Culturally, I remember listening to Salil Chowdhury's music for Malayalam films. Many Bengali actors have worked in our films, too.
I was born in Sri Lanka.
I grew up in Toronto and as long as I can remember, as long as there was cable, even those old cable boxes that were wired to the TV, there have been Bollywood movies on Toronto TV.
My family was one of the few South Asian families in my community in Illinois. Growing up in the '80s, I remember going to the K-Mart with my mom, when she was wearing her sari, and she'd get made fun of. People would ask my mother, 'Were you born with that dot on your head?'
I love music, and can dance on the desi beats. Punjabi music is my favourite. I listen to artists like Honey Singh. I love his music. I also love watching Bollywood films.
When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.
Alchemy is one of the good quote-unquote south-Asian experiences in that it has a wide variety of classical to experimental music.
Louisiana was as close to South Asia as the United States could get: it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches, and a corrupt government.
Yeah, I didn't ever think about music as a career. Like, it was never - it's just something like an extracurricular activity that my mom put me in. And as every South Asian, you know, like, child, I was like - oh, OK, I can do medicine.
I grew up in Malaysia, and Bollywood is really big there. As a result, I've grown up watching a lot of Hindi movies.
The amount of love I get from India, from Pakistan, from Asia, from Persia, Malaysia - people are just like, 'Brown boy doing it, brown boy doing it!'
Like so many other young South Asians in America, I am the product of two cultures whose conflicting values pull at me with equal urgency. Never have I felt as torn between the two as I do about the question of marriage.
My heritage is Pakistani, and I have loads of Pakistani fans on social media who I would love to connect with.
