This wall looks abstract. But it reads: “It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.” Artist eL Seed painted this John Locke quote for the Shubbak Festival in Shoreditch, London. Here, he poses in front of the mural in progress, after two days of painting. Photo: Karen Eng

Artist eL Seed fuses the beauty of Arabic letters with the modern art of graffiti — an art form he calls calligraffiti. He paints colorful, undulating messages of hope and peace on buildings all over the world — from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to the bridges of Paris (the city where he was born), to the minaret of the mosque in Gabès, Tunisia (his family’s hometown).

We caught up with eL Seed a few weeks ago in Shoreditch, London, where he was painting a large-scale mural as part of the Shubbak Festival — his first UK commission. As he worked high above the street in a cherry-picker lift, the spectacle of his painting slowed traffic and drew a crowd of pedestrians. He took a break to talk to the TED Blog about growing up as an Arab in Paris, and how becoming a graffiti artist who uses Arabic script has shifted his perception of who he is.

EL Seed’s murals deliver messages of hope and inspiration in graphic, swirling Arabic script. The completed piece in Shoreditch, London. Photo: Michael Brydon

What is this latest piece about, and how did it come about that you’re painting it?

The Shubbak Festival contacted me two years ago, asking me to come paint in London. They found me this wall, so I’m here for three days to paint it. The quote is from English philosopher John Locke, translated into Arabic: “It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.”

I chose this quote because I’m making this piece weeks after the massacre in Sousse, Tunisia, and the shooting in Charleston the same month. As a Tunisian man coming to the UK, I think the quote opens up a dialogue about the collective responsibility we have toward each other. War is individualistic — we always put blame on someone else. “It’s not my fault. It’s not my problem.” But the responsibility lies with all of us. It is our responsibility to bring those who perpetrate the crimes back, as well as to find a way to keep it from happening again.

A Nelson Mandela quote on a wall in Cape Town, South Africa: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” Photo: Kent Lingeveldt

You’re Tunisian but grew up in a suburb of Paris. What language did you speak growing up?

My parents used to speak us in Arabic when we were young, but we used to reply in French. Now that we’re grown up, we speak to them in Arabic — and they reply to us in French. I noticed that recently. I suppose for me, speaking Arabic now is a way to say that I’ve accepted my roots and that I’m proud of who we are. And when my parents reply in French, they’re showing that they have spent years in France and speak French as well.

How much time did you spend in Tunisia?

We used to go every summer, for about one and a half or two months. When I add up all those summers, I spent a total of two years and three months there. My parents made sure that I stayed connected to Tunisia. It was important for them — and I’m glad, because I learned to speak the Tunisian dialect.

Language was important. To make it in France, you cannot be French and something else. They make you choose, in a way. So most sons of immigrants in France didn’t feel French, even though we were growing up there. I went to a school that was segregated from mainstream French society, that was mostly Arab and Black kids. This segregation follows you into adulthood. When I was a kid, saying to someone “You’re French” was worse than insulting their mother. Claiming to be French was an act of denying our roots, and our culture.

To French people, I’m Arab, because of my face and my name. So I decided to get into my Arab roots. I took night classes to learn Arabic. That’s how I discovered Arabic calligraphy. I really wanted to learn it, but I couldn’t find a teacher. Classical Arabic calligraphy has many rules. To do it properly, you need to be taught by a master who was taught by a master — a tradition going back 1,400 years.

Lao Tzu’s words in New York City: “The more you go to the East, the more you reach the West.” Photo: Rika Prodhan

Was your first graffiti done in Arabic?

No. It was a time when most kids were into hip-hop, graffiti and breakdancing. When I started, I was also going to school to pursue a career in business. Then in 2006, I moved to New York and got a job as a logistics manager. I was in charge of three warehouses — $10 million of pharmaceutical stock. I was 24, and I stopped doing graffiti to focus on my job. But it called me back again. I met this guy called Hest in Montreal, a French graffiti artist. He wrote his name, H-E-S-T, in English but in Arabic shapes. He encouraged me to paint. After I saw his work, I realized I no longer wanted to paint in Roman letters. We painted together for three months, and then he moved to Indonesia. But I always tell him, without him, I wouldn’t be here today. That was about ten years ago.

So you never did learn classical Arabic calligraphy. How are you so fluent with your Arabic and shapes?

I had learned how to read and write Arabic; I just created my own style, not at all connected to classical calligraphy. The shapes just come out of me naturally. Maybe it’s because I don’t know classical calligraphy; I didn’t feel limited by all the rules. I just started extending my letters and, without realizing it, I was creating my own thing. People would say, “What are you doing? You’re not respecting the rules of calligraphy.” I’d say, “No, I don’t want to learn them. I just want to see who I am.” Because this is art. You cannot be limited in art.

People who read Arabic can decipher it, especially if I give them the quote. But it is hard to read. And that’s fine.

Along with his assistant, Myneandyours, eL Seed paints in Shoreditch. He works freehand, from simple preliminary sketches. Photo: Karen Eng

How did your story unfold from there?

Well, I got fired from my job in New York. My boss said I was good at my job, but he told me, “It’s time for you to move on.” I said, “Okay.” Last month, I was visiting the city and called him to say, “You know, you were right. It was time for me to move on.”

I moved to Montreal and found another job, because my art wasn’t bringing in any money. That changed in 2007. People started sharing my work on social media. This is how I built a following: I would paint at street art festivals and post photos online, on the group pages of institutions and museums. Once, I uploaded a photo of my work on the Facebook page for The Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar. A few years later, they contacted me and said, “We don’t know who you are, but we found your picture in our gallery, and we would like to do a project with you.” Now I get commissions, in addition to my own projects.

eL Seed painted a verse from the Koran on the minaret of this mosque in Gabès, Tunisia, his family’s hometown. It reads: “O humankind, we have created you from a male and a female and made you people and tribes, so you may know each other.” Photo: Courtesy of eL Seed

Tell us about the project in Gabès, Tunisia.

Three or four years ago, I wanted to paint the minaret on the mosque in my family’s hometown. The minaret was built in 1994, and for 18 years the 47 meters of concrete stayed grey. When I approached the imam and told him what I wanted to do, he said, “Thank god, you finally came.”

He didn’t ask me for anything — no sketch, no quote. I painted a verse from the Koran, because it was a mosque. The quote is: “O humankind, we have created you from a male and a female and made you people and tribes, so you may know each other.” It’s a call for peace, inspired by a clash at the time between secular and religious people in Tunisia about freedom of artistic expression. There were physical fights, and a curfew imposed. I didn’t paint the quote in response to this conflict, but the context helped me choose it.

The feedback was great from media around the world. Gabès was a city that nobody knew — and suddenly, it was on the map. Now people know Gabès because of its minaret. The imam really wanted this piece to be a monument. He wanted people to come to the city and visit the mosque. It looks like it worked.

How did you follow that up?

I decided I wanted to show the heritage of Tunisia, and took a road trip across the country to find its forgotten history. I went from town to town, meeting people and asking them about the history of the place. Based on these conversations, I painted 24 walls in 17 cities over one month. From this, I made a book called Lost Walls.

It was super cool, driving, stopping and meeting people. In one city, we entered pretending we were part of a wedding. We joined the procession, pretending we were photographing the wedding, and they said, “Okay, guys. Come in. It’s time for the dinner rehearsal.” We sat at a table with people — we had no idea who they were. We were eating, and then the guy beside me asked, “Are you from the groom’s family?” I said, “No, we just followed you.” Then I showed him my work. It turned out he knew it, and spent three days with us, showing us around.

The whole project was like that. Most of the people were really happy to see us and what we were doing.

In the Vidigal favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, eL Seed painted words from poet Gabriela Torres Barbosa: “You forgot how to love your people, to love your country, country of the poor, country of the black.” Photo: Henrique Madeira

You travel all over the world to paint. Are you usually invited, or do you just turn up?

It’s a combination. I was invited to give a talk in South Africa, so I gave the talk and then painted. In Brazil, I was invited for a festival, so they were ready for me to paint inside the city. Afterwards, I had a couple of days, so I said, “I need to go to the Vidigal favela.” And I just did it.

