The power to think ahead in a reckless age | Bina Venkataraman

111,317 views ・ 2019-09-17

TED


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00:13
So in the winter of 2012,
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I went to visit my grandmother's house
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in South India,
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a place, by the way,
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where the mosquitos have a special taste for the blood of the American-born.
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(Laughter)
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No joke.
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When I was there, I got an unexpected gift.
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It was this antique instrument
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made more than a century ago,
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hand-carved from a rare wood,
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inlaid with pearls
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and with dozens of metal strings.
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It's a family heirloom,
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a link between my past,
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the country where my parents were born,
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and the future,
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the unknown places I'll take it.
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I didn't actually realize it at the time I got it,
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but it would later become a powerful metaphor for my work.
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We all know the saying,
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"There's no time like the present."
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But nowadays, it can feel like there's no time but the present.
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What's immediate and ephemeral seems to dominate our lives,
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our economy and our politics.
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It's so easy to get caught up in the number of steps we took today
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or the latest tweet from a high-profile figure.
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It's easy for businesses to get caught up in making immediate profits
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and neglect what's good for future invention.
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And it's far too easy for governments to stand by
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while fisheries and farmland are depleted
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instead of conserved to feed future generations.
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I have a feeling that, at this rate,
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it's going to be hard for our generation to be remembered as good ancestors.
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If you think about it, our species evolved to think ahead,
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to chart the stars,
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dream of the afterlife,
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sow seeds for later harvest.
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Some scientists call this superpower that we have "mental time travel,"
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and it's responsible for pretty much everything we call human civilization,
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from farming to the Magna Carta
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to the internet --
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all first conjured in the minds of humans.
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But let's get real:
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if we look around us today,
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we don't exactly seem to be using this superpower quite enough,
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and that begs the question: Why not?
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What's wrong is how our communities, businesses and institutions are designed.
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They're designed in a way that's impairing our foresight.
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I want to talk to you about the three key mistakes
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that I think we're making.
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The first mistake is what we measure.
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When we look at the quarterly profits of a company
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or its near-term stock price,
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that's often not a great measure
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of whether that company is going to grow its market share
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or be inventive in the long run.
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When we glue ourselves to the test scores that kids bring back from school,
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that's not necessarily what's great for those kids' learning
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and curiosity in the long run.
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We're not measuring what really matters in the future.
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The second mistake we're making that impairs our foresight
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is what we reward.
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When we celebrate a political leader or a business leader
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for the disaster she just cleaned up
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or the announcement she just made,
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we're not motivating that leader
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to invest in preventing those disasters in the first place,
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or to put down payments on the future by protecting communities from floods
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or fighting inequality
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or investing in research and education.
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The third mistake that impairs our foresight
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is what we fail to imagine.
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Now, when we do think about the future,
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we tend to focus on predicting exactly what's next,
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whether we're using horoscopes or algorithms to do that.
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But we spend a lot less time imagining all the possibilities the future holds.
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When the Ebola outbreak emerged in 2014 in West Africa,
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public health officials around the world had early warning signs
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and predictive tools
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that showed how that outbreak might spread,
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but they failed to fathom that it would,
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and they failed to act in time to intervene,
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and the epidemic grew to kill more than 11,000 people.
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When people with lots of resources and good forecasts
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don't prepare for deadly hurricanes,
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they're often failing to imagine how dangerous they can be.
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Now, none of these mistakes that I've described,
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as dismal as they might sound,
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are inevitable.
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In fact, they're all avoidable.
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What we need to make better decisions about the future
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are tools that can aid our foresight,
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tools that can help us think ahead.
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Think of these as something like the telescopes
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that ship captains of yore used when they scanned the horizon.
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Only instead of for looking across distance and the ocean,
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these tools are for looking across time to the future.
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I want to share with you a few of the tools
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that I've found in my research
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that I think can help us with foresight.
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The first tool I want to share with you
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I think of as making the long game pay now.
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This is Wes Jackson, a farmer I spent some time with in Kansas.
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And Jackson knows
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that the way that most crops are grown around the world today
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is stripping the earth of the fertile topsoil
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we need to feed future generations.
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He got together with a group of scientists,
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and they bred perennial grain crops which have deep roots
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that anchor the fertile topsoil of a farm,
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preventing erosion and protecting future harvests.
