ManiM

The son of a professor and an architect, Mani was born on April 27th 1978 in Tehran, Iran. Two weeks before fundamentalists took hostages in Iran, the family relocated in America so that his father could serve a three-month sabbatical at the University of Minnesota. The family was later able to secure permanent residence in America, at the expense of its entire livelihood in Iran.

As a child, Mani was enamored by the numerical patterns in Beethoven and Mozart, which would later turn into an obsession with mathematics during his teenage years. Mani's first exposure to hip-hop came from an older cousin, who advised him to listen to as much NWA as possible. Being down with the CPT gave Mani an instant street credibility that left him void of the normal beatings most mathematical geniuses are forced to endure. Soon, Mani became the only fifth grader in his class who knew, and was happy to recite, the lyrics of every artist in the genre.

As lyricism developed, the rhyming constraints in the music gave way to more and more intricate patterns, increasing Mani's fascination with the art form. Although this love had grown tremendously, his first love was still math, so upon graduating high school, he attended MIT, where he earned degrees in mathematics, physics, and finance, and then went on to work as a trader on Wall Street. You don?t have to be a genius to do this math?he was set.

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Now one would think that taking people?s money and living in a fancy loft in Soho would be enough to make Mani happy. And for a while, it did. But the invasion of Iraq in 2003 left him feeling powerless; his job was to "bet on the most probable winner", even in the face of situations that appalled him. One day while sitting on the six train, he started typing his frustrations into his Blackberry; the words happened to take the form of hip hop lyrics.? He found clarity and peace from writing and vocalizing the words.