Press Play, Shift Worlds: The Secret Playlists Keeping Indian Americans Sane

Somewhere on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, Priya Krishnamurthy is doing something her coworkers would never guess. Before she pulls into the parking garage at her tech firm in Culver City, she switches off a Carnatic vocal set she's been streaming since Torrance and queues up a Drake playlist. The transition takes about four seconds. The mental shift takes a little longer.

"It's not that I'm ashamed of what I was listening to," she says, laughing a little. "It's just that I'd have to explain so much if someone got in the car."

Priya isn't alone. Across the country, Indian Americans are quietly maintaining parallel sonic lives — classical ragas on the commute, Bollywood remixes at the gym, Punjabi pop at family parties, and carefully curated indie playlists for the office. Music, it turns out, has become one of the most intimate tools for navigating the daily performance of identity that second-gen and 1.5-gen South Asian Americans know all too well.

The Playlist as a Passport

Cultural code-switching — the practice of adjusting language, behavior, and presentation depending on your social context — has been studied extensively in psychology and sociology. But its musical dimension is less often discussed, even though it may be one of the most visceral expressions of the phenomenon.

Dr. Aarti Mehta, a therapist based in the Bay Area who works primarily with South Asian American clients, says music comes up constantly in her sessions. "Songs are emotionally loaded in a way that language sometimes isn't," she explains. "For my clients, a specific film song or a devotional piece can instantly connect them to a grandmother, a childhood home, a version of themselves that they've had to put away during the work week. It's not escapism. It's anchoring."

That anchoring function is especially powerful for people who grew up straddling two cultural registers simultaneously. Many Indian Americans describe learning to read a room sonically long before they could articulate what code-switching even meant. You knew not to hum the song from last night's Hindi serial at school. You knew your mom's Lata Mangeshkar cassette wasn't going in the carpool playlist.

Morning Ragas and Office Playlists

For Rohan Bhat, a 31-year-old marketing director in Chicago, the musical day is almost ritualistically structured. He wakes up to a Spotify playlist of classical instrumental pieces — usually sitar or sarod — that his father introduced him to as a kid. "It sets a kind of internal tone," he says. "It reminds me of something before the day gets loud."

By the time he's on the L train, he's switched to something more neutral — a mix of indie folk and R&B. At work, it's ambient lo-fi or whatever the office Spotify is playing. But on Friday evenings, when he's cooking at home, the Bollywood comes back out. Old stuff, mostly. Kishore Kumar. Asha Bhosle. The songs his parents played on road trips through Indiana and Ohio when he was eight.

"Those songs are basically time machines," he says. "I don't even think about it anymore. It's automatic."

Automaticity is actually part of what makes musical code-switching so interesting from a psychological standpoint. Unlike consciously choosing your words or adjusting your accent, flipping between musical worlds often happens below the level of deliberate thought. It's habitual, emotional, deeply encoded.

The New Wave: When the Remix Is the Identity

Not every Indian American experiences this as a binary. For a younger generation, the lines between "Indian music" and "American music" have blurred considerably — and that blurring is itself a form of cultural expression.

Mumbai-born, New Jersey-raised producer Arjun Sethi, who releases music under the name ARJX, makes beats that layer Carnatic vocal samples over trap hi-hats and 808 bass. His SoundCloud following is split almost evenly between South Asian listeners and non-desi hip-hop heads who stumbled onto his page.

"I never made music to explain myself to anyone," Arjun says. "But I realize now that what I'm making is basically the inside of my head. Both things at once. Neither thing completely."

For listeners like him, the playlist isn't a series of compartments — it's a collage. A Tamil film score bleeds into a Frank Ocean track bleeds into a ghazal bleeds into SZA. The code-switching isn't between worlds; it's the worlds talking to each other.

What Gets Lost in the Shuffle

But there's a cost to all this navigating, and it's worth naming. Some Indian Americans describe a quiet grief around the music they've learned to keep private — not because it isn't meaningful, but because sharing it requires an emotional labor they don't always have bandwidth for.

"I love Hindustani classical music," says Deepa Iyer, a 27-year-old graduate student in Austin. "But I've never once played it for my American friends. Not because I think they'd hate it. But because I'd have to explain the whole context, and I'd feel weirdly vulnerable, and then it wouldn't be the same thing anymore."

Dr. Mehta hears this frequently. "There's a real sense of guardianship around certain music," she says. "It belongs to a private self, and bringing it out into a public space risks contaminating it somehow. That's not unhealthy, necessarily — it's a form of protecting something precious. But it can also mean that a huge part of someone's inner life never gets witnessed."

Turning Up the Volume on Both

What's shifting, slowly, is a growing willingness among younger South Asian Americans to stop treating their playlists as classified information. Social media has helped — TikTok and Instagram Reels have made it oddly cool to share your "desi girl summer" playlist or post a thirst trap to an AR Rahman banger. The algorithm, for once, is on their side.

And platforms dedicated to South Asian culture — yes, including this one — are part of a broader ecosystem that's making it easier to exist publicly in both registers without having to choose.

Priya, back in her Culver City parking garage, says she's started leaving her Carnatic playlist on a little longer before switching. Just a few extra minutes. A small act of refusal.

"I'm not trying to make a statement," she says. "I just realized one day that I was rushing through the part of my morning I actually liked the most. That seemed like the wrong trade."

She hits play. The vocalist holds a note that feels like it belongs to a different century. Then she walks into the building.