I’ve painted a slum in Cape Town; I recently painted in Mykonos in Greece. In Mykonos, you can’t paint just anywhere, because it’s legislated that everything has to be white and blue. But I met this woman who sold me shoes. She introduced me to an old man, who brought me to another woman, whose husband owned a hotel. I said, “I want to paint on your rooftop so I can take a picture and people can see the city behind the painting.” He said, “But we can’t.” I told him I was trying to meet with the mayor of the city — which I wasn’t. Finally I said, “After I do the painting and take the picture, I’ll paint over it in white.” When I finished, he decided to keep it.

People are very welcoming and receptive. There’s a universal beauty in Arabic script that anybody can feel. I can write “bullshit” in Arabic, and people are like, “Wow, that’s beautiful!” I did it once, in Qatar. I was doing a workshop with a student who said, “What should we write?” And I said, “Let’s write ‘bullshit.’” It looked nice!

“How could I forget the land of good? How could my heart be in peace?” In Didouche Mourad, Algeria, a line from a song by popular Algerian singer Dahmane El Harrachi. Photo: eL Seed

Is it the place that inspires you in the moment? Or do you have a plan in mind when you travel?

It’s the place that inspires me. Most of the time, it’s freestyle. There’s no plan; I go, and it happens. I speak with the people, I discover something. The coolest thing is the human experience of meeting people, having crazy adventures and sharing experiences. The best part of what I do. One day I’m going to do a book about that — not about the painting, but about all the stories.

Even if people can’t read the script, they seem to respond to the art. Here in London, a lot of passersby are stopping and asking questions. But Arab people seem particularly excited.

Yes. It touches their pride. When you paint a huge Arabic piece in a Western city, they’re like, “Wow.” I painted the Pont des Arts, the bridge in Paris where people used to put locks as a token of their love. They recently removed the locks and asked me to paint the bridge.

“Paris is a veritable ocean. Plumb it, you will never know its depths.” The Pont des Arts in Paris, once the “love locks” bridge, is now decorated by a quote from Balzac. Photo: Courtesy of eL Seed

That’s an iconic bridge. Does that mean that the Paris establishment is accepting you, and how does this sit with your experience of having grown up not really feeling French?

That is true — it is a symbol of Paris. This bridge was built by Napoleon in 1802. And 200 years later, I come and paint on it!

But since I’ve doing Arabic calligraphy, I have felt French. Something about not following the rules and creating my own style changed my perception of my identity. I recently bought a French soccer jersey. I would never have done that ten years ago. I’ve accepted my French identity — as part of the whole, which is also part Arab, part Tunisian, part Muslim, part hip-hop. All of that has made me who I am today.

Artist eL Seed works on a cherry-picker lift high above the streets of London. Photo: Karen Eng

This photo taken at the Fellows Closing Dinner of TED2015 gives me incredible joy — six Black women who are masters in different fields loving each other. In the aftermath of the domestic terrorism perpetrated at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel, it also leads me to a moment for reflection. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This picture was worth all the words I had — it rendered me speechless. It’s an image of six Black women, smiling and hugging, taken by Ryan Lash at the TED2015 conference. There we were —  LaToya, Somi, Aomawa, Camille, Danielle and myself — in all of our various and sundry Black Woman-ness.

It took me a long time to figure out why I had such a visceral reaction to this image. I couldn’t decide if it was just a beautiful shot in terms of lighting and composition, or if I just really liked the people in it. All I knew was that it resonated with me, so I did what many people do with pictures that mean a lot to them: I put it on Facebook. Within minutes it had dozens of likes. It ended up lifting out of my friend-set and circulating through a larger network. It seemed that my reaction was more universal than personal.

What brought the six of us together was the TED Fellows program; we are each a part of this unique and life-changing fellowship. Since TED Fellows are often described as “up-and-coming,” I wanted to introduce you to this powerhouse group. They are talent, expertise and creativity, personified.

On the right is Danielle N. Lee, biologist and outreach scientist. She’s a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University, as well as the author of The Urban Scientist, a blog at ScientificAmerican.com.

Smiling brightly second from the right is Camille A. Brown, a choreographer who has achieved many accolades for her daring works. She is interested in that space between dance and theater where work defies category and takes flight. Her new work, BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play, will premiere in the fall of 2015 and inspired a new community engagement initiative.

Third from right is Aomawa Shields, astronomer and astrobiologist — a fellow at both UCLA and Harvard. She studies the possible climates of extrasolar planets, and uses theater, writing and visual art to teach astronomy to middle school girls of color.

Next to her is Somi, an East African jazz vocalist, songwriter and recording artist who is originally from Rwanda and Uganda, but was raised in Illinois. (And now lives in New York City.) She is the founder of New Africa Live and has been called the “new Nina Simone.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier is second from left. She works in photography, video and performance to build visual archives that address Rust Belt revitalization, environmental justice and healthcare inequity while also exploring communal history. Her first book, The Notion of Family, received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award.

On the far left of the image is me: Jedidah Isler. I’m an astrophysicist and fellow at Vanderbilt and Harvard, studying supermassive, hyperactive black holes. I’ve loved the night sky since I can remember, and am committed to creating a STEM tsunami by encouraging and equipping the next generation of students — particularly those of color.

Now that we have the introductions out of the way, I want to dig deeper into why this picture struck me so viscerally. It was an impromptu shot, taken the last day of the TED2015 conference as we were headed to our closing Fellows dinner. Suddenly there we were, loving on and being loved by one another.

It could easily be a commercial for some carefree activity of uber-beautiful women — a diverse set of Black Women all inhabiting the depth of what that identity means to us. But beyond the superficial, I’m struck by the depth of expertise here. In this photo, you see six times 10,000 hours, spent on topics as diverse as behavioral psychology and urban ecology, music and improvisation, self-portraiture and photography, astrobiology and exoplanets, dance and choreography, astrophysics and blazars. All of us have some aspect of our work that connects to diversity, inclusion and social justice. Think about that for a second. We all come from different walks of life, have had different lived experiences, and yet when we came together there was a deep sense of knowing. Even more than that — of belonging.

I was so taken with this image that I had to see if the other women in the photo had the same reaction to it. So I asked what they thought.

Aomawa: “Looking at this picture, I see many shades of awesome.”

Danielle: “Upon seeing this photo I thought, ‘These ladies are my heart, and it is full of love and pride.’ I love that I have the honor of being affiliated with these bright, brilliant and high-achieving women through TED — a platform that celebrates brilliance around the globe. We are beautiful African women of every hue, representing the arts, sciences, humanities and activism. We are recognized as innovative. That makes me hype.”

Somi: “Beauty, brilliance and sisterhood. This photo reminded me of the inspired presence of all the diverse Black female narratives heard and seen at TED this year across disciplines.  Hopefully, that presence means that such identities are moving closer to being the norm and less of a ‘story.’ Perhaps. TED is an influential organization. By creating space for all of us, TED is playing a critical role normalizing diversity in fields.”

Camille: “I came to TED after some racially charged experiences performing my company’s new work. So I felt that my personal and professional mission — to move toward a better understanding that we are all equal in society — was even more relevant when I saw this photo. There we were — a beautiful representation of the spectrum of ‘Black girl,’ each standing in our individual truths. We were lifting each other up, honoring each other, loving each other. We understood what it meant for us to be together at TED. This picture was my emotional recovery.”

LaToya: “I knew this moment needed to be documented to defy all the expectations, myths and silence surrounding our existence at TED, in our communities and in our respective professions. The warm embrace that permeates this photograph is so important for me personally because it shows one of the rare times when I felt safe, when I was just truly enjoying my life knowing that the moment was much bigger than me.”

As I think about it, this is the crux of it for me: the space of familiarity in the context of the larger TED crowd. While there are certainly TEDsters of color — and all TEDizens are generally very friendly — the audience is overwhelmingly white and it isn’t the diverse place that it will be. While I met and befriended many people from other ethnicities over the week of the conference, it was this split-second — this precious, captured moment — that reminds me that, wherever I am, there is a home for me.

