Desi Outsiders

This week, right before the release of the much awaited Bollywood film Padman, we bring you a discussion on female reproductive health with Hollywood’s very own Gynaecologist, Dr Sherry Ross. She’s the OBGYN of Hollywood, and stars like Reese Witherspoon, Jane Seymor, Brooke Shields, Katherine McPhee are regular clients of Dr.Sherry.

Dr Sherry’s book she-ology: The Definitive Guide to Women’s Intimate Health. Period. was named one the 6 Most Life Changing Wellness Books of 2017 by Prevention.com and Women’s Health Magazine.

PadMan will surely be a huge success, but before we go explore the narrative of USING a pad, we believe that it’s just as important to go all the way back to basics. So if your parents didn’t pass this information down to you, or if your school didn’t emphasise on sex education - not to worry, we have Dr.Sherry to tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about female reproduction.

This week, we bring you our conversation with Supriya Joshi, a stand up comedian and writer who’s worked extensively with All India Bakchod.

Supriya enlightened us on what it means to be at the forefront of both the feminist movement as well as the change happening in the comedy circles in India today. And as you can imagine, we shared a lot of giggles along the way and hope you enjoy listening to the three of us as much as we enjoyed recording this episode.

You can find out more about our orphanage and our Foundation right here: www.altcricketfoundation.org

We warned you that we were coming back although the last time you heard from us, we had no idea that we were about to leave you for a month without a warning. As usual, we jumped from topic to topic in this episode and ended up discussing Zaira Wasim’s flight incident and how these situations contribute to the discourse around feminism. And then, again without a warning, and completely ignoring Meenal’s pleas to be spared the image, Ankita describes a very graphic incident of a man who stood in the middle of a flight with his pants undone.

We leave you with a food for thought - how important is it to be mindful of the way we represent our Desi community when we travel abroad? 

Ankita's blog - http://ankita.ink

We’re delighted to bring you our super special episode this week as we interviewed our first ever non-Desi guest! We couldn’t be happier to share her story with you because we learned a lot about a culture that is very similar to our own.

Luz Amuchastegui is a social rights activist, hockey superstar, consultant and an established entrepreneur based in Argentina. She currently serves as the Youth Development Director at an NGO called El Desafio (which means ‘The Challenge’) and is the co-founder of two companies - Evolution Factory and Keep Going Hockey. In 2013, Luz was selected as one of the 16 Emerging Leaders of the world by the US Department of State, ESPNW and The Center for Sport, Peace and Society of the University of Tennessee to be a part of the Global Sports Mentoring Program.

This week, we had the pleasure of speaking to TheSandyLion who confessed that this was her debut podcast interview!

Sandy is a full-time elementary school teacher and a fashion stylist based in Toronto. In this interview, Sandy takes us through her 4-year journey to bring her where she is now, working with big stars like Lilly Singh, Humble the Poet, and even styling in some music videos!

This week, we bring you our conversation with Elsa D’Silva, the Founder & CEO of the Red Dot Foundation. Through her app called SafeCity, Elsa and her team document sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. In the past four years, Safecity has become the largest crowd map on the issue of sexual abuse in India, Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Nepal.

This week, we bring you our conversation with Kirthi Jayakumar, an Indian women's rights activist, a social entrepreneur, a peace activist, artist, lawyer and writer among many other things. The list of Kirthi’s achievements is almost endless and to put it simply, her hard work landed her the US Presidential Services medal in 2011. But in this interview, we get into all the influences that made her want to do the work that she does today, especially as a lawyer who left her corporate job within just one month, and went on to volunteer with many NGOs including the UN.

Kirthi also revealed right at the beginning of our interview that she is a victim of sexual abuse - and this was a surprise to us. The conversation took a completely unexpected turn and here we have an amazing story to share - stay tuned until the end, we promise you, it’s worth it.

Yup, that’s us high-fiving each other for making it this far. Fifty episodes. Celebrating fifty of anything is a big milestone! We even celebrated 50 Twitter followers, then realised that they were all fake accounts.

This week, we bring you a very special episode where the tables completely turn and instead, we get interviewed instead by our most devoted fan - Nishant Joshi of AltCricket! This is the very first time where we truly get to express our opinions on the world, feminism, and our society after gathering so much knowledge from all our inspiring guests. Enjoy!

This Diwali, we bring you a “pattaka” called Karan Talwar a.k.a Bollywood Gandu, who is a comedian based in Mumbai. He shares the story of how he left a boring desk job in the US and returned to India at the age of 28 to kickstart his career in stand-up comedy. This led to the founding of SnG comedy and later, Bollywood Gandu. Over the years, Karan has garnered close to 2.5 million followers on Twitter alone but has also been “unfollowed” by many Bollywood celebrities on the very same social media channel. Tune in to find out how and why it all started.

We’re kicking off Season 4 with an exclusive interview with Vidya Vox where we accidentally damage her eardrums by singing along with her. We’re the new Desi Spice Girls now and Vidya is leaving her job as a solo artist to join us. That’s once she repairs her eardrums, of course.

We discuss her journey from the age of five when she started training in classical Karnatic music and wasn’t the biggest fan of it, to how she almost became a doctor but then ended up being a superstar instead - basically, Vidya is living Meenal’s alternate reality.