“I get lucky to play with him in my music video.” “He’s the superstar of Nepal industry at this moment,” Karan Rai told Leo of the actor. He has also released an album, The Kites, and shot a video for his first single, Changa, which involved him collaborating with Dayahang Rai, a revered Nepali actor. He clinched the crown as the competition’s champion in late December and with Lama performed a concert at the Pathri Morang camp, where his life began. The time – and money – Rai expended participating on the show were worth it. Louisville, Kentucky, resident Karan Rai competes on the Nepali version of the Voice, which he ultimately won in December. Rai went on to spend seven months in Nepal competing on the show’s fourth season as part of a team coached by Raju Lama, one of the brightest singing stars in the country of 30 million people. Producers notified him that he’d moved on to the next round, and he traveled to Nepal for a blind audition. Leo reported that Rai made an audition tape demonstrating how his range, from “hard rock to a delicate falsetto on more traditional Nepali melodies”, and submitted it to the show through its website. Then Rai learned online that the Nepali version of The Voice allowed anyone who spoke the nation’s language to audition to become a contestant – “including those who had been trapped between two lands that didn’t want them, in refugee camps, left without a country to call home”, as Leo’s Erica Rucker put it. The thought of participating in a reality show always appealed to him, including NBC’s singing competition The Voice, whose 23rd American season is scheduled to air beginning in March. Rai had first shown a talent for singing during his days at the refugee camp. In 2013, Rai and his family went to the US, initially spending time in Seattle, Washington, before moving to Louisville for what they considered better educational opportunities, he said. Other countries, including the US, began offering ways for refugees to migrate. “We used to get rations weekly,” including rice, potatoes and chiles, “and then sometimes we’d run out of the rations.” Rai told Leo that his family didn’t feel accepted as Nepali, and life was rugged at the camp. But they went to the refugee camps amid conflict over speaking and teaching the Nepali language. Rai’s parents were born in Bhutan and were descendants of Nepalis who went there to work. It was one of two camps remaining for people fleeing ethnic cleansing of people with Nepali roots in Bhutan – another Himalayan country – in the 1980s. According to the alt-weekly, nicknamed Leo, Rai was born in 1994 in the Pathri Morang refugee camp in eastern Nepal.
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