[Student Profile]
[Prompt & Essay]
The product of many heritages, I am shaped by diverse memories set to a backdrop of music.
Sixty years ago, my great-granduncle, the last Nizam of Hyderabad, used a 186 carat diamond as a paper weight. I grew up with the values of first generation immigrants who left that wealth and status behind to embrace American culture while still preserving their own. Now, my grandparents and I live in a house filled with wonderful and eclectic Indian treasures, from faded projector slides of an India long-since changed to jewelry and sarees passed down from my great-grandmother’s youth.
Still, if the day ever comes where smoke fills the house and the walls are crumbling around me, I will reach for my guitar, and a sibling, above all else. My mother’s family—a lively group descended from Irish and Canadian immigrants intermarried with Native Americans—passed down knowledge through music and lore, inspiring my own musical proclivity.
The summer before my junior year marked a period of mourning for a family favorite: my great-Uncle [name]. The afternoon of his funeral, a warm breeze blew through the chapel’s nave as I seated myself to play “Goodnight My Angel,” an emotional farewell, for the room. I kept my head down as I played, focusing only on the sound of distant notes in the foreground. In that moment, I realized this performance was greater than myself—that I played to share the grief I felt, and to give others the
opportunity to reflect on their own grief by experiencing mine. The realization transported me back to my earliest visits with Uncle [name].
When Uncle [name] sang his folk songs, they leapt into being before me. He was the image of childhood nostalgia, with worn Irish sweaters and a mischievous smile. I sat for hours at his small, vinyl adorned table, drinking in the steady baritone of his voice over Danish butter cookies and the bubble of the coffee pot on the stove. I did not realize then that my uncle’s singing taught me how to look at the world with a refined understanding and awareness of my surroundings.
My education taught me about government corruption during the Great Famine and the horrors the Indian Removal Act inflicted upon Natives, yet these events felt distant and impersonal, never seeming to leave the crinkled pages. In vivid contrast, Uncle [name]'s stories presented me with a different lens through which I could look at life, one where each song echoes with unique perspective.
His heart-wrenching Irish ballads and personal compositions about Native American life struck me in their ability to evoke feeling for cultures I will never truly experience, fundamentally altering me through the plights and aspirations of others.
I yearn for this arbitrary and monumental concept of understanding. By performing my own version of Uncle [name]'s piece “Kateri Lily,” a song about an Algonquin-Mohawk saint who saved her people, I empathized with the beliefs that make Native American traditions so beautiful, giving my audience a glimpse of the culture I experienced through powwows and Native music.
My own songs, however, played the largest role in coping with Uncle [name]'s death. Looking back, my words in “Renaissance” conveyed my struggle with losing him in a time when I could not consciously articulate such emotions. Only after the lyrics flowed onto paper did I sincerely understand the loss I felt when I said my final goodbyes to my uncle. I now sing my siblings to sleep with these same lyrics, knowing my family’s legacy will live on when I too am gone:
I catch a glimpse and a chill runs through me / And I, I can see it all decaying / Over the bridge and through the woods, lie the both of us, hunted by our words / I’m trying to break through, to the other side / but I know that I’ll get there, in my own time...