The beauty of the moment is only amplified in its context at TED. Just a few weeks earlier, I had been at the National Society of Black Physicists and had embraced another set of promising men and women of color. I felt the same sense of knowing and belonging there, in a larger context of black excellence. Do I think the former outweighs the latter? Absolutely not. I think both experiences are critically important to my well-being. I think being in both kinds of spaces — those that are completely familiar and those that stretch us beyond what we ever imagined — is extremely important.

But so is home. Home, no matter where you are. Home, no matter who you are with. That’s what this picture means to me.

In the wake of the domestic terrorism perpetrated on Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church last week, I have revisited this picture many times. When I first decided to write about the photo, it was from a place of unbridled joy; I had found a space that was both beyond my wildest dreams and comfortingly familiar all at once and had a great sense of hope about what it means to exist — in this body — in the TED space. I struggled about whether this article would be appropriate now that we have sadly reentered a place of collective mourning.

But what I found was a reaffirmation of why this picture was so precious to me in the first place; Black women living their best lives and being their best selves in a cultural environment that is not always amenable to such. It’s not lost on me that there were six Black women killed in cold blood in Charleston because of a lethal mix of racism and hatred, and six Black women pictured above. In some ways we are no different than our slain sisters; they too were united around a common experience — their strong faith — while also inhabiting very different lived experiences. There might even be similar pictures of the victims from Mother Emanuel embracing in their collective love as well.

In moments like these, I am reminded that to be a Black woman — living and breathing in this country — is revolutionary. To get to do so alongside these particular women is a deep honor. To persevere through this moment of psychic pain in the hopes that my work — and the work of the other women in this image, not to mention the work of the countless other Black women, Black men and our allies — makes and preserves space for the fundamental premise that #blacklivesmatter in our individual and collective endeavors. That’s my — or maybe our — memorial to the nine precious lives lost on June 17, 2015. May they rest in peace.

All these people have transitioned into their true gender. And all of them made the decision to share their stories in a TED or TEDx talk. What these seven stories show: There is no one “right” way to live a life. And no one should have to spend a life hiding who they are.

Below, seven talks on living life expressing your true gender:
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“I thought I should be a girl, but everybody treated me as a boy. So I concluded I must be wrong.”

For years, Alice Miller worked hard to be “just a normal guy,” doing everything she could to squelch her feelings that she actually ought to be a girl. But those feelings never went away. After twenty years in the CIA, two marriages, two kids, and in the middle of a distinguished academic career, Alice transitioned to live full-time as a woman. In a moving talk from TEDxStanford, she explains why.
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“I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror.”

[ted id=1961]

Geena Rocero kept her assigned sex a secret from her model colleagues — and even her agent — for years, “not because I thought what I am is wrong,” she says, “but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free.” In a poignant talk from TED2014, she shares her battle to live as her true self — for all of those who feel like they don’t fit in the body they have.
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“For me, gender always seemed like a big insider joke that everybody else but me seemed to get.”

Since childhood, Valentijn De Hingh struggled with fitting into a simply defined gender box. It wasn’t until she threw away the idea of the traditional gender binary that she started to feel comfortable with herself. At TEDxAmsterdam she shares how she was finally able to live beyond the limits of traditional gender.
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“I found my resting place in the fluidity of gender. When I found self-acceptance, the rest of my world aligned with me.”

Fox Fisher is a filmmaker who documents the vitality and diversity of the trans community. At TEDxBrighton, he reveals how he came to the decision to medically transition from female-bodied to male-bodied, and how that kickstarted a mission to help tell the unique stories of gender-variant people. It’s a narrative, he says, made up of so much more than surgery stories and hyped-up caricatures.
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“Do I come across ‘guy’ enough to use the men’s bathroom, or do I feel threatened enough by the men in this place that I would take the risk of being yelled at in the women’s?”

Living as a sex other than the one you were assigned at birth has huge implications on how you function in society, says Yee Won Chong at TEDxRainier, whether that’s choosing a bathroom to use or trying to get a government ID. In his talk, he shares his experience living as a transgender person, and shares advice on how everyone can be allies to the transgender community.
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“I felt my soul was always female, but I was afraid people would laugh at me if I expressed it. So I always kept it bottled up and just showed my male side.”

[ted id=2258]

Martine Rothblatt is the founder of Sirius XM satellite radio. And she also identifies as transgender — she was Martin as a child. In an interview onstage at TED2015, Rothblatt discusses her work, her home life and her relationships, all which have been bolstered by her decision to live a life of gender fluidity.
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“The greatest compliment I get from anyone is that they want me to meet their friends. They want to invite me in. And that is how you should treat a transgendered person.”

[ted id=1793]

Kate Stone’s talk from TED2013 isn’t at all about gender — it’s about her work using conductive inks to print circuit boards on posters and album covers. To Stone, her gender is the least interesting thing about her. But as she tells the TED Blog, she felt compelled to speak out after a shocking freak accident (she was attacked by an animal) landed her in the UK tabloids — where headline-hungry journalists focused on her gender. Once recovered, she realized she suddenly had a platform to speak out and help end the stigma. Because inviting people in isn’t just how you should treat a transgendered person. “That’s how you should treat anybody,” she says. “With respect.”

Do you have a story you’d like to add to this list? Share a link in the comments.

Stormtrooper: A portrait of a 12-year-old boy who hides his aspirations to be a ballet dancer from his friends. Image: Uldus Bakhtiozina

A 12-year-old boy in a Stormtrooper helmet – and a tutu. A hulking man wearing a pre-Raphaelite collar of Barbie dolls. A bride standing wistfully in a garden, her face obscured by a wrestling mask. Russian photo-based artist Uldus Bakhtiozina’s whimsical and surreal images — which feature models as well as herself — raise an eyebrow at identity, gender and cultural stereotypes with humor and thoughtfulness. Exquisitely detailed and lit like classical paintings, her images reveal a vulnerability in her heavily costumed subjects, offering layers of meaning and emotion. At TED2014, we spoke to Uldus about her work and worldview. Below, an edited transcript of our conversation.

Tell us about yourself and how you got started.

I found my way to photography six years ago. At the time, I was doing my art degree in England. There I was, surrounded with so many stereotypes around my nationality, which made me smile and feel inspired at the same time. That’s why I started with self-portraits: I wanted to lay open those stereotypes and change people’s perceptions.

After I graduated from high school in Russia at 16, I studied politics, but I didn’t finish, because I realized that’s not the thing I want to do. So I moved to London for art school and studied at St Martin’s. My first degree was in graphic design. Afterwards, I did a degree in photography. I worked as a graphic designer, then as an art director, while in the process of evolving as a professional photographer. I tried different disciplines: porcelain sculpture, oil painting, illustrations, mixed media. My exploration of the arts helped me to realize that photography is the best tool to express my ideas. That’s what I do now, and what I want to do for the rest of my life.

How did you stumble on photography after trying other media? And why do you describe yourself as a photo-based artist rather than as a straight photographer?

I don’t think there is a straight photographer in the world. Photography is a tool for sending a message, not just for capturing a moment or for fashion. I describe my way of photography creation as hand-touched within the picture. I stitch costumes, glue backgrounds, draw and even cook sometimes to create the whole composition. I shoot on film, with a Pentax 67-II. This makes the process much longer than digital photography. There it is hand-touched again. I develop prints and scan them again, so the whole process of one image can take up to three months or longer.

Sadness Never Loneliness: A self-portrait of the artist as a desperate bride, addressing the cultural expectation that every young woman desires marriage. Image: Uldus Bakhtiozina

Your portraits seem to bring out people’s internal conflicts, and put them out there for all to see. You must get to know people quite well before you take a picture.

