Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
About 75 years ago,
my grandfather, a young man,
walked into a tent
that was converted into a
movie theater like that,
and he fell hopelessly in love
with the woman he saw on the
silver screen: none other than Mae West,
the heartthrob of the '30s,
and he could never forget her.
In fact, when he had his daughter
many years later, he wanted to
name her after Mae West,
but can you imagine an Indian
child name Mae West?
The Indian family said, no way!
So when my twin brother Kaesava
was born, he decided to tinker
with the spelling of Keshava's name.
He said, if Mae West can be M-A-E,
why can't Keshava be K-A-E?
So he changed Kaesava's spelling.
Now Kaesava had a baby boy
called Rehan a couple of weeks ago.
He decided to spell, or, rather,
misspell Raehan with an A-E.
You know, my grandfather died
many years ago when I was
little, but his love for Mae
West lives on as a misspelling
in the DNA of his progeny.
That for me is successful legacy. (Laughs)
You know, as for me,
my wife and I have our own
crazy legacy project.
We actually sit every few years,
argue, disagree, fight,
and actually come up with our
very own 200-year plan.
Our friends think we're mad.
Our parents think we're cuckoo.
Because, you know, we both
come from families that really
look up to humility and wisdom,
but we both like to live
larger than life.
I believe in the concept of
a Raja Yogi: Be a dude before
you can become an ascetic.
This is me being a rock star,
even if it's in my own house.
You know?
So when Netra and I sat down
to make our first plan
10 years ago, we said
we want the focus of this plan
to go way beyond ourselves.
What do we mean by beyond ourselves?
Well 200 years, we calculated,
is at the end of our direct
contact with the world.
There's nobody I'll meet in
my life will ever live beyond
200 years, so we thought
that's a perfect place where
we should situate our plan and
let our imagination take flight.
You know, I never really
believed in legacy. What am I
going to leave behind? I'm an artist.
Until I made a cartoon about 9/11.
It caused so much trouble for me.
I was so upset.
You know, a cartoon that was
meant to be a cartoon of the week
ended up staying so much longer.
Now I'm in the business of
creating art that will
definitely even outlive me, and
I think about what I want to
leave behind through those paintings.
You know, the 9/11 cartoon
upset me so much that I decided
I'll never cartoon again.
I said, I'm never going to make any
honest public commentary again.
But of course I continued
creating artwork that was honest
and raw, because I forgot about
how people reacted to my work.
You know, sometimes forgetting
is so important to remain idealistic.
Perhaps loss of memory is so
crucial for our survival
as human beings.
One of the most important things
in my 200-year plan that Netra
and I write is what to forget
about ourselves.
You know, we carry so much
baggage, from our parents,
from our society, from so many
people -- fears, insecurities -- and
our 200-year plan really lists
all our childhood problems that we have to expire.
We actually put an expiry date
on all our childhood problems.
The latest date I put was,
I said, I am going to expire
my fear of my leftist, feminist
mother-in-law, and this
today is the date! (Laughs)
She's watching. (Laughter)
Anyway, you know, I really
make decisions all the time
about how I want to remember
myself, and that's the most important
kind of decisions I make.
And this directly translates
into my paintings.
But like my friends, I can do
that really well on Facebook,
Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube.
Name it, I'm on it.
I've started outsourcing my
memory to the digital world,
you know? But that comes
with a problem.
It's so easy to think of
technology as a metaphor
for memory, but our brains
are not perfect storage devices
like technology.
We only remember what we
want to. At least I do.
And I rather think of our brains
as biased curators of our
memory, you know? And if
technology is not a metaphor for
memory, what is it?
Netra and I use our technology
as a tool in our 200-year plan
to really curate our digital legacy.
That is a picture of my mother,
and she recently got a Facebook account.
You know where this is going.
And I've been very supportive
until this picture shows up
on my Facebook page. (Laughter)
And I actually untagged myself
first, then I picked up the
phone. I said, "Mom, you will
never put a picture of me
in a bikini ever again."
