brother they give him long sentence they give into my cousin brother Manmachan life sentence for 25 25 years old boy like without any reason I don't know and then my uncle Jaffa Timur he they give him also like the he detained 2017 after that they give him 20 years long sentence and many other my cousin sisters and brothers is missing because I mean overseas I don't know where are they and then they are alive or dead and since I giving this testimonies and also like speaking up since 2019 and Chinese government start to harass me through by like Richard call me every day or every other day and then if I don't pick up the Richard call and they bother harass my mom and they they threat her if you if your daughter not speaking like not answering I you call you will be punished and then my mom every day begging me please answer they call so I have to answer when they answer like as Alphina say they say like you need to stop from speaking up you need to stop like treat or you need to delete all your tweets or you need to like delete your videos because because I start to speak up since 2019 for my sister freedom because she has not only my sister my other relatives and all other viewers all dies and didn't do anything wrong because of identity was detained so since I speak up Chinese government so so unhappy and they try to silence me in many way like like still like Alphina say there is like threatened message from the through by my Twitter on the Facebook like that's that message or you will be killed if you keep speaking up so of course I didn't stop for speaking up and I'm speaking last four years and the things still keep going it didn't change but we have faith I believe in justice and I believe in God too and this will be in one day and then we will be China will be punished it's on on crime soon and but we need your help and we need your support and we need you stand in our side yeah if you have any questions I'm here and then I think there's one question about a person I says they're like the call is kosher asking how she escape and how she can be like openly speak up in here she didn't escape I remember in 2018 there is a Kazakhstan government had to negotiate because there's a lot of Kazakh people also detained not only Uyghurs and Kazakhstan government that negotiate with China there's a release 2000 Kazakhs and to tonight's sister husband was Kazakhstan's Kazakhstan citizen that's the reason she was released because of her husband and she was in Kazakhstan before she moved to United States I hope that's answer your question thank you so much to save the time we will go to Adilyar Saipedin now to share his story and then we can go to questions go ahead Adilyar while we waiting for Adilyar I can maybe answer the question I think there was somebody yes not only Uyghurs was detained there is a Kazakhs there is Kyrgyz there's Uzbek most of the Turkic ethnic minority group that that's like who was like we are practicing Islam also who is like similar is the Turkish identity people all like most of them is was detained. Adilyar can you try your mic now yeah can you hear me okay go ahead yes go ahead okay yeah sorry about that so hi everyone so my name is Adilyar Saipedin I've been in the US since 2014 today I would like to share one of my tragic story which is related to my parents I've been lost contact with my I never seen my parents almost like seven years by now and then I completely lost contact with my father his name is Saipedin Yemin this is his picture so it's almost been two years I lost contact with him and then because China China's authority forcefully detained him and then put him in the concentration camp so what reason just simply because he sacrificed himself and then send us to the free country like US and then get the higher education and that's the only reason he they are punishing him and then since that I never talked to him I don't even know he is alive or dead and then only my mom was left outside and then she's at home alone and then even with my mom I can talk like regularly just as usual and then whenever I talk to her and then try to ask about my father she's like a very crying and then she's like very sad and then also scared because she cannot say anything about my father and then we usually just say like a like a not directly say my father but we just say like your grandfather so I just say how how's my grandpa and then she's like always like trying to avoid the topic and then she just say yeah he's fine he's fine and then just either hand up the phone or just switch to different topic because of the Chinese constant team monitor our conversation in the vchat and maybe you know like you know there's some news about like how chinese app like vchat or maybe other app they can monitor your speech or like videos etc so since I come I was I came as a student and then after that I start to work as a IT right now I'm working in the progressive insurance as a software test engineer so I have my daughter right now I have my family here it's like it's kind of like very sad every day it's kind of like affecting my psychology as well because I usually I was trying so hard like for example like your parents try so hard to give you like a old education all the support you need and then by the time you get you go to US and then get your education and then go to work suddenly you build your family here and then even you try to bring them to live with you suddenly they're disappeared and then I don't know my father is alive or dead and then it's like a very he's kind of like my hero he did a lot of things and