Currun Singh

The weekly Adams House sophomore Social Studies tutorial had started as planned. But someone was missing: Currun Singh ’07, a bit tipsy and hiding in a closet, was trying to salvage what had become a disastrous class. The lecturer asked a question and Singh piped up (“very intelligently, too!” he claims) from his hidden lair. Trying to surprise the lecturer, Singh turned the doorknob—only to discover he was locked in.

After a fellow classmate and conspirator freed him, Singh, who while concealed had inexplicably covered himself with remnants of band uniforms, burst from his hideaway, singing “I Will Survive” while he ran for the door.

A first glance at Singh’s CV reveals an overachieving Harvard student: he is a First-year Urban Program leader and a theater producer with nine plays to his name. A deeper look exhibits an amusing mixture of funky and humanitarian, a juxtaposition that just might begin to characterize the seemingly undefinable Singh.

As a sophomore, the theater-active Singh drew national media attention with “Abu Ghraib,” a play he wrote and co-produced. As a junior he taught in AIDS-afflicted Namibia and promoted economic development and youth leadership in Morocco. And now, as a senior, he’s working on a thesis highlighting protest through rap-music culture in Parisian immigrant communities—underscoring his belief that “art is a very powerful way of communicating messages.”

A former fellow producer, Rowan W. Dorin ’07, thinks of two things when trying to characterize Singh: a “dead-on” impression of Britney Spears on all fours, and his knack for integrating himself into foreign communities like the ones he worked with in Paris while doing thesis research.

“Even though he’s clearly American, it didn’t matter,” Dorin says. “He was so warm that people just embraced him. They clearly didn’t think of him as an ‘outsider.’”

Outsider or insider, Singh is sure that whatever happens he will continue to merge social change with art.

“There’s that famous E. M. Forster exhortation to ‘only connect! Live in fragments no longer,’” Dorin says. “That’s Currun. He connects. He lives completely.”