What's your 200-year plan? - Raghava KK
[Music] [Applause]
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. 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 named Mae West? The Indian family said no way. So when my twin brother Kesha was born, he decided to tinker with the spelling of Kiva's name. He said, "If Mae West can be Mae, why can't Kaba be Kae?" So he changed Kesha's spelling.
Now Kesha had a baby boy called Rahan. A couple of weeks ago, he decided to spell, or rather, misspell Rahan with an AE. 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 a successful legacy. 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 are 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 aesthetic. This is me being a rock star, even if it's in my own house. You know, so when Natra 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. That’s nobody I'll meet in my life will ever live beyond 200 years, so we thought that's a perfect place to 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 Natra 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 she’s watching.
You know, I really make decisions all the time about how I want to remember myself, and that's the most important kind of decision I make, and this directly translates into my paintings. But, like my friends, I can do that really well on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Flicker, 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—at least I do.
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? Natra and I used 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. I actually untagged myself first, then I picked up the phone. I said, "Ma, 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 legacy or not, we’re actually leaving behind digital traces all the time. So Natra 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. 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.
I woke up from my visualization and said, "Who was that?" I couldn't tell if it was Shabana Azmi or Rhea, two very famous Indian actresses like the mural streets of India. As it turned out, the 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 Natra, my wife. She's a co-creator of my 200-year plan. Natra is a high school history teacher. I love Natra, but I hate history. I keep saying, "Natra, you live in the past while I'll create the future and when I'm done you can study about it." 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." 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, and 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 brain is to serve our dignity. Go tell Facebook to figure that out. Natra 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.