The Elephants in My Backyard | Rajiv Surendra | TEDxUofT

[Music] it's always a pleasure and a relief to be introduced by somebody else because when I have to do it myself I kind of don't know what to say about myself I say I'm Rajiv and if I'm meeting a stranger I have to fill in the next blank this is what I do so one of the things they do I might call myself as a Potter I apprenticed with a Potter in Connecticut every summer guy Wolff who makes flower pots for Martha Stewart and when I'm in his circle of friends I'm a Potter I run a business out of New York called letters in ink where I do calligraphy and pen and ink and I also do chalkboards for restaurants and cafes and different companies sometimes I call myself a painter many people know me as Kevin G the rapping mathlete from Mean Girls so which is something that I have grown to really embrace no one thought this movie was going anywhere I was sitting in the hair and makeup chair one day while we were shooting and we actually shot completely in Toronto and many of her scenes were right down here at U of T this is Khan Hall where we had our math competition but I remember sitting in the hair and makeup chair one day and asking the the makeup artist how she thought this movie was gonna do and she's like please it's called Mean Girls in it's starring Lindsay Lohan it's going it's like it's going straight to DVD and I remember thinking oh that sucks well but for me it was a thrill because up until this point all of the arts and crafts that I had grown up doing as a kid were things that were tangible there were things that I could do with my hands and when I became more proficient at them and and sometimes had an audience around me to witness what I was doing there is always the appreciation from the audience when they observed my technique so if I was lifting up the wall of a clay pot you could hear the people around me kind of sigh in marveling at the technique what fascinated me about this this art form was that if I was doing my work properly you laughed or you cried you went along the journey that I was going on and that fascinated me because you couldn't see what that work was it was intangible and as a young first-year student at U of T wanting to be an actor was just sort of something that seemed a little outlandish and landing this part in a major Hollywood movie was the reassurance that maybe this could work maybe I could really become an actor it just didn't really seem very plausible at the time because the only parts that I could really try out for as a skinny young brown guy were for terrorists and and I have to say when I tried out for the terrorists I was always terrorist number two cuz I was like so I was I was like I wasn't never even the guy that got to push the button to blow up the whatever so terrorists math nerds this was a very unconventional math nerd so I was like really shocked by by this or like guys working in a call center in India being like you know how is the weather in Pawtucket Rhode Island and I just remember being on set and thinking you know I just wish that one day I could possibly play a lead role in a major Hollywood movie and maybe that movie could be nominated for an Oscar and I could take my mom and we'd walk along the red carpet and I would be nominated for the lead role and and you know you're dreaming as a young actor Dez but then coming back to reality and thinking well you know terrorists math geeks call center workers it's probably not gonna happen this line was one that resonated with me Tina Fey wrote the script she wrote a great script I felt like she had a very accurate pulse of what high school was like in North America and this line in particular was something that I think I had grown up doing you know I had weird childhood hobbies of keeping chickens in my backyard and you know digging clay up to do the from the backyard to make my pottery and this line is kind of what led me to taking a chance and trying to make this acting thing work on the set of Mean Girls my my dream of maybe making this work was to take a turn very drastic turn was in my first year here at U of T I was trying to juggle biology 101 with shooting I ended up failing biology and almost failing drama class ironically because I missed so many classes to make a movie but on the set of Mean Girls one day the cameraman came up to me and he's like I just finished this book and you really remind me of this lead character and I'm like oh yeah hmm interesting was he brown he's like yeah he was actually have you read Life of Pi no I haven't read Life of Pi I said but I've seen the cover on the subway and I thought well let's see what this book is about so I went out that day I left we were shooting downtown right around here and I walked over to the Indigo at bay and Bloor and bought a copy of Life of Pi and then I spent the next two days on set reading it and as I don't de / and deeper into this book was almost creepy how similar I was to this character PI is Tamil my parents are Tamil he grew up in Pondicherry in South India in a zoo I grew up at Meadowvale and Shepard right beside [Music] right beside the Toronto Zoo so if I left my bedroom window open at night I heard elephants through my window pie is fascinated with religion as a kid I grew up in a Hindu household where my parents only on like big holidays would take us to the temple in Richmond Hill and I really loved going as a toddler I love the spectacle and the ritual but I also had an Irish aunt Bridget who would take me to Mass with her and I in a weird strange way enjoyed that too the spectacle of Catholic Mass I finished this book and I was just like this is weird this book feels like it was written about the kid actually ends up going to U of T where I was at the time and is enrolled at st. Mike's so finished book Oh what the this is so pretty like with someone spying on me and I remember the cameraman turning the corner and saying what did you what do you what do you think and and that coinciding with me just finishing the book and and kind of sighing and thinking I don't know what to think this is so strange a week later I find out they're making this book into a movie and I lost my because here finally was that dream that dream that I thought would never actually come true the possibility of that dream which was even better the possibility of playing this lead role that no one else could play that only I was suited for of that movie potentially being nominated for an Oscar or a few walking down that red carpet and I remember hearing that they were gonna shoot this movie within six months of Mean Girls coming out and thinking you know what I'm gonna do whatever I have to do to get that part that part is my part and no one else can play it I was at U of T I realized that what I really needed to do is immerse myself in the life of this character I was born in Canada now although I grew up hearing about my parents childhood and in Sri Lanka I didn't really know that world I felt like I