Born pure-blood Gujarati in the Catskill Mountains of New York, Raj’s life path was destined to be one of bushwhack.
Early on he found childhood glee in both composing syncopated beats upon common kitchen wares as well as carving bobsled paths in the ice crusted powder of the east coast winters.
During his first holiday back to meet the extended family in the motherland of India, he requested to be left at a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayan province of Jammu Kashmir where he studied Buddhist meditation for three months sustained only by chai made with yak butter. Nirvana was no longer a concept, but an apex destination which would lead him to all seven continents in so many years.
By the age of seven, Raj had begun to play the organ, wowing students and teachers alike, adjusting tone and timbre with his phantom hand technique. After outgrowing the Suzuki method, he was inspired by the slow food movement, and his attention turned to horticulture and the farming of heirloom vegetable strains long thought lost to selective breeding. In his third season of production, he entered the Dutchess County Fair contest for the most primal tomato experience and won.
Seeking the new frontier of technology and pacific currents, Raj’s family moved to Northern California when he was only ten years old. After purchasing a dual floppy drive PC XT with a 20MB HDD, he quickly learned to disseminate information as means for political gain. Two years later his mastery of inductive reasoning landed him a coveted spot an Antarctic expedition analyzing ice core samples to validate the last hundred years of the geologic record.
Enrolling at the University of California Santa Barbara in the discipline of computer science, Raj succumbed to the monotony of the cathode ray tube. In his fifth and most mystical epiphany to date he discovered the department of ethnomusicology. After learning the theories of tuning and temperament and debuting as the premiere accordian player in the middle east ensemble, Raj finally found his true calling in the sitar.
He has since studied Indian classical music in the holy city of Varanasi, used his intrepid melodic sensibility to dig up the San Francisco underground, and composed bed music for exotic dance cabaret callers.
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