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