Love Language

Everyone is watching Off Campus. Your millennial colleague, your younger cousin, that friend who swore she was done with college dramas. Anahita and Jesselina have a theory.

Tracing back their years in boarding school and the unlikely education that happens in the in-between spaces. When you're told you're not good at something you've put your heart into. When Cosmopolitan is contraband. When there's one television, the seniors have the remote, and you squeeze yourself onto a shelf just to catch an episode of One Tree Hill and quietly begin imagining a life far outside those walls. And it turns out those shows were doing more work than anyone gave them credit for, which is exactly why shows like Off Campus and Heated Rivalry feel refreshing and important right now, not just as good television but as a genuine counter-offer to a culture that has lately been writing young people with so much spite and so little empathy. The mean girl trope, the toxic bad boy, more stereotypes and less character arc.

A light-hearted conversation that will make you glow with nostalgia, and quietly hope that the future is possibly coming around, to a good rom-com, to better storytelling, and maybe, just maybe, to the idea that 2000s nostalgia is having its moment for a reason.

PS: Don't miss Jesselina's Hindustani classical music audition from 2007.

• Gandhari, a Monologue and Anahita’s Stardom (02:43)

• "You're Not an Actor But You Could Be a Narrator" (06:23)

• Jesselina’s Hindustani Classical Music Audition That Cannot Be Undone (08:15)

• Cosmopolitan, Mills and Boon and the Sex Education Our Mothers Started (11:16)

• The Hot Pink Flip Phone Heist (14:51)

• Friday Nights, Plastic Chairs and the Senior Who Always Had the Remote (16:32)

• One Tree Hill, OC, Friends: The Shows That Raised Us (19:32)

• The Delayed Consumer Theory: A Psycho-social Analysis (29:00)

• Off Campus and Heated Rivalry - The Radical Act of Writing Young People Well (32:38)

• Friends Got Us Through Our Darkest Times (49:52)

• Humor Is Intelligence and We Will Die on This Hill (48:10)

South Asian weddings carry warmth, family, and fanfare. But behind the celebration, a quieter crisis of dowry deaths, women choosing to end their lives rather than endure abuse, and a social architecture rarely built for women to not just survive, but thrive.

Anahita and Jesselina unpack what it really means to marry or consider marrying into a South Asian family. Are women being prepared for the marriage, or just the wedding? Are we shying away from the hard conversations? And how much time with a partner is actually enough, whether love, arranged, or love cum arranged.

• The Business Family Blueprint in South Asia (02:36)
• The Pessimism Built Into Marriage (07:10)
• The Calculated Risk of Any Marriage (08:46)
• "Love Cum Arranged" (11:32)
• Marriage Is a Stool - How Do We Build the Limbs? (13:40)
• Love Marriage as Reckless Passion - The Big South Asian Myth (15:32)
• Gold, Grandparents, and Running Away (18:02)
• Dowry By Any Other Name: Class and the Sanitization of a Crime (20:00)
• Twisha Sharma (27:31)
• Have You Built Your Ammunition for a Patriarchal World Before Marriage? (30:56)
• Are You Ready for the Wedding or the Marriage? (36:29)
• Biological Clock v. Risk Clock (42:50)
• Women's Enmeshed Identity Post-Marriage (47:56)
• Parallel Lives of Jesso and Ana (54:29)
• Takeaway: Marry a Friend (55:37)
• Wizard Liz and the Visa Trap (58:24)

What does it really take to survive a long-distance relationship without losing your mind, your identity, or your will to live? In this episode, Anahita and Jesselina get honest about the emotional chaos, quiet resilience, and very specific kind of character-building that comes with loving someone across cities, countries, and time zones.

From cheating paranoia and mismatched communication styles to control, individuality, marriage, and the politics of not shrinking yourself for love, they unpack the things long-distance relationships tend to expose rather than create. This is not a neat guide, and definitely not an expert one, but it is full of lived experience, contradictions, and the occasional hard-earned insight.

Call it a dummy’s guide, call it a survival manual, call it two women oversharing for an hour, but this one is for anyone who has ever tried to hold on to love across distance and come out with themselves intact.

What if romance on screen once held our hands through feeling and belonging, and now lets go? In this episode, we linger over the slow disappearance of the romantic comedy in Bollywood and Hollywood, tracing what has been lost along the way. From starry-eyed classics to today’s hardened heroes, we ask how cinema stopped believing in love as something soft, sincere, and transformative.

