FROM OLATHE TO KLYPKUT: THE FULL STORY

My dad finished his postdoc at UT Austin and took an aerospace engineering job in Kansas. He brought my mom from India to a state where they knew nobody. No family. No community. Just a job, a marriage, and the immigrant math that says if you work hard enough, the next generation gets to choose.

They landed in Olathe, Kansas. I grew up on a street where every house held a different version of America. And the kid inside my house was supposed to become an engineer. Study every day. No exceptions. No cartoons on Saturday morning when a MacBook was waiting to be opened.

They didn't know they were raising a rapper.

THE STREET THAT BUILT ME

My block was a small-scale version of what my music would eventually become: a collision of cultures that had no business working together, but did.

Albert and Steven were adopted Hispanic kids raised by Keith and Barbara, white business entrepreneurs who gave them everything. Jordan was Native American and Black, a natural athlete who taught me basketball and football. I played with him on the field in ninth grade at Pioneer Trail. He went on to play college basketball and now coaches at the collegiate level. Daniel came from a classic American family. His dad Steve ran a small ink business. His mom Natalie was a drummer. A rockstar. Daniel is the reason I make music.

Sam and Harrison were my kindergarten friends. Sam was the kind of friend who treats you like family from day one. I ended up living with him after college while we were both chasing music. Chai was from Hyderabad, so we had that intellectual competition that only two first-gen Indian kids in a Kansas school can understand. Grades, expectations, the constant measuring. And then there was the crew I made prank videos with: Sean (Korean), Caleb, and William. We were chaos in the best way.

I floated between all of them. The Indian kid who played football with Jordan, skated with Albert and Daniel, studied with Chai, made stupid videos with Sean, and somehow sat at the popular table his first week at a new high school.

I didn't know it then, but I was training. Learning how to code-switch. How to read a room. How to carry two cultures inside one body and make both feel natural. That skill is the entire foundation of what KLYPKUT sounds like.

THE CLASSICAL VOCALIST IN THE KITCHEN

My mom was a classical Indian vocalist. She sang every day. Multiple times a day. Not performing for anyone. Just singing because that was how she existed in the world.

I didn't take vocal lessons. I didn't study music theory as a kid. I absorbed it. The melodic patterns, the tonal shifts, the comfort with vocal expression as something as natural as breathing. My ear was trained in that kitchen before I ever heard a hip-hop beat. She was the first artist in our family, whether she ever called herself one or not.

Our home was loving, religious, and strict. Strong moral compass. Study every day. My family is from Maharashtra. My grandmother taught and owned a school in Ujjain. We visited India three or four times while I was growing up, staying two to three months at a stretch in Indore. In India, I stuck out because I dressed differently. Once my cousins had me dressed right, I blended in fine. It was always the speech, the vernacular, that marked me as American. My parents and cousins never let me leave the house alone there.

And back in Kansas, the American kids reminded me I was Indian. Not my close friends. Never them. But the hallways had their own rules.

THE HALLWAY

In tenth grade, I transferred to Blue Valley West High School in Overland Park. New school. New faces. Walking home one day, three kids cornered me in the hallway. Called me a terrorist.

A kid named Spencer found them doing it. He stepped in. That was the beginning of a friendship that would carry me through the next decade of my life. We started playing hacky sack together, him and Luke. He introduced me to his crew. I started sitting at the popular table. He took me under his wing for parties, gave me advice on girls, became a brother.

Years later, when I was working at GM and Ford, Spencer's family took me in. I lived with his parents out in the country, south of the city. Lots of land, lots of dogs, total freedom. His dad was a surgeon who served in the Korean War. They treated me like their own son. From defending me in a hallway to giving me a home. That's a full-circle story that only real life writes.

"I was always good at being a chameleon. Fitting in where I needed to thrive and survive. I moved to a new high school and ended up at the popular table the first week. My nerdy friends envied me for that. It was trivial to me. I was just trying to belong somewhere."

THE BASEMENT

Daniel and I stayed close through every phase. He was my brother. Always invited to everything. I remember pulling up to his basement. There was always a crew there. The band room. Instruments everywhere. His mom's energy in the walls.

One day I walked in and they were all freestyling. Daniel told me to hop in. I did. Every jaw in the room hit the floor. They didn't expect it. I didn't expect it. But from that moment, I never stopped. That was all the inspiration I needed. I felt like we built something special that day. I knew we were destined to tour together.

