Sunny, welcome to Democracy Now Studios. Thank you. It's such an honor to be here.

How did you become a musician? You know, I became a musician as a child playing sick

devotional music, going to sick camps, learning this instrument, the harmonium, a little bit of this

instrument, the doubla. And then I started playing trumpet in school band at the age of nine.

Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina wasn't so easy for you.

Talk about your family.

Yeah, my parents are immigrants from India.

Punjab?

Yeah.

Well, my grandparents are from Punjab.

Both sides of my family are from West Punjab, so we're refugees after partition in 1947. And my dad came here in 1969 to pursue his master's in engineering. And I was born in Charlotte. And yeah, you know, growing up in Charlotte in the 1980s with the with the turban. I didn't have a beard just yet when I was that young.

But even pre-9-11 meant a lot of racist harassment. So music eventually became one of my bombs.

You know, it became one of the ways that I could channel my, my anger and pain into something more

productive. What happened after 9-11?

After 9-11, the racist harassment just spiked in very

serious ways. You know, it shaped my childhood before then, but after 9-11, it felt like our community

was just under siege completely. And I would say the form of the racism became much more about

being called a terrorist or being called Osama bin Laden. It was hard to walk down the street

in my 20s in New York without being called Os terrorist or being called Osama bin Laden. It was hard to walk down the street in my 20s in New York without being called Osama or Al-Qaeda or go back to your country or

something along those lines. So talk about what music meant for you. Yeah, so music both has been a sort of

like way to channel my grief and channel my pain and channel my anger. And it's also

been a way that I've been able to kind of keep myself in the sick spirit of Chardhdi Gala, which is

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