The Decolonization Of Anshi
By Anshi Pacha, CAPA Youth Chair
In my desire to address the great issues that impact Asian-American teens, I’ve spent all
of my past articles addressing singularly the issues. This has led to a string of really depressing articles that definitely need to be talked about but could be found in every major news outlet. The worries of Asian teens are absolutely sometimes centered around the fact that the world sees us as less than others due to our race, but mainly they’re just about school, friends, and how our hair looks. So I’ve decided that if I want to depress myself in the name of doing something fun, I can just spend another two hours scrolling through people on TikTok posting their stats and the colleges they didn’t get into.
Therefore, instead of talking about the string of recent hate crimes, I’m going to point you toward NextShark’s Instagram for that and tell you about my playlists. I’m going to start this with a few facts about myself.'
Fact 1: I listen to a lot of music. Like a lot a lot. Like Spotify told me I listened to over 130k minutes of music last year a lot.
Fact 2: My taste in music is not so much a taste in music so much as it is anything that’s good and is neither country nor top 40.
Fact 3: I refused to listen to Hindi music until a year ago.
I put a lot of effort into my Spotify playlists. They’re expertly curated masterpieces, that contain music ranging from pre- Jesus Is King Kanye to the gothic folk band The Amazing Devil, in which the songs are centered around a common theme or general vibe. I do not simply put songs into my playlists with all the grace of a person selecting the best grapes at Meijers, I choose them like a sommelier at a wine tasting, choosing the best ones to take home.
But in all of my pretentious browsing of tracks, up until I got dragged into helping my friend Adi move his guitar setup, I refused to even go near Hindi music. Then Adi did the best thing anyone could do for my identity as an Indian woman: he played Girls Like To Swing. As the first strains of revamped retro pop filtered through his speakers, a grand realization dawned upon me. It turned out that Hindi music wasn’t inherently bad, it was just the adults’ taste in it that was.
This tiny thing was huge for me, I had been at a place in my life where I was fully
suppressing my identity as an Indian. I had been secretly harboring the view that being Indian was something negative, something that wasn’t fun, or cool, or anything other than mildly burdensome upon my future when I wasn’t dressed up for Diwali or Eid. Those four minutes and three seconds opened up my mind to what being Indian could be. Hindi music wasn’t all old people from the ‘60s playing the sitar. It was also people like Divine spitting bars that couldn’t rival Kendrick, because nothing can, but got as close as physically possible. It was dreamy indie ballads like Duur, up-beat pop songs like Ilahi, and fun piano riffs like Naina Da Kya Kasoor.
So if this negative perception that I had of Hindi music wasn’t true, then did that mean that everything else I thought was bad about my culture wasn’t either? I’ve spent the past 10 months since my mind was opened to these possibilities ruminating on this. The answer that took me so long to arrive at is simple. Of course not, gajar ka halwa is still terrible, nothing will ever make it good, but most other things are.
