Desi Outsiders

Somehow, one year ago today, we convinced you to replace your Sai Baba bhajans and Niki Minaj playlists with our podcast episodes. We really wish we could invite you to Desi Outsiders with chai and samosas this fine morning, but Ankita can’t cook, and Meenal doesn’t share food.

So instead, we put together a very special season finale where we share the snippets of the good, the bad, and the ugly of our journey so far. We bring you cringe worthy clips from previous episodes and tell you how we started out initially as a two-member team before Shane got involved in this project. We’ve come a long way together since then and can’t wait to see what Year Two has in store for us.

Jasvinder Sanghera CBE is a UK born and raised Sikh-Indian who narrowly escaped a forced marriage by running away from home at the age of sixteen. She is the founder of Karma Nirvana, a national award winning charity that supports both men and women affected by honour based abuse and forced marriages.

She was listed in the Guardian’s top 100 Most Inspirational Women in the World in 2011. She was awarded Commander of the British Empire in 2013 in recognition of her outstanding contribution for the victims of forced marriage and honour based abuse. In fact, Prime Minister David Cameron stated that her work “turned his head on the issue of forced marriage” and her work is recognised as being pivotal to the creation of a specific UK forced marriage criminal offence in 2014.

We couldn’t be more excited to present to you our conversation with the writer Jaishree Misra. Her debut novel ‘Ancient Promises’ which came out in 2000 was a major best-seller, following which, she has written seven books. But apart from her success as a writer, we delve deep into many other aspects of her life and career. Her personal story is one of breaking social barriers to let her passions thrive, especially as she stepped out of an unhappy marriage and a rigid system to reclaim her own life. She talks about arranged marriages, the stigma surrounding divorce, step parenthood, and the many facets of caring for a child with special needs.

This week, we’re in conversation with Gurmehar Kaur, a face that you might already be familiar with. Since February of this year, a photograph of her holding a placard that says ‘Pakistan did not kill my dad, war killed him” has been plastered all over the news and social media channels in India.

She was scrutinized by the whole nation, criticised by celebrities, and directly compared to the antagonists of the world. The title “anti-national” as a suffix to her name was at the tip of everybody’s tongue although, most people didn’t even have the slightest context into how and why this branding was taking place.

What resulted was her receiving rape and murder threats while the whole nation forgot the main reason for all this scrutiny - Gurmehar’s stand against a leading student body in India that attacked young students at a Delhi University campus. Tune in to listen to her side of the story!

This week, we bring you our conversation with Ajit George who helps run Shanti Bhavan, the institution showcased in the Netflix documentary ‘Daughters of Destiny’. Shanti Bhavan is a free residential school for underprivileged children in India. Every year, the school enrolls 24 children at the age of four and takes care of their needs and expenses all year round, supporting them till they land a job and become capable of taking care of themselves and their families. 95% of these children come from the Dalit or ‘untouchable’ communities in India and almost all of them are from impoverished families that survive on less than $2 a day.

Tune in to hear about the 20-year journey of this institution that starts with Ajit’s father, Dr Abraham George’s dream to uplift the Dalit community in India.

In this episode, we continue the beautiful story that Nishant shared with us last week. For those of you who are just tuning in, last week, we interviewed Nishant Joshi from AltCricket. Nishant is a full-time doctor who has written his own book, hosted his own cricket TV shows, and even built his Alternative Cricket brand on the internet all with his own two hands.

After the tears from the previous episode, Nishant pulls us all out of gloom by sharing the story of how he wrote a book in just a month during his second year of college, and how a simple twitter account he started to publicize this book later landed him deals with high profile media partners like Star Sports. This time around, we promise there are fewer tears!

We’re proud to present our very first two-parter with Nishant Joshi from AltCricket - a London based doctor by day and sports journalist by night. Once the conversation about his dual life began to unfold, we unexpectedly delved into an in-depth discussion about Desi parenting, culture, and adolescence. It was only half-way through this conversation that we realised that Nishant’s story actually begins in 1972 when his father immigrated to the UK as a refugee from Uganda.

Part 1 with Nishant covers his extremely high profile schooling once his family rose from the refugee status, his sheltered upbringing in a Desi-London home, and the resulting incapacity to deal with the lowest point of his life when he was asked to leave Imperial College London after his first year of medicine.

Nishant is one of the most honest guests we've had so far and he never held back while narrating quite a vulnerable story. We promise it has a happy ending, although you’ll have to tune in next week to find out how he rose from the ashes to reclaim his life.

This week, we spoke to Aditi Gupta, the co-founder of Menstrupedia - the leading comic generating awareness in women’s reproductive health in countries like India, Nepal, Nigeria and South America. This episode is coming out in time to celebrate Menstrupedia’s 5th anniversary and we couldn’t be more proud to share such an amazing story.

Aditi’s Ted Talk ‘A taboo-free way to talk about periods’ has close to 1.5 million views and she’s made it into the achiever's list of Forbes India 30 under 30 in 2014 for her work towards breaking the taboo around menstruation. She’s a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNBC and BBC.

For those of you who watched our ladies perform on Sunday at the Women’s Cricket World Cup Finals, this interview with Snehal Pradhan, a former international cricket player, will help you understand what it really takes to train and support women all the way to the international stage.

This week, we’re talking to Alex Mathew a.k.a Maya the Drag Queen from Bangalore. Born and raised in an orthodox Christian home in Kerala, Alex temporarily broke away from his roots to live his life being true to his identity as a queer man and to pursue his passion for performing Drag in Bangalore. Get ready to share this episode with all your friends who still don’t fully understand the LGBTQ community and Drag as a performing art.