“Just being Muslim and South Asian, you’re involuntarily politicized. You have to deal with the way your identity is a political issue.”

I went to BLM protests in San Francisco and San Jose, and I was so bothered by everything I was seeing. You have to develop a skin for yourself — if you constantly expose yourself to these issues, but you let yourself be emotionally bothered by them, it's very difficult to function. But the protests were so deep cutting, that I found myself in a place where I was feeling these emotions. I wanted to see if I could put that emotion into something that's visually communicable as well, and art has such a unique way of connecting straight to the emotion of a person.

I grew up in a world that's been mainly post 9/11. And just being Muslim and South Asian, you're involuntarily politicized. You have to deal with the way your identity is a political issue. So politics was always a part of who I was. In high school, I started doing work with political nonprofits and advocacy groups. And I realized the only way to change things is through public policy. So when I was 16, I decided someday, I was going to run for office. I started shaping my life around that. Now I’m running for Sunnyvale City Council. It wasn't really a spur of the moment thing. I was heading to it all along.

I think my personality works for being a candidate. I find campaigns to be the perfect thing for an artist to do, because so much of it is visible, especially today. So much of it is media based and online. Campaigns are the perfect platform because you're taking ideas, beliefs, needs, and emotions, and you're translating them across the big swaths of people. Having an art background makes me much better at that. I’m already tied to the idea of communicating beyond just words and body language. And I think a lot of candidates actually suffer because they can only do those two things and they don't think beyond that.

I saw this quote that said 'an artist’s job is to make the revolution beautiful.' That is exactly how I feel. Everyone has a role to play in social movements. And the artists are there to make it beautiful to everyone else.