And she said, "Why? You look
so cute, darling." I said,
"You just don't understand."
Maybe we are among the first
generation that really understands
this digital curating of ourselves.
Maybe we are the first to even
actively record our lives.
You know, whether you
agree with, you know, legacy
or not, we are actually leaving
behind digital traces all the time.
So Netra and I really wanted
to use our 200-year plan
to curate this digital legacy,
and not only digital legacy
but we believe in curating
the legacy of my past
and future.
How, you may ask?
Well, when I think of the future,
I never see myself moving forward
in time. I actually see time
moving backward towards me.
I can actually visualize
my future approaching.
I can dodge what I don't want
and pull in what I want.
It's like a video game obstacle
course. And I've gotten better and better
at doing this. Even when I make
a painting, I actually imagine
I'm behind the painting,
it already exists, and
someone's looking at it,
and I see whether they're
feeling it from their gut.
Are they feeling it from their
heart, or is it just a cerebral thing?
And it really informs my painting.
Even when I do an art show,
I really think about, what should
people walk away with?
I remember when I was 19,
I did, I wanted to do my first
art exhibition, and I wanted the
whole world to know about it.
I didn't know TED then,
but what I did was I closed
my eyes tight, and I started
dreaming. I could imagine people
coming in, dressed up, looking
beautiful, my paintings with all
the light, and in my visualization
I actually saw a very famous
actress launching my show,
giving credibility to me.
And I woke up from my
visualization and I said,
who was that? I couldn't tell
if it was Shabana Azmi or Rekha,
two very famous Indian actresses,
like the Meryl Streeps of India.
As it turned out, next morning
I wrote a letter to both of them,
and Shabana Azmi replied,
and came and launched
my very first show 12 years ago.
And what a bang it started
my career with! You know,
when we think of time in this
way, we can curate not only the
future but also the past.
This is a picture of my family,
and that is Netra, my wife.
She's the co-creator of my
200-year plan.
Netra's a high school history
teacher. I love Netra,
but I hate history.
I keep saying, "Nets, you live
in the past while I'll create
the future, and when I'm done,
you can study about it."
(Laughter)
She gave me an indulgent smile,
and as punishment, she said,
"Tomorrow I'm teaching a class
on Indian history, and you are
sitting in it, and I'm grading you."
I'm like, "Oh, God." I went.
I actually went and sat in
on her class. She started by
giving students primary source
documents from India, Pakistan,
from Britain, and I said,
"Wow." Then she asked them to
separate fact from bias.
I said, "Wow," again.
Then she said, "Choose your
facts and biases and create an
image of your own story
of dignity."
History as an imaging tool?
I was so inspired.
I went and created my own
version of Indian history.
I actually included stories from
my grandmother.
She used to work for the
telephone exchange, and she used
to actually overhear conversations
between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten.
And she used to hear all
kinds of things she shouldn't
have heard. But, you know,
I include things like that.
This is my version of Indian history.
You know, if this
is so, it occurred to me that
maybe, just maybe, the primary
objective of our brains
is to serve our dignity.
Go tell Facebook to
figure that out!
Netra and I don't write our
200-year plan for someone else
to come and execute it
in 150 years. Imagine receiving
a parcel saying, from the past,
okay now you're supposed to
spend the rest of your life
doing all of this. No.
We actually write it only
to set our attitudes right.
You know, I used to believe
that education is the most
important tool to leave
a meaningful legacy.
Education is great.
It really teaches us who
we are, and helps us
contextualize ourselves
in the world, but it's really
my creativity that's taught me
that I can be much more
than what my education told me I am.
I'd like to make
the argument that creativity is
the most important tool we have.
It lets us create who we are,
and curate what is to come.
I like to think -- Thank you.
I like to think of myself
as a storyteller, where my past
and my future are only stories,
my stories, waiting to be told
and retold. I hope all of you
one day get a chance to
share and write your own
200-year story.
Thank you so much.
Shukran! (Applause)