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The name, the city, the first edition
Everything in this city points at the river.
Why we are called Sabarmati, what Ahmedabad has to do with any of it, and an honest account of being the first one.
The old walls were built to face it. The bridges exist because of it. Ask anyone in Ahmedabad where something is and they answer you in one of two words: this side, or that side. The river is the sentence the whole city is written in.
And for most of its life it was empty. Sand. A dry road through the middle of town that people set up markets on, flew kites over, walked across in slippers. Ahmedabad built five hundred years on a river that wasn't there, then decided it should be, and made it run.
That is the trick this place has always had. Build first. Fill it later.
It is also, more or less, what happens to a delegate somewhere in hour six of day one, when the room turns and the bloc collapses and somebody they have never met takes their clause apart in forty seconds.
You will find out what you actually do under pressure. You will find out on a riverbank.
The host city
Ahmedabad, on both sides of the water.
A walled old city of pols and carved timber. A stepwell you descend into to escape the heat. A sky full of kites every January, and a riverfront that took fifty years of arguing before anyone built it.
Ahmedabad has never been a monument city. It is a working one, built by merchants and guilds who negotiated with every empire that turned up and outlasted all of them. It is a reasonable place to hold an argument.
Edition One
Nobody has heard of us.
That is the honest opening. There is no legacy here, no fifteenth edition, no wall of photographs from conferences you have heard about. There is a name, a river, a date, and a group of people who decided this city needed one of these done properly.
If you want to be able to say you were at the first one, this is the only year that sentence is available.
The thing that actually happened on this riverbank was not a holiday. It was a small group walking off a sandbank with no plan anyone believed in, and a country breaking the law alongside them twenty-four days later. It started unfashionable and underfunded and it worked. We are aware of the parallel. We are using it on purpose.