The Perfect Cage | Sudev Sudheer | TEDxUniversity of Birmingham Dubai

About this video

At 12 years old, I mispronounced one word in class. The whole room laughed. In that moment, I made a silent vow: never again. So I erased myself. I wiped the sacred ash from my forehead before walking through the school gates. I stopped watching Malayalam films on Thursday nights. I even asked my grandfather to turn off the radio station we used to love together. And it worked. Nobody laughed at me anymore. But the house went quiet, and I stopped recognising myself. This is a talk about what happens when survival becomes a permanent address, and what it actually means to grow beyond where you started. Not erasure. Not reinvention. Integration. Sudev is a final year Money, Banking and Finance student who is taking the TEDx stage because he mispronounced a word in seventh grade and, apparently, never fully got over it. The talk is about identity. The therapy is ongoing, but he might finally have an idea of what lies beyond it. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx