Me as the only South Asian guy promoting techno in Bushwick. That sentence appeared in two separate conversations with two different people who had no connection to each other. Not incidental. Consciously held. Occupying a niche that nobody else can claim because nobody else looks like this in these rooms.
Simon is not the most convenient name in Mexico City. In CDMX, the dissonance of being South Asian in a Latino scene was constant and inescapable. In New York, the discovery was different but equally pointed: they realized I was not queer, or even Colombian like most of the hard techno scene, and that I was not a liberal. They treated me like I was a Trojan horse.
The outsider mathematics
Being the only person who looks like you in a room has exactly two effects. It makes you visible in ways you did not choose, and it makes you invisible in ways that matter. Visible when someone needs to point at the person who does not belong. Invisible when the booking conversations happen among people who all know each other from the same five parties.
The Instagram account became the workaround. When your name does not open doors in person and your face does not match the expected profile, the platform becomes the introduction that the handshake cannot provide. The account opens doors that being social in person never could — not because the content is better than in-person connection, but because the content does not have a face attached to it until the credibility is already established.
The anonymity era was not an aesthetic choice. It was a survival strategy. Build the reputation before revealing the person behind it. By the time the face attaches to the account, the voice is already established enough to survive the exposure. The people who would have dismissed a South Asian kid promoting techno in Bushwick cannot dismiss the account that already shaped their scene.
Built differently is not a metaphor
The systems exist because the person building them could not do what most promoters do naturally. Be social in person. Network in the local language. Show up looking like everyone else. Walk into a venue and get recognized by default.
Every system is an introvert’s answer to an extrovert’s problem. The flyer-sharing funnel replaces bar conversations. The guest list exchange replaces personal favors. The commission codes replace handshake deals. The SMS blasts replace word of mouth. Each piece of infrastructure was built because the organic version was not available to someone who looks and operates the way I do.
That constraint produced something stronger than what the organic version would have built. Systems scale. Handshakes do not. The promoter who relies on personal charm maxes out at their social circle. The promoter who builds infrastructure maxes out at the infrastructure’s capacity, which is theoretically unlimited.
The political dimension
The identity politics of the scene tried to categorize this story and failed. Not queer enough for the queer-coded spaces. Not Latino enough for the Latin-dominated hard techno scene. Not liberal enough for the Bushwick consensus. The categorization failure became the freedom. When nobody can place you in their framework, you get to build your own.
Do not call me a POC. It is literally just a repackaged slur — othering dressed up as inclusion. Treating different identities like a monolith has gotten most people out of touch with reality. The insistence on being uncategorizable is not contrarian for the sake of it. It is the only honest position when every available category is someone else’s framework.
The only South Asian promoter in Bushwick techno built differently because building the same way everyone else built was never an option. The constraint is the origin story. The systems are the result. The identity is not a brand angle — it is the reason the brand exists in this specific form and no other.