By Kuya Allen
VIB doesn’t talk like someone trying to brand two lives into one story. He talks like someone who never separated them in the first place.
We caught him fresh off a shift. “I just came back from work,” he tells me, already in that strange limbo where your body is present but your mind is still halfway in the hospital.
The kind of day that would drain most people dry, and yet for him, music is still the next breath. Not a hobby. Not a side quest. An outlet. A second language. The place where everything he can’t hold inside his chest gets turned into sound.
He’s in the UK, practicing now. Med school was five years “where I go,” and back then he could sneak releases between holidays. Now there’s “this filthy thing called annual leave that you have to book so far in advance,” and he’s navigating a healthcare system that’s “a bit understaffed in general anyway.” Still, he’s building. Still, he’s producing. He tells me straight up, “Producing tracks is my favorite bit, but marketing is the hard bit.” The most honest sentence an artist can say in 2025.
What makes VIB different isn’t just the headline of artist and doctor. It’s the reason behind both. “The music is to change the narrative people’s minds and hearts, and medicine is to change people’s health… save a life if I can,” he says. “And there’s two different outlets of the same passion, which is change.”
He doesn’t romanticize it.
In fact, he admits the weirdest part is how numb it can feel once you arrive at the thing you’ve been climbing toward your whole life. “Now that I’m in practice, it almost feeling like numb… but now I’m here, it just feels like it’s happening, but I’m watching it happen.”
Then the conversation turns, to culture, to heritage. The internal battle of being raised inside one world and measured by another. He grew up Sri Lankan in a place that wasn’t diverse. “I was probably the only kind of ethnic minority in the whole school,” he says. And he names the cost of that clearly: “Feeling embarrassed about where you come from… seeing it through someone else’s eyes.” He says out loud what most people bury: “I got to a point where I disliked my own skin.”
But he also tells you what changed. University. Travel. Being surrounded by students from “50 different countries,” where difference stopped meaning isolation and started meaning overlap. His pride evolved too. “I went from… being embarrassed of my culture and heritage, to then being proud of it… and now I’ve got to the point where that pride is not just the color of my skin, but it’s the soul underneath it.”
That’s where his art lives. In the translation gap. In the things you can’t directly explain. “There’s no word,” he says. So he shows it instead, through a sari in the video, through traditional dress, through casting, through “Tamil drums,” through melody that still hits like a statement. He calls his producer “a genius,” and says the beat comes first. Always. The sample comes from “this really, really old Tamil artist… from like, the 70s black and white.” That’s not an aesthetic choice. That’s lineage.
Underneath all of it is his obsession with unity, not erasing difference, but refusing the fear underneath it. “There’s so much beauty in the diversity of how we are perceived from the outside,” he says. “But… the changes are made to link us intrinsically.”
So how does someone carry med school, medicine, and music without collapsing.
He credits his family, his “three angels,” and his mother’s belief. “If you really want to do it… and you believe that you can do it, then you will.” And then he says something I haven’t heard in a long time: “Implementing delusion as much as I could.”
Not delusion as fantasy. Delusion as faith. As direction. As choosing to walk toward what’s yours without begging the world to approve it first.
Before we wrapped, I asked him for a closing message. He didn’t promote a release. He didn’t tease a rollout. He offered a practice.
“Find time to sit in your stillness… purify your intentions… look outwardly with your heart, instead of using your eyes… sit in stillness and look through love.”
VIB isn’t doing two jobs. He’s doing one thing through two doors.
And if you’re paying attention, you can hear it in the music.