Yes. Normally, I meet with my models a lot before I photograph them. We talk, we hang out. I want them to feel warm and relaxed, and to trust me. My last project involved mostly young men. In the Russian mentality, heterosexual guys don’t really like to pose. For them to dress up or be confronted with a camera, it’s kind of doing something girly. To convince them to be my models was an issue. Their occupations are many, but all of them came to my exhibition and brought their friends. I was happy about this, because I could integrate people who are typically so far away from each other’s subcultures — some of them far from the arts field. There were punks, architects, dancers, anarchists, illustrators, graphic designers, hairdressers, old-school skinheads, all mixed together. That was the most amazing thing. I feel that my art should give a smile and positive energy.

Why is that important to you?

We already have so much negativity around us, and I want to balance this. People sometimes create very negative tragedy art — about war, illness, revolution, politics. And while this can motivate people to move toward more positive things, generally, when you open up any social network or news blog, there is bad news, bad news, bad news. I believe in motivation by creating something positive. Negative and positive emotions should be balanced.

I want to give to my audience a little bit of fairytale. I consider my photography something that makes people happier. Like a meditation. I’m happy to hear people say that they can look at my photo work for hours and they feel healed.

Hulk: a portrait of a bouncer, upending Russian social norms dictating that it’s only acceptable for a man to be depicted as hyper-masculine. Image: Uldus Bakhtiozina

In your Fellows talk, you showed an image of a man wearing a collar of dolls from your series “Desperate Romantics.” Was he happy with the image?

Oh, yeah. He was so excited that I was showing this image at TED. It’s interesting: he’s a very brutal guy anyway, and everyone knows that the fact that he agreed to pose for the image makes him, in a way, even more brutal—because he’s not afraid to dress up like this. It makes him even more of a man. Some of his friends photograph him because he has such interesting features, and often he takes an aggressive pose. But anyone who knows him in person knows that he’s also very kind and sweet, and will always help you if you have a problem. People would say that he’s philosophical. So those who know him see the photo and say, “Yeah, that’s really Nikita.”

You’ve done a lot of art around the culture of boys and men. What about the culture of girls?

Right now, I’m doing a very feminine project. It’s going to be a book about Russian fairy tales, and Russian princesses — Tsarevnas — in these fairy tales. So these princesses are able to transform into animals at some point in the fairy tale. I stitch the costumes for them.

I want to open the subject of history of Russian fairy tales because they were created before Christianity came to Russia, before religion and church. People believed in the gods of sky, forest and sun. They were very close to nature. This is becoming popular again now in Russia, and in the world in general. People are more appreciative of their connection to nature, to the supernatural — discovering one’s self, using intuition. Russian fairy tales are a metaphor for this.

You often photograph portraits of strangers you meet on your travels. Is it as simple as that, or do you stay in one place and get to know people first?

It happens sometimes. I’ve been working on a project called “Miss Other World,” an ironic series of portraits about the Miss Universe competition, and some of those models are people I met in my travels. I use the word “miss” in terms of “missing something.” Miss Purity feeds herself with fast food, Miss Uniqueness is surrounded with hundreds of identical Buddhas, Miss Relevance sits in a temple, drinking and smoking, Miss Genuine — whom I met in Bali — has clearly had plastic surgery and is wearing plastic jewelry…

Miss Genuine: Part of the “Miss Other World” series. A portrait of a stranger encountered on Uldus’s travels. Image: Uldus Bakhtiozina

Wasn’t Miss Genuine offended that you asked her to pose?

No, she wasn’t. It’s just a matter of communication with people. I explain what the project means, what the thought process is behind my work. She sees it as a message. I also pose for this project as Miss Understanding and Miss Purity.

So you make fun of yourself as well.

Yeah, I do — a lot. It’s a part of my social experiment. When people meet me, and I start talking with them, people realize that actually, I’m quite normal. I’m not a freak. Art is my method for exploring the world, and identity, and to notice how people approach and accept things that are different from them. We often see others as we are, not as they are.

And now, I’m in the middle of this social experiment at TED. People come up to me, and I feel that through our conversation their impression about “Uldus” gets transformed up to 180 degrees. It’s interesting how they are entering new levels of understanding and coming to understand the many meanings in my work.

Above, watch a video made by Uldus, an extension of her “Miss Other World” series.

Geena Rocero on stage at TED2014 / Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Geena Rocero did a pretty bold thing at TED2014: She came out. The transgender fashion model chose Vancouver to reveal to the world that she was assigned male at birth. “I am here exposed … to help others live without shame and terror,” she says in today’s talk.

The trans community has had a spotlight fixed on it in this year: a piece in Grantland sparked outrage and sadness after the subject of the story, outed without her permission, committed suicide; Jared Leto won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a trans woman in Dallas Buyer’s Club; while Piers Morgan was widely criticized after a poorly handled interview with journalist and activist Janet Mock. Meanwhile the US’s new Affordable Care Act bans discrimination against someone based on their “gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.” (See also: Why scientist Kate Stone decided to speak up about being transgender a year after giving her own TED Talk.)

As gender issues become more public, it’s clear that the media will play a crucial role in how trans people are treated — but sensitivity starts with the individual, and a good first step is to be thoughtful and precise about our language. Below, find tips and quotes gathered from trans men and women and their allies about positive, helpful ways to have that conversation. Though respectful language is only part of the battle for equality and acceptance, it’s a very good start.

Don’t conflate sex and gender.
This concept is fundamental to the trans community — and it’s simultaneously obvious and difficult to grasp. Sex is based on biology and assigned at birth, while gender is cultural and social, based on how a person self-identifies. This is, for many, perhaps the biggest obstacle to understanding by the cisgendered (that is, people whose sex and gender align). Says LGBT activist and TED speaker iO Tillett Wright, “Male and female are the two pillars upon which our society is built. Gender dictates everything from what kind of relationship you get into to where you take a piss. And if you upend that, it’s very threatening for people. It challenges the system by which they live.”

Take the time to find out a trans person’s preferred pronoun.
Across the board, experts and activists say this is vital. But isn’t asking someone’s preferred pronoun at a party a bit awkward? According to GLAAD Senior Media Strategist Tiq Milan, most people appreciate it. He says, “People would respect [the question] more than they would reject it, particularly if you have people not on the binary.”

Never use: tranny, transvestite, he-she, she-he, it, sex swapped, sex change. Do use: trans man or woman, male-to-female (m-t-f), or female-to-male (f-t-m), transition.
“‘Tranny’ is the same as ‘faggot,’” says Milan. TED speaker Kate Stone agrees: “The worst, to me, is when people shout out ‘tranny’ across the street. It sounds horrible.” Norman Spack, the first doctor in North America to create an interdisciplinary program for transgender adolescents in a pediatric academic medical center, also sees “she-male” as potentially damaging, because the phrase is often used to refer to male sex workers who dress as women to serve a specific fetish.

While many public trans people and allies view careful language as paramount, University of Southern California’s Jack Halberstam has quite a different view: “I’m not a banner. Policing speech is usually the least interesting way of addressing social prejudice, and often it actually misunderstands how you make change — and also what constitutes harm and prejudice. So I’m much less concerned with the word ‘tranny’ and much more concerned with how we might raise kids to expect people to embody lots of different forms of gendering.”

Don’t focus on a person’s anatomy, past or present.
As Piers Morgan learned the hard way, belaboring someone’s assigned sex at birth, or their surgical procedures since then, misses the point. Says Stone, “Asking someone you just met, ‘Have you had a sex change?’ is like asking, ‘Have you been circumcised?’” Adds Rocero: “It’s a very private thing. Most people just go there, because there’s a sense of fascination about it, but that’s a big no-no.”

Indeed, sexual definition is becoming less important legally. Says Spack, “I’m glad to see that we no longer use terms that require people to have, let’s say, certain surgeries to qualify as trans. It used to be that in order to get a license or a passport, a person would have to have either top surgery or bottom surgery, and then have the surgeon sign on that, so that they could get the designation of being transsexual.” (As of 2010, the US State Department no longer requires sexual reassignment surgery for a passport gender change.)

Never out a person without their permission.
This seems beyond obvious, but it’s precisely what landed Grantland in hot water. How much did outing Dr. V without her permission contribute to her committing suicide? There’s no easy answer, but, says Rocero emphatically, “Nobody has the right to out a person.”

