“Mirrors, Windows, & Sliding Doors” | Akhand Dugar | TEDxMountainViewHighSchool
[Applause] books are sometimes windows offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined familiar familiar or strange these windows are also sliding glass doors and readers have only to walk through an imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author when lighting conditions are just right however a window can also be a mirror all right there we go routine Sims bishop I moved to India when I was five years old and back to the US when I was 11 between these ages was the time when I was starting to read for pleasure and thus began selecting the books that I was going to read myself my starting point was my peers all of whom were reading Percy Jackson Harry Potter The Hunger Games and Diary of a Wimpy Kid meanwhile my mother introduced me to such classics as Charlotte's Web and Mary Poppins a trip to the library would offer the works of classic British authors like Roald Dahl and ended Blyton here's a list of books we used to read as kids compiled by my friends and classmates living in India right now and here are their main characters and here are their authors do you notice anything about the people on the board yes very good yeah so I see what you're all thinking this is super homogeneous and remember I'm talking about the books that I read while I was in India but India isn't where we are right now maybe there's a difference with students who started reading for pleasure while they were in the US so I surveyed my peers here and the results were vastly the same now I absolutely love and cherish these books but the issue is that those were the only books that I was reading and to some extent were the only books that were available to me these books were my first windows and sliding doors he allowed me to look into different times and cultures helping me form a picture of what the outside world was like but because I was only reading one kind of book the kind set in England or the u.s. my perception of the outside world and literature was very Eurocentric and Ameri centric in her TED talk Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie a has reflected on how her childhood reading experiences influenced her writing and what I read were British and American children's books I was also an early writer and when I began to write at about the age of seven stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading all my characters were white and blue-eyed they played in the snow they ate apples and they talked a lot about the weather how lovely it was that the Sun had come out so this was while a DJ was growing up in Nigeria and her words resonated with me because this was precisely my experience like for example in the fifth grade I participated in a school-wide writing competition my story was set in the English countryside and was about British children things with which I had no personal experience other than my one trip to England as a three-year-old as a result my story was filled with crude attempts to copy British culture and language even slang I recall using the phrase cheerio about a dozen times of Paige story the story would have been better if I had said it in India because I lived what I was writing about but the thought to set it in India didn't even cross my mind because to me books had to be set in America or in England and feature a white American or English character of course I wasn't consciously thinking according to the rules of the universe my story has to be set in England but that's all that I was reading it was ingrained into my subconscious however JK Rowling for example didn't face this issue her stories are set mostly in the UK where she's from her main characters are white British people just like she is the culture of Harry Potter is vastly British the culture she grew up in unlike me Rowling wrote stories based in her culture because her experiences in that culture were reflected and what she was reading growing up Rowling recalls reading mainly Elizabeth a gouge and even esbit growing up both of whom are white British women who wrote about white British characters what she was reading was what she knew so she was able to replicate it properly but I on the other hand wasn't reading books written by people like me about people like me or set where I was living so there was this disparity between what I was reading and what I was actually living but one day while I was still in India my grandmother handed me a book called Malgudi days by arcane Rin I flipped to the back cover and there was a picture of a brown guy on it it was like this cognitive dissonance between what I thought authors were and what I was seeing now it wasn't that extreme obviously but I knew there were Indian authors but this was the first time I'd ever been exposed to one and I devoured that book it was the first time I was reading something meaningful to me something that I could truly identify with this book was my first mirror I could identify with what the plots of the stories were I could identify with the cultural references in the book and I could identify with merry and colorful characters and so I moved on and I found a whole but world of books that I could find mirrors in more Indian series were the Shiva Trilogy in the ROM Chandra series which are basically Percy Jackson books with Indian gods this awakening occurred the time that I moved back to the US when I was around 11 so I found mirrors and books about the immigrant experience books like The Joy Luck Club Americana the spirit catches you when you fall down and the namesake there were some cultures I was unfamiliar with and this is where I found some novels to become my windows and sliding doors the autobiography of a Tibetan monk and a long way gone gave me insight into the lives of a Tibetan monk imprisoned by a Chinese by the Chinese government in the 70s and a child soldier in Sierra Leone I genuinely believed that reading these books my mirrors and my sliding doors allowed me to widen my perspective and understand other people's better contributing largely to Who I am today I was fortunate enough to discover them realizing that not only one type of person is an author or that not only one type of person deserves to have their story told a realization that I've come through through my own writing my mother is a teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing and used to teach at a school called the Weingarten Children's Center a school for children who are deaf and hard of hearing I went to the school as a preschooler even though I'm not deaf so I was in what was called a reverse mainstream program and it was here that I made my first friends I'm still friends with Arya who's currently a senior at Saratoga High Arya is profoundly deaf meaning she can't hear anything really without her cochlear implants one day Ari and I were talking about how little her classmates actually knew about her deafness and the obstacles that she faced because of it I was fortunate enough to have the experience of being in a reverse mainstream program at the School for the Deaf and I realized that I had the opportunity to share the knowledge I had gained through this experience with others I had the opportunity to create something that could be somebody's window or sliding door so I wrote a story about Maya a little girl who was deaf and has cochlear implants from the perspective of Sid a little boy who was hearing and very curious about Maya's cochlear implants I was able to write from the perspective of Sid because I was in his position once I was a hearing child who was very curious about his friend's cochlear implants I was able to write the story because I was writing what I need him I finished the book in January of last year after it was published I read it at some local schools with aria at the end we conducted an activity and found that the book was some of the students first exposures to people who were deaf or hard of hearing and that they learned something completely new to it from it in these readings my book was able to be a window and a sliding door for other children offering them a new perspective but it was also able to be a mirror while working on it Aria told me how amazing it was for her to see a deaf Indian girl featured as the main character in a book and how real the story felt to her another little deaf girl living in India who was reading the book excitedly pointed to Maya's cochlear implants in one of the illustrations to compare it to her own over the past year I've continued to hear back from several other families whose children were able to identify with Maya my experience has reading diverse literature books that were mirrors windows and sliding doors inspired me to share that same experience with others through writing so if you've only been reading one kind of author go out and seek new ones realize that not only one type of person can write books and not only one type of person deserves to have their story told find your mirrors your windows and your sliding doors thank you [Applause]