could connect to this character on many levels but in order to authentically be him fully I needed to become an Indian schoolboy so why you laughing there's no funny so I dropped out of UT I gave my notice at the registrar's office that I wasn't coming back next year and I booked a one-way ticket to India hi attends a school in Pondicherry called petit Semin Erin although pi is fictional petite Simon Eyre is a very real place it was a school that was started in the 1820s I found the school I convinced the principal to let me sit at the back of a classroom for a little while and I just started observing these kids I wanted to know that when I walked into that audition room I wasn't doing my tetris accent like this I wanted to make sure that I was doing an authentic Pondicherry accent you know when we when when I was doing my Indian accent going into these auditions it was just an Indian accent and I started to realize that there was a difference you don't just have an Indian accent in the north where the language the language is Hindi when they speak English the vowels are a lot more open and as we go further to the south the vowels are very very short because they speak Tamil in the south and so the vowels in Tamil are very short there's a difference between those two accents I wanted to make that real and these kids started helping me do that I wanted to know that when I slumped in my chair in that audition I was slumping in the right way and that's why I was there I befriended the five guys that sat in front of me and these guys really taught me what I needed to know they became my authentic Pondicherry friends they called themselves the dudes of petite and being with them kind of legitimized that I could become one of them it was success I returned to Toronto only did it discovered that the movie was put on hold they lost their director and it was a huge blow this was something that was to continue for the next five years finding the director getting put on hold I decided I'd reenroll at U of T and just wait it out and that's what happened came back to U of T decided I'd continue to just do my research and wait for this part to come up the next big thing that I needed to do is learn how to swim I had a huge fear of the water know anything about swimming spent every day of my the next four years here at U of T in the pool at the Athletic Center and eventually learned how to swim the last bit of research that I needed to do about three years in was to become a castaway I found this book written by a man that survived drifting across the ocean for 76 days when his boat went down in the middle of the Atlantic Steven Callahan I read his book but his book still seemed like fiction to me so I did what I do best I stalked him they found him in Maine and I became his friend huh this is dinner with Stephen and his wife Cathy and that story became real to me and I felt like now I had in my bag of tricks everything I needed to do to go into that audition and and deliver those lines as a real authentic character angley was the last and final director to be attached to the project after five years of you know back and forth and it looked like it was going to happen I met his casting director in New York pulled out all this research that I had done and she looked me in the eye and said you'll you will definitely be seeing seeing me again and I love you which was kind of my reassurance then I find out that Angley cast some unknown Indian school boy in the part and like that the six long years of waiting and hoping and dreaming was over that coincided with me graduating from school and I was kind of traumatized this kid this person was a very real part of me and in an instant he was gone I didn't know how to quite how to deal with that so I ended up actually running away and becoming a nanny in Munich an au pair it just felt like the right thing to do to kind of leave this whole world that I knew and and escape to somewhere where I didn't know anything and it was the perfect medicine for me to mourn the loss of what had happened these were the two kids that I took care of Alexander and Sebastian and by the end of the year I had realized that you know if I was daunted by the reality of getting this part I probably wouldn't have tried but I did tell myself at the very beginning like heaven G said don't let those haters stop you from doing your thing you got a try and you got to know that you might not get this part but that shouldn't stop you from even trying and at the end of the year I think I had come back to life realizing that it was so much better to have at least embarked on that journey than to have played it safe ironically I started giving this talk a much longer version of this talk at colleges all over the states and that culminated and ended up being something get back to this that turn into a book that turned into a book call the elephant's in my backyard and it's the detailed version of this story the point I think I realized at the very end of this whole process was that it's not easy taking chances and making mistakes and falling flat on your face and picking yourself up again is really tough and as Britney Spears says you gotta work you want a hot body you want a Maserati you want to achieve anything in life you have to work but there is no assurance that you're going to succeed and everyone at some point in their life is going to experience major failure every every one of you students here is going to experience that big scary open door when you leave school and going out there in the real world and facing the possibility of succeeding and failure is something that I have really learned to embrace and I would like to be able to tie a little bow on this and end the talk here and say you know I wrote a book and in the end I succeeded but there's reviews know so even I'm learning after this that although some some reviews have praised this book and called it inspirational and motivational others have torn it apart and called it mean and nasty and racist and you know they just didn't get my jokes but I hope that my short little talk about my experience you know inspires all of you to take chances to not be afraid of falling flat on your face and to not let those haters stop you from doing your thing thank you Kevin gee I'm a mathlete the nerd is inferred but forget what you heard I'm like Jason on the third you should shake it not starting Kevin up or the genius I don't want to sleep in your door and make love to you women on the bathroom sha don't play like shaggy to notice me because the next time you see us you'd be like Oh keV Angie whoa [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 181,320

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Life, Art, Book, Rap, Self, Self improvement, Time, Youth

Id: nUn4iTzYPfw

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/TigerDragon747]

This dude is so charming. I really liked his how-to videos about letter writing and chalk paint.

[u/sutoma]

This was great!