Don’t assume you’ll recognize a trans person — and that’s a good thing.
With harassment rates so high (in a recent survey of 6,450 American trans people, 90 percent reported experiencing harassment, mistreatment or discrimination on the job), it’s no surprise that for some trans people, even going outside can be daunting. Not to mention, as Rocero says, that media and popular entertainment seem to prefer portraying trans people as victims, drug addicts or prostitutes. Says Milan, “I know so many people, especially trans women, who don’t leave the house during the day. They only come out at night because of the ridicule and the violence.” But this is changing, for the better. Increased visibility is integral to the growth of the trans movement. Says Halberstam, exposure to trans people is the real way to make progress: “There are trans people in every walk of life at this point. There are a large number of trans women who work in software, in computer technology. There are trans people who are politicians, doctors, lawyers, professors. I think that increasingly people do know trans people, though they may not know it.”

Don’t make it a thing if it’s not.
If someone’s trans status is irrelevant, don’t focus on it. Definitely don’t dwell on the anatomical and legal details. This particularly applies to reporters. Milan allows that people may be naturally curious, but gender status should not drive the story. When Stone was in the press after being in a horrific accident, one paper published photos of her from before her transition. Says Stone, this suggests that when you find out a person is transgender, the first thing you should rush to do is dig up information about their past. Really, don’t. Of her gender status, “I’d never speak about it at work — not because it’s a secret, but because it’s not relevant.”

“How should we talk about …” is a TED series in which we examine how society tackles sensitive issues — and suggests ways we might do better. See also How should we talk about mental health, featuring insights from seven mental health experts, including Andrew Solomon, Sarah Caddick and Vikram Patel.

Kate Stone speaks at TED2013 / Photo: James Duncan Davidson

When creative scientist Kate Stone gave her talk at TED2013, her biggest worry was whether her paper DJ decks would work onstage. Something she didn’t think twice about: being “outed” as transgender. She didn’t want to detract from her work, and figured that her gender identity was her own personal business. But now, one year later, Stone has decided to speak out.

What’s changed? On New Year’s Eve last year, a freak attack by a stag left Stone with a punctured trachea and esophagus, a fractured neck, and damage to her vocal cords and spine. To add insult to traumatic injury, many reports of the incident focused on her gender identity. UK tabloids ran headlines referring to her as a “sex swap scientist” and “transgender academic.” A Daily Record article tracked down and printed a photo of her from before her transition. The experience left Stone (who is currently recovering from a ten-hour throat operation) feeling voiceless in more ways than one.

As Stone told me by phone, she hadn’t wanted to be a spokesperson for trans issues — but the disappointing articles persuaded her that speaking up was better than being spoken for. For though Stone is confident in her lifestyle, she worried about what the press could mean for other trans people already afraid of coming out. “Those articles tell literally millions of people, if you see a transgendered person, the first thing you do is label them, the second thing you do is ask their previous name, and the third thing you do is try and find pictures of them,” she said. That’s why she wants to clarify her gender to the TED community — and move on.

For Stone, who calls herself a “happy healer” rather than an “angry activist,” the confidence has been hard-won. When she first transitioned in 2007, she says, life was “absolute hell.” Isolated from her friends and former partner, says Stone, she felt like she was being attacked from every corner. “Every single day I left my flat, somebody would shout abuse at me. One night, I found myself locked up by the police because of stuff that people had done to me. I’ve been thrown out of bars. People would pick ice out of their drinks and throw it at me while I sat in a bar.”

Such abuse is all too common; a local trans support group in Cambridge, UK, where Stone is usually based, even met in secret to avoid harassment. But such stigma is another reason why Stone wants to take a stand and make the case that being transgender is the least interesting thing about her. Says Stone, “The greatest compliment I get from anyone is that they want me to meet their friends. They want to invite me in. And that is how you should treat a transgendered person. Actually, that’s how you should treat anybody. With respect.”

(Today is International Day of Transgender Visibility Day. Watch Geena Rocero’s talk on why she’s gender proud and find out from experts how to talk about transgender issues.)

UPDATE: In May 2014 Stone filed a complaint with the UK Press Complaints Commission (PCC) regarding the tabloid articles that focused unnecessarily on her gender history. As a result the online “sex swap” headlines were removed. Watch a clip of Stone reflecting on her success.

Andrew Solomon. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

The extraordinary and eloquent Andrew Solomon closes TED2014 with a talk that brought the theater to its feet. Popular wisdom, begins Solomon, is that we find meaning, that it is an external truth to seek. But after a lifetime as a student of adversity, he has found that meaning, in fact, is forged.

Solomon recalls the misery of his childhood: Bobby Finkle’s birthday party, to which everyone was invited but him; his demeaning nickname, Percy; and his 8th grade science teacher, who told the class that “all male homosexuals develop fecal incontinence because of trauma to the anal sphincter.” Poised and unflinching, Solomon says he graduated high school without ever going to the cafeteria. “I survived that childhood,” says Solomon, “through a mix of avoidance and endurance.”

Solomon’s mantra as an adult became: Forge meaning, build identity. “Forging meaning is about changing yourself, building identity is about changing the world,” says Solomon. He gives the example of Burmese political prisoner Ma Thida, who told him she and the other prisoners were grateful to their jailers for the time to think, the wisdom they gained and the chance to hone their meditation skills. She had sought meaning and made her struggle a part of her identity, says Solomon. But for all the grace with which she viewed her imprisonment, Ma Thida was still deeply frustrated by the government’s reform pace, showing that “you can forge meaning and build identity — and still be mad as hell.”

In 1991 Solomon went to Moscow to visit with some underground artists, and ended up being involved in the final putsch that ended the Soviet Union. On the third day, confronted with tanks at Smolenskaya, one of the artists asked the soldier operating the tank to allow him to explain why the protesters were there. He launched into a “Jeffersonian panegyric about democracy”; at the end, the soldier who’d been ordered to run them over stopped, thought, and said: “What you have said is true, and we have to bow to the will of the people.” Forge meaning, build identity, change the world.

Identity politics can be narcissistic, and the gay rights movement seems to run that risk at times, but we’re not yet at a point when the movement should be quiet, says Solomon. In 29 states one can still be fired or denied housing for being gay; 27 African countries have laws against sodomy; and recently in Saudi Arabia two men received 7,000 lashes each for homosexual acts. “Someday being gay will be a simple fact,” he says, “free of party hats and bling — but not yet.”

Today Solomon is married with children, and his life is full of joy. At his fiftieth birthday, Solomon’s 4-year-old son George gave a speech: “I’m glad it’s Daddy’s birthday; I’m glad we all get cake; and Daddy, if you were little I’d be your friend.” At the end of a very emotional Friday, Solomon completes his mantra: “Forge meaning, build identity. And then invite the world to share your joy.”

Artist Sharmistha Ray has spent her life moving between India, the Middle East and the United States, discovering, layer by layer, her own sense of self, sexual identity and artistic vision in contrast or harmony with each new environment. Now, as her latest exhibition Reflections + Transformations is set to open at the Aicon Gallery in New York City on October 24, she tells the TED Blog about how her journey has unfolded so far, taking her from figurative art to abstraction and back to vibrant colors and lush, sensual textures that celebrate and reclaim the female body.

You have quite a complicated background. When people ask where you are from, what do you say?

It’s complicated because I’m an artist. People want to know where you’re from as a way of understanding your deepest creative impulses. I started to define myself as diasporic because the many migrations in my life played a very big role in terms of defining who I was, as well as my outlook on life and my artistic practice. I was born a British citizen in Calcutta, but spent my growing-up years in the Middle East and then migrated to the United States with my family later on. I didn’t stop there; a residual nostalgia beckoned me towards India, and after exploring Kolkata for a few months in 2006, I moved to Mumbai and made it my home.

Growing up gay in a traditional Indian family in an Islamic society in Kuwait also created its own displacement. I experienced oppression very early on within my family and society. My sexuality, which started to emerge in my early teens, was a terrifying realization for me. I lived in mortal fear of anyone knowing my dark secret. But ironically, the fear also bore my love for art. It was through art that I was finally able to find my own voice.