We recorded in that basement for years. Me, Daniel (who went by Draab), Chainsawtana, Von, Zdeazy. Von introduced me to Bleed5x, a producer from the hood of KC who became one of my closest friends in music. Bleed5x would cook up custom beats, teach me how to structure a verse, show me what made a track hit. He produced the beat for Fvck It Up. He was brilliant.

In 2019, I opened KickedOpen Entertainment. We threw our first show at the Roxy in Kansas City on Black Friday. The energy was unreal. Chainsawtana, the whole crew, the city showing up. I made Something To Me that year, and everyone around me knew I had something special. That was probably my most underrated and underappreciated song.

That Black Friday show was the last show I threw in KC. The pandemic killed everything.

THE LOSSES

Bleed5x was taken by gun violence in early 2020. Before I even left Kansas. Before the world got to hear what we were building. I have an unreleased tape called Evidence of Artifacts that I made for him. It will come out when the time is right. It needs to be a masterpiece out of respect.

Daniel went down the opiate path. He became close with Ty, whose mom was deep in that world, and that's when they started trapping. I never went there. I watched it happen. I couldn't stop it.

Daniel died in 2024. I buried him a day before my birthday.

Von was killed by gun violence last year, after Daniel. Three brothers. Three different exits from the same war. Opiates. Guns. The streets that run underneath every American suburb if you look close enough.

I'm still standing. I'm still carrying KickedOpen Entertainment. I'm still holding that tape until it's ready. Every bar I write now carries their weight.

THE ENGINEER WHO WOULDN'T QUIT

Before all of this, I took the path my parents wrote for me. Chemical engineering. I went to the University of Illinois. I lasted a semester and a half before life intervened in the hardest way possible. I withdrew, went back to junior college in Olathe, and graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in chemical engineering.

I landed at General Motors. I did the analysis, ran the tests, did the critical thinking to modify a sealer product that ended up on the Chevy Malibu and Cadillac XT4 production lines. Real cars rolling off the line with my work inside them. They took the credit. They paid me a salary. That's how it works when you're the one doing the work but not the one signing the papers.

When the pandemic hit, the factory shut down. I was furloughed. New management wanted to move operations to Fort Wayne, Indiana. I said no. Kansas City was home. Too much happening. Too many people depending on me. Too much music left to make.

That refusal became the doorway to everything that came next.

THE OCEAN

After a couple of heartbreaks, my Indian brothers stepped in. Anish, Neal, and Tej. Anish and Neal are like family. Tej I met in chemical engineering school and brought into the crew. They sponsored a vacation to California. A reset.

We got a house four blocks from the ocean in Huntington Beach. A mansion. I woke up every morning, walked to the beach, worked out, watched the waves, and let the heartbreak dissolve. We shot the Suburban music video during the pandemic. That track now has 278,000 views.

My parents found out I was in Huntington and called. "Rent a car. Drive to NorCal." My dad had a job at Google. My sister had a job at Tesla. They were in an apartment. I told them I wasn't crashing on a couch. That week, we went out and bought a house in California. Closed it within a month. I flew back to Kansas, packed up, and my dad helped me drive to NorCal.

From a postdoc at UT Austin to an aerospace job in Kansas to a house in California with a son at Google, a daughter at Tesla, and a rapper who invented car parts. The immigrant math worked. Just not the way anyone expected.

RELENTLESSLY DELUSIONAL

I'm building KLYPKUT from NorCal now, moving to Vegas for the next chapter. KickedOpen Entertainment is still operating. The catalog is growing. Talk About IT has 633,000 views. Suburban has 278,000. Zoro has 221,000. The documentary series Engineered Different is in development.

People ask what KLYPKUT is about. It's about this: no matter how small the odds, it is truly possible. If you don't try, if you don't give it everything, you will never know. I had to keep getting up after being knocked down. Time after time after time.

Relentlessly delusional in achieving success at all costs.

I want people to know that believing in yourself and investing in yourself is what makes or breaks you. The engineering degree didn't define me. The GM job didn't define me. The losses didn't define me. The decision to keep going defined me.

Every track is autobiography. Every bar is lived experience. From Walnut Grove Elementary to Pioneer Trail to Blue Valley West. From Daniel's basement to the Roxy stage. From the GM factory floor to a house four blocks from the Pacific Ocean.

The kid from Olathe who floated between every crew, absorbed every culture, lost brothers to the streets, and turned all of it into music nobody else could make.

That's KLYPKUT.

"They built a sealer that goes inside Cadillacs. Now they're building bars that go inside people."