Kundan Baidwan, Part 1 (S7E12)

It's not often that I feature someone for the first time who's already been on the podcast … not once, but twice. Such is the case for my friend, artist/bartender/nonprofit arts organizer Kundan Baidwan.

Before we dig into this one, please go back and check out Kundan's previous appearances on the show:

• Kundan Baidwan's Oral History of Aub Zam Zam Bar (2018)

• Rootstock Arts' Color Your Mind Festival (2024)

Those podcasts were about important things in Kundan's life—the legendary SF bar where she's bartended for more than a decade, and the Indian arts nonprofit she started with friends just within the last year or so. This episode is all about Kundan herself.

We begin Part 1 with Kundan's birth (on Dolly Parton's birthday) in January 1978. She was born in San Jose, but her family soon relocated up the East Bay to Fremont. Her dad had come to the U.S. for college. He went to school in Reno at UNR. When he and his first wife split up, he went back to Punjab, India, to find a new partner. One of his sisters introduced him to the young woman who would become Kundan's mom.

Kundan's dad had already graduated and moved to the Bay Area by the time he found his new wife. In fact, he had lived in The City—on Haight and in South of Market—in the late Sixties. He brought Kundan's mom back to The Bay after they got married.

The young couple moved around San Jose a couple times, with her dad doing what he could to buy housing for himself and his family. This included their move to Fremont when Kundan was around 2.

All of Kundan's early memories are set in the East Bay—Fremont specifically. They spent time there and at relatives' places in San Jose. As a young kid, she enjoyed things like playing dress-up, singing songs in the mirror, hanging out with adults, and asking for recipes. She had visions of being a "culinary genius," she says now.

Kundan has 26 first cousins, and she keeps up with every single one of them. She's on the younger end of her generation in her family, but most of her cousins around her age don't live nearby. In the Bay Area, Kundan was usually the youngest. Owing to this, she feels she benefited from constantly being exposed to culture through her older relatives.

Around middle school, Kundan says she became a "bad student." What she means by that is school got harder and she didn't feel up to the challenge. Other kids also began teasing and taunting her, which didn't help.

When it comes to her own creativity, Kundan is quick to credit her mom, who, she says, was pretty much always drawing or illustrating. Her mom's mom was a painter. Creativity ran through her and her siblings' DNA—her brother and sister both wrote at various points in their lives.

She went to Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, where she found her people—the "weird kids," meaning artists and musicians and theater people. High school wasn't too cliquey, but as much as groups mixed, you knew who your people were. At this point, Kundan and I go on a sidebar about the movie Didi, Sean Wang's 2024 film set in Kundan's hometown of Fremont in the early 2000s.

Her parents were on board for Kundan's to major in psychology in college. She'd taken art classes in high school, and found a strong art program at UC San Diego. But that's not what she intended to study.

Kundan shares some of her early memories of visiting San Francisco from across The Bay. And we end Part 1 with her decision to leave the Bay Area and go to college in San Diego.

Check back next week for Part 2.

We recorded this episode at Mini Bar in April 2025.

Photography by Nate Oliveira