then I was not worrying about my mom at the time but as if it's not enough right now maybe you heard like it's been like three months the lockdown all the which is my hometown and then and also also other other cities the lockdown the cities and then because of the zero code zero code policy that's kind of like excuse for them to like killing all of our people my mom also in the city is she's in at home she's been like three three months she cannot go outside and then recently I talked to her and then I was like so worried about her and then she keeps saying don't worry don't worry it's okay like she doesn't want to say anything bad about Chinese so that's why and then but she said like son our home is very cold and I was asking why don't you pay the like don't you have the heat etc and then she said no we cannot go outside so we cannot pay the bill and then there is no heat no like AC etc so and then at home it's winter is coming she's like a very cold at home I was like I don't know what to what to help her and then it was like so emotional and then I just say okay mom like we will try to save you etc and then yeah that's what's happening in our East Turkistan right now when I come to the US like for eight years ago I completely like start to uh last contact with my all my friends and the students are like my classmates the only way we can contact is a WeChat and whenever I see the WeChat people started deleting me because I posted some pictures about like US like I'm in the university etc because they know like they they are not allowed to contact with the outside so they started deleting my profile and then we we no longer I no longer contact with anyone so yeah that's what's happening uh in the East Turkistan and also about the same question there was one question as being asked at Torsunay I feel like uh you guys need to be like respectful in my opinion because she's been tortured she's been even she's been raped and then people keep asking like how she escaped and then is it like it's kind of like a joke to them so I don't like that kind question in my personal opinion and then um uh also I saw some uh maybe if I am allowed to share video uh share my screen that I I saw one person was asking about uh like uh who are minorities if they are also like being treated as the same way so I found some videos about uh as you can see this those are all who are Muslims it's they are not in the East Turkistan but it's in none of China so they were praying and then uh the Chinese like trying to demolish the mosques they already demolished most of our mosques in East Turkistan but these are the mosques outside of East Turkistan this belong to those who minorities and then they are also trying to demolish this and then they kick kick the people outside of the mosque this is like worshiping place so as you can see those are like uh uh Chinese military so it's like uh it's same towards most of the other Muslims also and also uh there is some videos I found about like our Uighur people as you can see uh because of the lockdown outside the city they've been like no food no drinks as you can see there is no food there no water as well so the people people dying from starvation it's like it's happening right now like we are as we speak right now people are dying over there so as you can see their refrigerator is empty everything and then as it's not like as you can see those Chinese like they're uh they don't give the food to the people and then they're like uh like dumping all the foods to the like a food truck like trash no those are all the foods and then because of the time restriction they are let me uh they are let me stop you here uh just to add to that yes uh the recently it's been more than uh three months China is using covid guys as an excuse to star Uighurs in our homeland so basically prisons are full concentration camps are full now they're using our own house as our own prison uh do they deliver food yes if you have money they deliver food so Chinese are getting food but most Uighurs not all of them uh they live paycheck to paycheck and when they don't work for months they don't have money so they can order food and they're starving now and the Radio Free Asia and other media is uh showing the debts coming out of you know the under the guise of covid however there are China still building more camps for the future detainees so this ongoing genocide is still going looks like we are you know out ran out of time I would like to answer the questions that you have so but we don't have much time and I will share my email address and if you can email it to me I would like to go through one by one and answer your questions and feel free to contact us for other reasons as well if you want to organize any events in your church in your synagogue in your mosque or other places one of the question was is it because of your Muslim or because of your Uighur I think it's both and that's why China assimilated all other 50 uh nationalities in their like minorities in their land but Uighurs were different they owned that land until 1949 we were occupied and also Uighurs identity their history a long rich history their religion their language everything is different and our religion also kept us not to be assimilated easily we had our own army own country before and that's why until 1949 so that's one of the reason why they're still trying to do their goal is Chinese Communist Party's goal is assimilate us and make one Chinese country of course and be a number one economical power in the world again thank you so much and I will turn it to you guys