“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”, that ad has been talked about so much, but you know who really has great jeans: Lararaj, part of the iconic Katseye girl group, has done an ad just as iconic as we always knew she was.

Adorning a nose ring, a bindi, and a om necklace, she has been the talk of many towns. Megha Rao, a model and now a CEO of a beautiful contemporary Indian inspired fashion brand, posted that ad on social media, writing when she stopped to take a photo of that Gap ad, her daughter asked her why it was such a big deal and why she was taking a photo of it, and Megha realized that for her daughter this was normal, something she took for granted, whereas for Megha growing up, she did not see this representation. I often have thought about this, the daily fight of today, me writing articles on representation is going to seem so unnecessary for the generation of tomorrow, something that is so normalized that I will not go around asking singers and musicians at the Juno carpet why it’s a big deal for us to finally have a South Asian category. Sometimes I think how much work gets put into for something to seem normal. Today we see treating women equally and us having the right to vote, to own property to be so normalized that the thought that someone had to fight for it seems absurd, because its common sense that we should all be treated as equal. Yet during that time, it completely wasn’t, just like today we are on the right path for bringing south Asian representation and the music to the global scale, but it’s a big deal. When Diljit collaborated with Jackson Wang, for a song, it was a big deal, when Karan Aujla did a song with OneRepublic, and both my worlds collided, it was a big deal. Being an immigrant, I have gotten so used to my two consciousnesses, I am talking to my friends about Justin Bieber at school, then I go home and listen to Bollywood songs they wouldn’t be familiar with at all. Representation is important to me because many music samples over the years have been stolen without credit from so many countries including India, and its been rapped over or sung over, but that’s part of our heritage and when singers like Lara proudly showcase that culture, and they are the face, then we rally behind them. When artists like Atif Aslam are performing at big venues like PNE, it lets us know that demand is there. That more than enough people love south Asian music for it be a mainstream genre, instead of the music being used just as background.