Moving between nostalgia and critique, Anahita and Jesselina unpack the rise of hyper-masculinity, the flattening of emotional vulnerability, and what that shift reveals about our cultural moment. This conversation drifts through old films that shaped a generation of romantics and lands firmly in the present, questioning why heartfelt storytelling now feels so radical.

It is full of yearning for better love stories and for a cinematic language that dares to make us feel again.

(00:00) New Year reflections and our grandma hobbies

(03:12) Where did all the rom-coms go?

(09:03) Perfect actors and sanitized scripts

(16:41) Pyar Dosti Hai: how storytelling shaped social dynamics

(22:53) Early-2000s journalist women leads and their influence on women in media today

(23:46) How young people learned about desire and intimacy through rom-coms

(28:42) Missing young adult and teen stories fueling hyper-consumerism

(39:01) Rom-com gaps filled by hyper-masculine, nationalistic cinema

(45:09) The future of romantic storytelling: what needs to change

So, you’re turning 30, congrats, welcome to the club! In this episode, Jesselina and Anahita, both now 30, dive into all the weird, funny, and unexpected parts of this new decade. Why does your body start sending mysterious signals you didn’t ask for? Did we really leave the weight of other people’s opinions behind in our twenties? And seriously, are we all supposed to become marathon runners now?

We get real about health habits that actually stick, lessons we wish we’d learned in our twenties, and how we plan to navigate friendships, social life, and goals in our thirties. It’s honest, hilarious, a little messy, and we hope this episode helps you ease into your 30s. We’re all figuring it out, and there’s no one right way to live your thirties or life in general.

0:33 Jesselina’s Big 3-0: Leveling Up

7:27 Preparing for Your 30s: A Milestone Moment… or Not?

12:25 Leaving the Weight of People’s Opinions Back in Our 20s

16:52 Your 20s Are for Learning; Your 30s Are for Applying

24:03 Atomic Health Habits for Your 30s: Tiny Tweaks, Big Wins

26:01 Ana Starts “Strength Training”

31:35 When Your Body Starts Sending Weird Messages in Your 30s

41:03 Are We All Becoming Marathon Runners in Our 30s?

What if every meal were a mirror reflecting belief and belonging? In this episode, we dive into the politics simmering beneath our plates. From fab food to fad diets, we explore how food can be both a bridge that brings us together and a weapon of exclusion.

This conversation moves from the plate to the politics, from the intimacy of home kitchens to the hierarchies that shape entire cultures. Jesselina and Anahita discuss food purity, power, and the everyday practices that show how something as intrinsic as eating can reveal who we are and who we’re told to be in South Asia.

It’s layered and maybe a little hard to digest, but that’s exactly the point!

(00:31) Daylight Saving and the Doom Feeling

(01:27) Champion’s Breakfast

(03:27) Fad Diets or Dieticians?

(11:51) Are Our Healthier Choices Making Us Boring?

(16:40) Food Diversity in Nepal

(19:45) The Politics of Food Starts at Home

(26:37) Caste, Vegetarianism, and the Politics of Exclusion in Hinduism

(32:52) Dr. Ambedkar on Food as a Tool of Hierarchy

(38:58) Regional vs. Religious Food Practices(

44:50) Economic Liberalization and the Export of High Quality Food: Neocolonialism or Market Standards?

(49:23) The Turmeric Biopiracy Case: Neocolonialism Through Legal Standards

Ever wondered why eldest daughters have spreadsheets for feelings and backup plans for everyone’s birthdays? In this episode, we get way too real about our BDE aka Big Daughter Energy!!  Why do eldest daughters end up running family group chats like Fortune 500s? Is dating younger siblings just emotional babysitting with better playlists? And can we ever stop trying to fix everyone else’s problems without feeling guilty about it?

It’s funny, raw, and way too relatable — part therapy sessions, part guilty confessions.. Is our BDE a personality type, a public service, or both? Press play and find out.

(02:12) The Eldest-Daughter Sorority No one Signed up for

(04:08) Taylor Swift shows up to the eldest-daughter party… two years late

(06:13) “Hi, I’m 12 and the family therapist”

(09:45) When you start mediating your parents’ marriage for sport

(12:31) Cake orders, calendars, and carrying the emotional Wi-Fi of the house

(14:22) Dating younger siblings: therapy or thrill ride?

