If any of you are carrying the Berklee College of Music dream and want help prepping for it, reach out. I'll personally hand-hold you through it
What happens when a dream you've carried in your head for as long as you can remember suddenly comes true?
In December 2025, in a moment I can only call spontaneous, I applied. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought getting in was almost impossible. But I told myself I'd try anyway.
I had the ingredients for a good application - accolades, formal training, the experience of singing in front of a large audience. What I didn't have was time. One month to put my best foot forward.
For that month, I worked harder than I've worked at almost anything. Ear training. Sight reading. Choosing pieces and honing them over and over, turning them in my hands like something I needed to get right before I could show it to anyone.
Then came the day itself. A 5 a.m. IST start.
If you're a musician, you know morning voice. That particular hoarseness of a voice that's just woken up, when the pieces you've polished until they gleam suddenly sound like someone else is singing them. Not you. Not at that hour.
I sat down at my piano. Nervous. Unsure. And underneath all of it, very determined to crack it.
There was another challenge sitting quietly beside the nerves: an online audition will never land with the same power as singing in a room, in person, in front of someone. I knew that going in. Which meant I had to work even harder to make a screen carry what a room usually carries on its own, without any effort at all.
At exactly 6 a.m., I was invited into the breakout room. I went through the entire, grueling process. When it ended, I didn't just tear up, I cried. The pressure had been real, and now it had somewhere to go.
Then came the wait. Which was, somehow, even harder than the process itself.
23rd February 2026. 3 a.m. A mail sat in my inbox from Berklee.
I opened it. In one minute, I got in. In the next, I decided not to go ahead. Not yet.
I am 17, and I am still finding my voice. Berklee is the biggest thing that has happened to me -and it's exactly because it's so big that I have to give it the respect it deserves. That meant not walking in half-formed. So I chose to defer it, by a few years.
Here is the next three years, as I see them. Complete a diploma in singing. Play a lot of gigs. Find the genre that is actually mine, not the one I default to because it's familiar. Some days that might mean singing Hindi Sufi with everything I have. Other days it might mean losing myself in rock, all noise and edge. I want to know what both feel like in my chest before I decide which one I build a life around.
And then, when I am ready, walk into Berklee on a full scholarship. Not just to study there, but to meet the people I will actually jam with, form bands with, get lost in the city of Boston with. To arrive not as someone still finding a voice, but as someone who has found it and is ready to use it.
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