Chapter 5
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Mila Babicheva and Sara Crispino will be on our next episode of Home Hunters! Tune in tomorrow at 8pm to watch the cute couple find their dream house
Sarvinoz Mamurova @sarvinozm
my in-depth profile of otabek altin is now up https://www.sarvinoz.com/blog/otabek-alt...
Sarvinoz Mamurova: Proud Uzbek woman. I bring you latest news from Central Asia, my home region.
Some might call Otabek Altin is a man of contradictions--but the young musician seems to know his place in the world better than working professionals twice his age. He is both fiercely attached to his Kazakh national identity, and a citizen of the world. After welcoming me into the apartment he shares with new bandmate Yuri Plisetsky, he shows me both his doira, a traditional Kazakh string instrument, and the DJ booth where he creates experimental electronic music.
I'm going to ask Otabek how his relationship is with Plisetsky, but one look says it all. "We love each other. It's that simple. Yuri was a troubled child. We're not perfect but we make each other happier, " he tells me. I ask him if he's worried about the way the public will interpret this, given the fact that he is legally an adult but Yuri is not. "No. Western society likes to impose its definitions where they don't necessarily apply." Then he says something that makes me rethink the assumptions I hold. I'm the child of two Uzbek immigrants, and I've always considered myself a passionate advocate for racial equality. "Who decided these ages at which one becomes an adult? They're not arbitrary, but they're subjective, too. They vary globally by country."
Otabek has astutely managed to point out that the notion of an "adult" is a social construction. Then he takes it a step further. "It's incredibly ethnocentric for Western countries to insist that their laws are the only right ones. It harkens back to colonialism, to the days when people of color weren't allowed to govern themselves." The musician's Central Asian upbringing and subsequent travels, combined with his natural intellect, has allowed him to see through the institutional inequalities that unfortunately still permeate more corners of society than we think.