(16:15) Middle-child energy: the chaos you didn’t plan for

(20:18) The Let them Theory & Learning to Loosen Control

(31:01) Type-A Brains, Structure, and the Cities That Match Our Nervous Systems

(42:11) Health crises, control issues, and the eldest daughter’s medical degree

(48:04) Unlearning perfection: the art of doing less and caring less

(50:47) The soft spot: eldest-daughter friendships that keep us sane

Summer’s over, the mics are back on, and Anahita and Jesselina are finally here! In this bonus episode, they return from their season break with a little bit of everything. They reflect on 6 months of podcasting - the sweat, the tears, the doubts - and spill all the tea from a very Love Island–coded summer.

The Summer We Turned Petty? Maybe. Tune in to find out what the girlies were really up to.

00:29 - Welcome Home

05:12 - Six Months of Podcasting: Did We Fail?

11:45 - Jess' Love Island Summer

19:15 - Growing Up & Running Out of Family Time

23:19 - Married Friends & Friendship Dynamics

30:10 - Is 30 the New 20 in NYC?

34:01 - Ana’s Shower Thoughts 😉

36:05 - What’s Next: LoLa Season 2 Plans

You know those nights where you're doomscrolling TikTok, half-watching Love Island, and somehow end up talking to ChatGPT about your ex? Yeah. Same.

In this episode, Anahita and Jesselina get real about what we’re all secretly doing—bingeing “mindless” content and ask if it’s actually mindless at all. From Rakhi Sawant deep dives to emotional support sitcoms and the sweet relief of rewatching shows we already know the ending to, they unpack what “brain rot” really means in a world that never shuts up.

Why do we feel guilty for needing to switch off? Why do we pretend some content doesn’t “count”? And why are the shows that make us feel the most seen often the ones people love to hate?

This one’s messy, funny, a little chaotic and surprisingly tender. Because maybe, just maybe, the things we consume when we’re not trying to be smart are saying something really important about who we are.

Spoiler alert: Rakhi Sawant was in Main Hoon Na.

Clickable Timestamps

(00:32) "Do we sound like people who started a podcast out of boredom?"

(03:44) ChatGPT, therapy, and the new emotional outsourcing

(06:52) Astro GPT, false hope, and when AI becomes your best friend

(09:47) Anxiety, spoilers, and the comfort of rewatching old shows

(12:37) Squid Game, overstimulation, and doomscrolling to survive

(15:22) Deep cinema vs dumb shows: do we really need to pick a side?

(18:14) Who are the PAPs? (Pretentious Alt People explained)

(20:32) TikTok, Finstas & the new language of internet girlhood

(23:17) Love Island as a social experiment (not a guilty pleasure)

(26:42) Rakhi Sawant, Takeshi’s Castle & the golden age of chaotic icons

(29:55) Meme culture, emotional processing & staying connected

(33:10) Why “low-brow” content is more political than we think

(37:16) Pop culture vs ideology: what actually shapes society?

(40:34) Can brain rot be a form of resistance?

If a city doesn’t work for women, it doesn’t work for anyone.” In this powerful episode, Jesselina and Anahita unpack the invisible gender biases built into our cities—design flaws that don’t just inconvenience women, they actively exclude them.

From unsafe college walkways and inaccessible public transport to public bathrooms that ignore menstruation, this conversation lays bare the very real consequences of male-default urban planning. And no—it’s not just about safety. It’s about ambition, leisure, and the basic freedom to move through public space without fear.

Rooted in personal stories, data, and lived experience across Delhi, Kathmandu, and LA, this episode reveals why gender-inclusive cities aren’t a luxury—they’re a necessity for a truly sustainable world.

Clickable Timestamps

(02:39) Why sustainable cities are more personal than we think

(03:50)Cities are designed for men, by men.

(06:46) Jesselina’s NLUD story: how a 10-minute walk became a daily risk

(10:44) Public toilets that fail women (and everyone else)

(12:41) Mobility, class, and why public transport isn’t built for all

(16:02)When a dinner and pickleball plan turns into a safety negotiation

(20:04) Fake phone calls, pepper spray, and the exhausting mental load

(23:48) Why women avoid parks—and how Kathmandu got it right

(28:40) Girls at Dhabas: Pakistan’s story of reclaiming the right to exist

(30:23) Crash tests, cold offices, and other everyday design failures

(32:43) Small wins: inclusive bathrooms in Benares & Mumbai

(37:55) Breastfeeding, Colonialism and the gendering of public space

(42:33) Learning independence through metros, autos, and quiet rebellions

(48:03) Superstition, public space, and being shut out for having a period