Even though I spend most of my time in Mumbai now, I can’t attribute any one of my multiple social, linguistic, cultural, queer, ethnic and geographic ties as the singular source of imagination. It’s really the grazing together of all these identities that has created a messy hybrid form, with many points of location. I am even starting to recast the term “diaspora,” as it feels limited to a binary of homeland and not-homeland. Once the migrant has moved back to the homeland, does he or she continue to be “of the diaspora?” I’m gravitating towards a new term I encountered in reading Gyan Prakash’s excellent historical account of Mumbai in his book Mumbai Fables. He revisits the notion of cosmopolitanism throughout the book, and it struck me that to be “cosmopolitan” strips the subject of a desired location or need to belong. To be “cosmopolitan” essentially means “being in the world.”

Nude #6, 2013

What prompted your decision to move to India?  

I was curious — and curiosity is probably the starting point for deep infatuations. I had schooled in Kolkata for close to two years during the Gulf War in Kuwait, where my family lived at the time. Becoming a refugee and living in forced exile with my family formed, at a young age, a confusing network of associations between stability and belonging. As I matured as a thinker, the idea of India took shape as a sort of dreamland, a place of possibilities. I wanted to live without the burdens of identity politics for a while and investigate a more poetic entry point into the question of “being.” Of course, I’m not saying that identity politics is exclusive of poetics, but my work had become riddled with an anxious rhetoric caught between the binaries of “self” and the “other.” I wanted to find a different way of locating myself in a milieu that accepted me first as “Indian.” Interestingly, in India I found myself thrust into other negotiations — with gender and sexuality in particular — which took me many years to untangle. And despite my initial longing to connect to an Indian identity, I am as much an outlier there as I was in America, as I am anywhere else!

You mention gender and sexuality. When did you start exploring these themes in your work?

I started in the last year of high school. Although I lived in a conservative Islamic society in the Middle East, I became emboldened in my final year of art studies and decided to take the plunge. But as I had to be careful, the work is very subtle. In those early works, some of which are lost now, the narratives center around myself and a female agent, but there’s always this physical and psychological distance between the two figures in the frame. It mirrored my life at the time, and the feeling of disconnect from my family and society.

I continued my explorations into college, and received a grant from an alumni organization called BiGLATA in my first year. It was only $2,500, but a lot of money for me, as I was a student. I locked myself away in the summer of 1998 in the basement of my family home in New Jersey and produced a body of large-scale charcoal drawings, which I exhibited together as Queer Series in the fall semester of my sophomore year. That was probably my first solo show.

Cube-like World, 1998

These works are all about dislocation, which came out of a period of intense questioning about selfhood in relation to society, culture, family, gender and sexuality. My family had just immigrated to America from Kuwait at the same time I went to college, and college gave me the space and environment to let bottled up and repressed impulses out. At the same time, the new culture in America added another layer of complication. I didn’t really get American culture at the time, I didn’t understand the references or relationships and felt even more acutely the isolation many students feel being out in the world for the first time. My art became a way of making sense of the world around me, and identifying my inner struggles.

It must have been tricky to negotiate your different identities in India.

India had been embedded in my consciousness from the time that I had lived there during the Gulf War period in the early ’90s. It had provided a refuge for my family at a very trying time, and it seemed like the logical next step in my investigations into selfhood. I had also become quite interested in Indian contemporary art while interning at a gallery in New York that was showing major artists from India during my graduate school years. These artists’ works revealed a dynamism that made me curious about the society, culture and politics they were reflecting on. I moved to India in early 2006, and spent the first 10 months living in Kolkata. I set up a studio in South Kolkata at my paternal grandmother’s house, and just tried to work every day. It proved rather challenging, as the rose-tinted shades soon came off and I realized I was in a very claustrophobic environment. But it gave me the time and space to explore my impulses in an honest way. I didn’t have anyone looking over my shoulder, so I went back to these small colorful abstracts I started and abandoned at graduate school.

Since I was living amongst extended relations for the first time, I realized quickly that being a woman made me more vulnerable in many respects. Despite that, my time in Kolkata was productive, but on a deeper level, it allowed me to get in touch with myself. I spent many hours reading, learning, understanding. I made many small studies and experiments. Looking back, it was a very rich and textured time. I looked at everything Kolkata had to offer: the architecture, the culture, the textile traditions, the crafts. The city was exploding with visual cues, and these cues resonated with me. The most important development in my practice at this time was the introduction of color. Surrounded with so much color, my relationship to it became less plastic, and more organic.

Lost Pyramid, 2006

After a few months, I knew I had to find an alternative to Kolkata. It had become easy to live there, because the cost of living was cheap, which allowed me to just focus on my work, but the feeling of oppression just became too much. An opportunity came from Mumbai. I was invited to give a lecture at a major museum there by a prominent group of art patrons, and I took my first trips to the city in August and September. I was very fortunate in that I landed a dream job at a major contemporary art gallery in the city. By October I’d moved there and have been there ever since. Mumbai is a pretty incredible metropolis; it’s like a densely layered sponge cake. It’s endlessly absorbent and changing all the time. There’s an intensity in the people, in experiences and the way of life. It’s rife with contradictions and contrast. I just love the city.

How were your first years in Mumbai?

Working in a leading contemporary gallery was incredibly exciting. Life was very fast, I traveled like crazy, which suited my wanderlust. Initially, I lived from paycheck to paycheck as Mumbai is a very expensive city, but I was in my twenties, and I was ready to take this big gamble with life — and it paid off! The recession was a very difficult time. I saw the business I had worked so incredibly hard to help create crumble overnight. In the following years, I also started to paint seriously again. I was determined to get back to the reason that had brought me to India in the first place and continue that story for myself. It wasn’t a popular decision, as many wondered why I would leave a successful and promising management career to start from scratch.

How has your work been received in India?

The response to my debut solo exhibition, Hidden Geographies, was pretty remarkable. By and large, people loved the work and the exhibition did really well. It was also written about quite extensively, so the public was very positive and responsive. The paintings are large abstractions, and they are very beautiful. I am interested in canonical ideas of beauty and aesthetics, and while the whispers of sexuality lay embedded just under the surface of these works, it’s really the aesthetics that one engages with first. However, I will say that the metaphorical and poetical nature of my work is in large part due to the censorship that presides over the cultures I’ve had some of my most formative experiences in — the Middle East and India. It’s not safe to be all that explicit, less so in India, but again, it depends where you are. Mumbai is more open than other cities, but still has the strong puritanical presence of right-wing Hindu politics at play.

Forbidden Pleasures, 2011

So how did you begin to paint the female nudes? They seem like quite a leap, considering that need to be cautious due to censorship.

Censorship and my awareness of it — my frustration with the invisible cloak upon my sexuality in the Middle East, in my family and now in India — has, in a way, led me directly to this new body of work, Reflections + Transformations, anchored by the female nude. Here, the self-conscious charge of sexuality is very much present. My approach to the female nude is a very intimate one, born of a personal gaze. It was important for me and for my work to make this statement at this point.

I decided I needed to be more bold and see if this work resonated once I put it out there. It’s probably the most autobiographical work I’ve made since the Queer Series, when I used my own self as the protagonist. I’ve always sensed the glorious artistic potential locked away in the human body, but in my early years, I was deprived of it in art and life. There were no art museums or libraries in Kuwait that carried such pictures. I remember a picture encyclopedia I received one birthday, in which a big, black marker had been used to censor the sexual organs of Michelangelo’s David and any other images that involved nudity or sex. The human body and its sexual desires came to symbolize a subversion of normality and a place of intrigue, and that was more intensified by my being queer.

