Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress and he still seems to be a frontman for whatever WordPress does.
I was at an event he arranged on June 3. Matt looked like a typical America who, as Nandan would say, gave very little attention to his personal appearance other than hygiene. About 40 people came to the bar and we had a room which was kind of separated from other rooms in the bar but it was not private. When Matt finished his beer he walked to the bar and got another one for himself instead of having anyone get it for him, and despite the fact that he was obviously the center of conversation.
He advertised the event through a local WordPress meetup group. This group is an unregistered organization of people who meet at a coffeeshop or bar once a month and talk about WordPress. No one gets paid to organize the event; it is just people helping other people. Many of the people who go do WordPress for their job so it is in their interest to learn WordPress among themselves. Also, there is a culture here of students getting together and teaching each other for free without paying a teacher to be in front of everyone.
Matt chose to approach this group to organize his meeting because these were people who were interested in talking about WordPress for their own personal benefit and not because someone told them to talk about WordPress.
The success of this kind of event made me wonder why such events do not happen in Varanasi. Of course they do not start with leading figures for a topic – they start with an interested community base, and that attracts special speakers. I am not sure what issues Varanasi people care about, but there must be something that people want to learn and would be willing to learn without being paid to learn it. This is the kind of group which I would want to assemble, and which foreign students would like to meet.
I personally go to groups like this for many computer issues, to play sports, for HIV and gay rights issues, and for lots of other events.
Both Nandan and Babu have told me that this system is difficult to manage in India. It is still hard for me to understand why but I want to come to understand.