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But they also knew
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that in order to get farmers to grow these crops in the short run,
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they needed to boost the annual yields of the crops
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and find companies willing to make cereal and beer using the grains
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so that farmers could reap profits today by doing what's good for tomorrow.
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And this is a tried-and-true strategy.
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In fact, it was used by George Washington Carver
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in the South of the United States after the Civil War
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in the early 20th century.
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A lot of people have probably heard of Carver's 300 uses for the peanut,
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the products and recipes that he came up with
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that made the peanut so popular.
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But not everyone knows why Carver did that.
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He was trying to help poor Alabama sharecroppers
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whose cotton yields were declining,
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and he knew that planting peanuts in their fields
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would replenish those soils
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so that their cotton yields would be better a few years later.
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But he also knew it needed to be lucrative for them in the short run.
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Alright, so let's talk about another tool for foresight.
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This one I like to think of as keeping the memory of the past alive
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to help us imagine the future.
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So I went to Fukushima, Japan
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on the sixth anniversary of the nuclear reactor disaster there
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that followed the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011.
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When I was there, I learned about the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station,
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which was even closer to the epicenter of that earthquake
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than the infamous Fukushima Daiichi that we all know about.
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In Onagawa, people in the city actually fled to the nuclear power plant
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as a place of refuge.
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It was that safe.
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It was spared by the tsunamis.
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It was the foresight of just one engineer,
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Yanosuke Hirai,
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that made that happen.
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In the 1960s, he fought to build that power plant
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farther back from the coast
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at higher elevation and with a higher sea wall.
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He knew the story of his hometown shrine,
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which had flooded in the year 869 after a tsunami.
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It was his knowledge of history that allowed him to imagine
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what others could not.
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OK, one more tool of foresight.
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This one I think of as creating shared heirlooms.
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These are lobster fishermen on the Pacific coast of Mexico,
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and they're the ones who taught me this.
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They have protected their lobster harvest there
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for nearly a century,
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and they've done that by treating it as a shared resource
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that they're passing on to their collected children and grandchildren.
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They carefully measure what they catch
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so that they're not taking the breeding lobster out of the ocean.
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Across North America, there are more than 30 fisheries
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that are doing something vaguely similar to this.
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They're creating long-term stakes in the fisheries known as catch shares
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which get fishermen to be motivated
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not just in taking whatever they can from the ocean today
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but in its long-term survival.
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Now there are many, many more tools of foresight
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I would love to share with you,
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and they come from all kinds of places:
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investment firms that look beyond near-term stock prices,
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states that have freed their elections
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from the immediate interests of campaign financiers.
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And we're going to need to marshal as many of these tools as we can
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if we want to rethink what we measure,
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change what we reward
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and be brave enough to imagine what lies ahead.
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Not all this is going to be easy, as you can imagine.
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Some of these tools we can pick up in our own lives,
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some we're going to need to do in businesses or in communities,
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and some we need to do as a society.
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The future is worth this effort.
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My own inspiration to keep up this effort is the instrument I shared with you.
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It's called a dilruba,
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and it was custom-made for my great-grandfather.
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He was a well-known music and art critic in India
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in the early 20th century.
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My great-grandfather had the foresight to protect this instrument
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at a time when my great-grandmother was pawning off all their belongings,
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but that's another story.
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He protected it by giving it to the next generation,
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by giving it to my grandmother,
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and she gave it to me.
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When I first heard the sound of this instrument,
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it haunted me.
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It felt like hearing a wanderer in the Himalayan fog.
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It felt like hearing a voice from the past.
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(Music)
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(Music ends)
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That's my friend Simran Singh playing the dilruba.
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When I play it, it sounds like a cat's dying somewhere,
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so you're welcome.
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(Laughter)
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This instrument is in my home today,
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but it doesn't actually belong to me.
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It's my role to shepherd it in time,
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and that feels more meaningful to me than just owning it for today.
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This instrument positions me as both a descendant and an ancestor.
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It makes me feel part of a story bigger than my own.
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And this, I believe,
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is the single most powerful way we can reclaim foresight:
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by seeing ourselves as the good ancestors we long to be,
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ancestors not just to our own children
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but to all humanity.
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Whatever your heirloom is,
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however big or small,
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protect it
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and know that its music can resonate for generations.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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