Origin Story: WHEN PLANETS MATE

Entropy transformed our planet from rock into blood and DNA, which is what allows the past and the future to connect at the nexus of the present. The same blueprints of my ancestors’ bodies manifest today as the collection of cells that make up me. But even though I’m just as genetically Indian as my ancestors, I did not inherit a metaphysical South Asian identity.

Despite being physically Indian, I never felt like I could authentically represent my ancestors’ culture because I was born and raised in the United States. There’s even a specific term in immigrant South Asian culture that denotes a clear separation between Indians born in India and those born in the western world. This term’s acronym is ABCD, which stands for American Born Confused Desi. So in many ways, I’ve always felt distant and alien from my ancestry despite seeing proof of my origins in the mirror every morning.

However, I now believe that our lives and deeds convey our ancestry, and creating art is my rebellion against the notion that our ancestry is only consciously communicated to us or needs to be learned. My art is my way of saying that no one needs to teach me how to be Indian because my ancestor’s ideals and cultures already reside inside me. And my argument’s verity rests in the compositions that inspired When Planets Mate.

A drummer asked me once if I intentionally composed in asymmetrical subdivisions of 4, and I had no idea what they were talking about. They went on to explain that even time signatures such as 4 can be multiplied into larger segments of 8 and 16 and from there can be divided in ways that are uneven: 3 and 5 and 7 and 9. I later learned that these asymmetrical syncopations are a distinct characteristic of classical Indian music. I never formally learned how to play or write within those time signatures—the only musical training I’ve had was classical western violin for a few years. So that to me was the first piece of ancestral evidence in the investigation of my identity. It’s as if our ancestor’s knowledge and culture swims somewhere in the ocean of our subconscious and simply waits—patiently—to be summoned.

Creating WHEN PLANETS MATE was an attempt to call up and converse with those secret histories that reside in me.