There’s so much fear about women expressing their freedoms in both Middle Eastern and Indian societies, and fear is contagious. I don’t want to live with fear. The rash of violence against women in India is deeply disturbing, and if anything, now is the time for women to speak their truth, to not be afraid. Making this work was a transformative experience for me, hence the title. The work is more obviously about sexuality and desire, and brings up the female body as a site of conflict. In an interview for her new memoir In the Body of the World, Eve Ensler talks passionately about how women and girls become exiled from their own bodies, either through real or imagined violence. She says they become “desperate for a way home.” Many feminists have used the female body as starting point to investigate notions of freedom, and what it means. Ironically, I’m showing this work in New York, not in India. But making this body of work has emboldened me to take on bolder subjects, and I am not against showing work dealing with gender and sexuality in India.

Bed of Roses #2, 2013

Is there a queer community in Mumbai?

Yes, there is, and it’s very stymied by familial, social, cultural, religious and ethnic affiliations and restrictions in a patriarchal system that restricts women at every turn. I probably have more freedom not being embedded in an extended family and community structure, although being a single woman has its setbacks. There’s very few defined roles for women in that social fabric, and they include “mother,” “sister” (or some other female relation), or “whore” and “prostitute.” There needs to a massive rehaul of those identities if women are going to be allowed to thrive and prosper as individuals in that culture, straight or queer. And men need to be educated from a young age, not left to their own devices to figure it out. Still, it’s come a long way from when I moved there in 2006.

I have to keep reminding myself that New York is not a model for Indian cities. The latter carries an entirely different historical baggage, and gender and sexuality has to be viewed within those parameters. It may look repressive through Western eyes, and to a large extent it is, but people also find ways to exist and co-exist that can be surprisingly radical. I can understand that as an observer, but having had an entirely different formative process myself, I am still trying to find ways to participate in a meaningful and engaged way.

I read an original short erotic story about two Indian women that was socially and racially charged at an open mic session that was hosted by a queer organization in Mumbai at a popular restaurant last year. It made people uncomfortable, not for the erotic content but because it triggered deeply embedded hypocrisies around socio-economic status, caste, power and class. It also made me very uncomfortable to read it to an audience that wasn’t ready for it. I realized I need to think more about audience if I do something like that again.

Do you see yourself continuing to negotiate your gender and sexuality in India? Don’t you want to just be in a place that embraces that part of you?

I’m still figuring that one out, to be honest. Mumbai is also a place that doesn’t let me go. It challenges me, drives me, intrigues me and sometimes just plain frustrates me. I can’t say my life is hard per se; any place has its own set of challenges. I probably have the best of both worlds as I move between Mumbai and New York, and both represent “home” to me in very different ways. I am nurtured by these polar cities, and in that sense, I am extremely fortunate.

In an interesting way too, some of my internal dialogues about gender and sexuality have been recorded in the Indian media. Femina, which is India’s largest distributed women’s magazine, ran a feature story last year on women and their relationship to their bodies and they wanted to engage with interesting women from different fields who thought about their bodies differently from the norm. I am quite proud of it, and of Femina for being progressive enough to run it. I talked about cutting off my hair. Hair plays such a staple in notions of femininity in India; it’s treated almost as sacrilege if you lop off your locks.

In the end, life is only easy from a distance. When you get up close, it’s messy; and the deeper you go, the messier it gets. You have to make peace with the messiness. That said, I’m a human being and I desire many of the things that other people desire, like a permanent home, a stable relationship, the presence of a community, and so on. But I’m driven even more by my need to unravel appearances, to plumb deeper into the idea of selfhood. At least for now.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“I don’t know how to introduce this, so I’ll just say, ‘Hetain Patel,'” says TED curator Chris Anderson. So no one knows what to expect, and that’s as may be, because this is some crazy right here.

Patel walks onstage and crouches in a chair next to the dancer Yuyu Rau. He speaks a few sentences in Mandarin, and Rau proceeds to translate. “If I may, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and my artwork. I was born and raised near Manchester in England, but I’m not going to say it in English to you. I’m trying to avoid any assumptions that might be made from my northern accent.”

It’s at this point that the audience begins to get the sense that something is up. Patel continues: “The only problem with my Chinese Mandarin is I can only speak this one paragraph, which I learned by heart when I was visiting China. So I just repeat it in different tones and hope you won’t notice.” He and Rau look at one another. “Needless to say I would like to apologize to any Mandarin speaker in the audience.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Patel is playing with our preconceptions of identity and authenticity, and the pair interact with dance-style moves as he tells us stories of growing up as an Indian in England and his love of kung fu. “My artwork is about identity and leverage,” says Patel through Rau. “Challenging common assumptions on how we look like or where we come from. Gender, race, class. What makes us who we are anyway?”

Now Patel begins to speak to us directly. “This year I will be 32 years old, the same age Bruce Lee was when he died.” He strikes a martial arts pose, and wonders aloud what advice Lee might give him. “Don’t imitate my voice. It offends me,” he says, in an obvious attempt at an impersonation of Lee. Oh.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Patel tells us of shaving his head and trying to regrow his hair so he could style it as his father had it in the 1960s. “At first it went very well, I started to get discounts in Indian shops,” he says to big laughs from the audience. “Then my moustache got way too big. It didn’t look Indian any more,” he adds wryly.

Imitation is not without risk, he says. “But I am going to stick with it. Contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating someone can reveal something unique. Every time I fail to become more like my father, I become more like myself. Every time I fail to become Bruce Lee, I become more authentically me. This is my art. I strive for authenticity. Even if it comes in a shape that I might not usually expect.”

He concludes by crouching on the floor, Indian-style. “It’s only recently that I’ve started to understand that I didn’t learn to sit like this through being Indian,” he says. “I learned this from Spiderman.” Surreal, bizarre, and utterly charming.

Hetain Patel’s talk is now available for viewing. Watch it on TED.com »

Joshua Prager uses his journalistic eye to tell his own story at TED2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Almost twenty-three years ago, Joshua Prager experienced a moment that could only be described as “a great hinge in my life,” one that divided it “like the spine of an open book.” Just 19 years old then, Prager was in Israel for a year after high school. He was sitting in the backseat of a minibus bound for Jerusalem when a truck behind him lost control and slammed into the corner where he sat. His neck broke and, in a second, he went from an athletic teen to a hemiplegic. It would be weeks before he could breathe on his own, four months before he would leave the hospital. For the next four years, he navigated the world in a wheelchair, then a cane and braces – and embarked on a career as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal.

Joshua Prager: In search of the man who broke my neck In today’s talk, given at TED2013, Prager tells the story of going back to Jerusalem to try to find the man who had been driving that truck: Abed.

“[He was] a man I never met, but who had changed my life,” says Prager in this wrenching talk. “So on an overcast morning in January, I headed north in a silver Chevy to find a man – and some peace.”

Prager had returned to live in Jerusalem once before, after college. While there, he’d read Abed’s testimony from the morning after the accident and felt an intense wave of emotion.

“It was the first time I’d felt anger toward this man and it came from magical thinking. On this Xeroxed sheet of paper the crash had not yet happened,” says Prager. “Abed could still turn his wheel left so I would see him whoosh by out my window … and I would remain whole.”

He contacted Abed on that trip, but the two didn’t meet. It was only last year — as Prager wrote a book about his experience — that he realized he needed to meet Abed face-to face. “Finally I understood why,” says Prager. “To hear this man say two words: I’m sorry.”

To hear how Prager found Abed, watch this talk. In it, he shares the unexpected trajectories this meeting took — and the lessons this unpredictable encounter taught him about human nature and the core of our identities.

Of course, Prager was only able to tell a sliver of his story in an18-minute talk. He shares much, much more in his book Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck. Below, two excerpts from this recently released book – one from the prologue and one short selection from later.

Through the faded blue metal frame of my open window, I watch the morning light approach. It crests the skinny cypress trees atop the hill just over the valley, rolls down the bone rooftops of Jabal Mukabbir, rises to ripen the red-yellow nectarines on my sill three stories above Naomi Street. My floor, tiles of salmon and olive, brightens, and my glass tabletop reflects the worn copy of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly upon it.

