My foray into the world of Asian dramas and content:

Hi fellow MDLers! I am betun (Abhinav in the real world ). Growing up on Jackie Chan's and Bruce Lee's Hong Kong movies, I watched my first Korean movie in 2011 and watched a Chinese Japanese movie every now and then and after watching a concert by Baek Ji Young on TV, I became hooked to "Like Being Hit by a Bullet" , TiA's "Ryuusei" and some other songs by them but I did not truly embrace the world of East Asian dramas and movies till 2017. Starting from Jun Ji Hyun's 'My Sassy Girl' and moving onto her other movies, I telephoned my mother home to inform her about my discovery of K movies and she told me to watch 'Descendants of the Sun'. My YouTube playlist had managed to play DOTS and other OSTs just around then after starting from some IU and 'Goblin' songs recommended by Korean friends. I also had Netflix for the first time and a big TV at my new rental. Serendipitous is understating it! In hindsight, though DOTS is cliché as heck, it is perfect to get introduced to KDrama as it was really exciting and has a mix of so many elements. The 16-episode or so format of Asian dramas was way better than what I had seen so far on TV and I realized I preferred it over the breakneck pacing of the American shows that somehow still needed 7 seasons to tell their story.   

Languages and genres

I have learnt Mandarin Chinese at my university to the intermediate level and thanks to Coursera and Kdramas, I am also a noob in the Korean language.  I mix my watching and watch Korean, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Japanese or Chinese content. While my favourite genres are Thrillers, Action, and Psychological, I also enjoy slowburn romances and comedy. My watchlist has every genre.  

On MDL

I am part of the writers circle at MDL and also part of the ASKMDL team since 2019 (recommending for Hong Kong/Taiwan and writing the intro).  

Real life

I grew up in India learning engineering and then finance and after a brief banking career, I moved to the US for grad school (any Cornellians here?) a few years ago and have happily moved to a research role with the university since then.