My goal was to be a “pop star,” an Indian version of Britney Spears. I told my highly conservative parents that I would go to India for just one month, “to explore.” I ended up living there for 4 years, working on a music album that seemed to never end. On the other side of the world, my parents, who had immigrated to the U.S. 30 years before, were in a state of disbelief at the fact that I was living alone in India, calling me everyday to make sure I was alive and asking me when I would come home and continue my studies rejoining medical school, like most normal Indian kids. I had received admission into a prestigious MD/PhD program, an offer that seemed like the best thing on earth for them – and which seemed like a 12-year imprisonment for me.

My parents were justified in their worries about me living in India – In the less-than-wholesome world I had found myself in, it was commonplace to be approached by industry professionals who promised “they would help in whatever way they could” before they strung you along for months. I saw firsthand how the media industry norm was to use sex as a form of currency, for those women who did not have enough money (which was most Indian women). It was a world where a non-resident Indian girl coming to India to do music was like a gold mine for the greedy, money-minded industry. It was a world that was extremely slow and languorous.

I faced many ups and downs along the journey, needless to say – but I finally completed my first album, as well as co-founded a music company and worked with an array of renowned Indian musicians and composers, touring and performing in cities throughout the Indian subcontinent. All this wasn’t cutting it for my parents, though – I came from a family of PhDs strongly devoted to academia and higher education. My mother had ranked #1 in her school 44 times in a row in her childhood, among other accomplishments – it would be a travesty for her daughter to have anything less than a Master’s degree! We finally made a compromise – I would pursue a graduate degree, but in business, instead of medicine. Studying for the GMAT in India in tandem with working on my next album, I gained admission to one of the world’s top business programs, INSEAD, and spent the next year traveling and studying between France, Singapore, and the U.S., visiting countries almost everywhere in between. Throughout, I found ways to market and perform my music in different cities in concurrence with my rigorous academic studies. Somehow or another, I found a balance between what my family wanted and what I wanted.

Instilled in most Indian American children is their parents’ life story. Factored into all our life decisions is much more than just our own passions – we must take into account a complex set of factors – the sacrifices our parents made to raise us in the U.S.; the sacrifices they made to please their own parents; the fear of failure and dishonor to our family’s reputations; the compulsion to follow in the footsteps of our ancestry and build upon the family wealth; the obligation to support our families and parents financially; etc., etc. If our parents’ lives can be summed up in one word, it is sacrifice, and if ours can be summed up in one word, it is guilt. From choosing who we want to marry to choosing our career path, each step we take is intrinsically lined with some degree of guilt.

I am an advocate for taking the less-traveled path, but not because it is easy by any means. What it is, is eventful. It taught me to live alone and depend on myself – as well as provided me with hundreds of crazy and funny stories that I can now share and remember with fondness. More importantly, it helped me discover the esoteric truth and meaning for my life, a truth that is unique to each one of us. In the last 5 years I have been straddling between life in USA and life in India, and straddling between the pressures of the legacy of my family and my own urge to be something different. At times that legacy has kept an otherwise impulsive woman stable, and at other times it has made me feel stifled. If I could go back in time, there are many things I would have done differently, many decisions that would have been different. But one decision I never regretted was leaving medical school to make that first trip to India, which changed the entire direction of my life and made me discover a new part of myself.

It occurs to me that some people can’t relate to my story. They feel passionate about IT or engineering or consulting, which also falls in line with the society and family’s expectations, and it all works out. While in medical school, I saw people like this myself, who genuinely loved medicine and were there because they were fascinated with learning every single bone and morsel of the human body and its mechanism. For them, perhaps this story is not as relevant, because they found and followed their passions relatively easily.

But for those who are craving something more than the status quo – whose minds travel to faraway places and love to weave dreams – let this story inspire you in some way; if nothing else, to give those dreams a small place in your reality and then see where in the world they can take you.