The light reminds me that I have just come back to Jerusalem and I smile at a thought: “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” I appropriated the sentence long ago from the Psalmist and I slide my left foot into my plastic brace, calf-high and erect in an empty brown shoe. I take hold of my wooden cane and walk to the staircase. There is no handrail on my right so I descend the three flights slowly, right forearm pressed against the powdery concrete wall, left hand unable to grasp the banister available to it, left leg — hard to bend–preceding the right down each of 55 steps.

I turn right on Naomi Street, right again on Hebron. My left foot is closer to the street than my right. Sidewalks the world over slant down toward the gutter and I am careful to give the extra smidgeon of clearance the slope affords to the half of me that swings forward from the hip. I have now done so for half my life.

Before May 16, 1990, I had not noticed the slant underfoot. Nor, as I ran over rise and fall, had I contemplated much what made me me, or that unfairness has theological implications, or that life might end each and every day.

But right now, because my neck broke, I am carrying a question to a windmill aware not only of the topography of the stone molars below but also, as every day, of these higher burdens.

And yet, I am lucky. Twenty-two years ago, at the base of the hill that rises to Jerusalem, a careless truck driver almost killed me as I sat in the back of a minibus. He would have but for the machines and people and tubes that saw to it that my body breathed and fed and pissed. A medical jet flew me home to New York where at age 19, I quietly observed the goings-on; I could not speak or move or feel anything below my neck save one well placed prick of a needle.

Improbably, the swelling in my neck receded. I would walk in the land of the living! But imbalanced. My right side moved freely. My left, restrained by spasticity, a neurological tightness of sorts, did not; it furled and shook. A doctor explained that I was further divided: I had Brown-Séquard syndrome which roughly meant that one half of me could move better, the other half feel.

I told myself to work now and think later. And so I pushed myself, learned to eat and dress and steady a suppository in spastic fingers, to sit and stand and walk. Walking, however gratifying, was at any real length an impractical exhaustion, and I used a wheelchair for four years until, back in Israel after college, I put in another year of exercise and rose from the chair for good. I returned to New York and became a journalist, walking through six continents with an ankle brace and cane, typing articles and a book with one finger.

I tried to write of the crash but failed. Instead, for a decade, I wrote of secrets. There was the reclusive boy who inherited the royalties to the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon. There was the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment, The Shot Heard Round the World. There was the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a photographer in Iran. There were the unknown suicides of the parents of the most famous missing person in World War II.

It took a friend to point out to me the obvious: all of these stories mirrored my own, each centering on a life that changed in an instant — owing if not to a crash than to an inheritance, a swing of a bat, a click of a shutter, an arrest. Each of us had a before and an after. I had been working through my lot after all.

A second friend helped me to see that I was, in effect, forcing my subjects — one solved secret at a time — to live with their altering moment just as I did: openly. Whereas a depressed person can choose to conceal her disability, to meet me is to see that I use a cane.

But as I continue now on my walk and turn left onto King David, I am less sure of what I, not others, see in me and my broken neck.

I have returned to Jerusalem to find this out, to become again whole where I was once divided.

I cross to the right side of the street so that my left leg is to the curb and I see the windmill ahead amidst cypress and carob and olive trees. It is beautiful, a narrowing white stone cylinder with an iron cap and sail. A wealthy Brit named Moses Montefiore had it built in 1857 to encourage Jews to leave the safe but confined walled city just over the valley and support themselves milling flour. Though a community rooted about the mill, the mill was not used for long.

I turn into the park, step onto its stone path and walk between puffs of rosemary toward the windmill. I have walked a mile and my back is tight–all that swinging of a leg–and I put my right hand on my hip and lean back quickly at the waist. I hear the familiar crack deep in my back, my left leg stiffens and kicks forward, my left arm bends and shakes in spastic confusion. I balance flamingo-like a few seconds on my right leg, then sit.

I reach the windmill and look up. And then I, who once ran about it, asks my question: with no wind and no mill, are you still a windmill?

***

I am standing on a rooftop in the old walled city of Jerusalem when at 4:04 on a Friday afternoon a siren sounds as it does here every week. It stops and the Sabbath, silent, begins. And I remember another silence that followed another great sound not far away. For the crash blew out my eardrum and for a time, I heard nothing.

And then the world was full of noise — beeps and alarms and intercoms and voices — and I was silent. And the absence of my voice was audible. So I listened and heard what I had not before — the wee squeak of a first sneeze, the echo of smacked lips, the soft click of my thumb pressing a blue square button embossed with the white silhouette of a nurse.

In the quiet of my first night at Sinai, I heard a scream. It was a sustained, bloodcurdling scream, a woman in a horror film. My body jerked. The scream stopped, then returned, words articulated but incomprehensible. Then more screams descending into a frantic cough.

Then I saw her — a girl, maybe 16, skinny and tall, with half her head shaved and long dark scraggly hair falling from the other. She looked like a demon and ran screaming from my door.

My heart pounded. I began to sweat. My call bell was clipped to the railing on the right of my bed and I put my thumb on it and pressed. No one came. The screaming continued. Sweat wet my face and I pressed the button repeatedly. Where was help?! I felt dizzy. It occurred to me that perhaps there had been a mistake: I had been sent to a mental institution! Minutes passed. I was dizzy, drenched and bewildered when the nurse entered my room and told me that the girl had been in a car accident and could not speak.

I calmed. I listened. I thought of the girl. Wrote William Carlos Williams: “The poem springs from the half-spoken words of such patients….”

Time passed and I readied for bed one night when a man I could not see began to moan. Minutes passed and still he moaned and then an hour passed and I was exhausted and began to count the moans and time the moans, their metronomic parabolic rise and fall. The nurses did not make the moans stop and the moans continued for nights until the man was gone and I did not care to where.

There was more noise too. Margaret was loud. Tufts of black and white hair did not conceal a scar on her scalp and she blurted out unpleasant words and glowered at all. And one Saturday night as my father recited a prayer to mark the end of the Sabbath and I held a forbidden candle, middle-aged Margaret pushed open my door with her foot and wheeled in.

My father stopped. We closed the door. Margaret looked at the flame and we looked at Margaret. Her expression contorted. “You can’t have fire,” she said.

“Hi Margaret,” I said.

“Hi sunshine.”

I explained that this was a special candle and the fire was a secret. Margaret listened as my father resumed the prayer. She left and never told.

Years passed and I thought of Margaret and the moaning man and the screaming girl and their half-spoken words and my own words that were whole. And I appreciated the words I spoke more for having once not been able to speak them. Wrote Melville: “Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”

Contrast. It is the short sentence that stands out in contradistinction to the long, the sound to the silence. You are mindful of what you do not have and so are truly mindful of what you do have. And if the gods are kind, you truly enjoy what you have. That is the one singular gift you may receive when you live in a hospital or break your neck or are sick or lose someone you love or suffer in any existential way. You know death and so may wake each morning pulsing with ruddy life. Some part of you is cold and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm. And even to be cold. When one winter morning years after the crash, I stepped onto a tile floor and the underside of my left foot felt a flash of cold stone, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow.

The excerpt above comes from the new Byliner Original by Joshua Prager, Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck. It’s available for $3.99 at Amazon’s Kindle Store and Apple’s iBookstore. It is also a Nook Snap at BarnesAndNoble.com, and a Short Read at Kobo.

So how did Prager come to TED? He spoke at the New York stop of our worldwide talent search. There he gave a shorter talk, about reaching his “half-life” – the exact moment when he had lived as long after the crash as he had before. Below, hear what he spent this moment, which calls “a looming uber-anniversary.”

And here, read the TED Blog’s Q&A with Prager after his talent search talk »

Here, the speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a recap of their talk:

Jim Flynn challenges our fundamental assumptions about intelligence.

Pulling from psychology, evolutionary theory, history and more, Daniel Ogilvie is trying to understand humankind’s deep-seated belief in the soul.

Daniel Reisel searches for the psychological and physical roots of human morality.

Amanda Palmer, whose talk “The art of asking” appeared on TED.com today, came back for a heartbreaking piano performance.

Jared Diamond investigates why cultures prosper or decline. In his latest book, he suggests that technological civilization is only a fraction of the human narrative.

Joshua Prager’s journalism unravels historical secrets — including his own.