This week, we spoke to Trisha Sakhuja Walia, the CEO of Brown Girl Magazine. This incredible online magazine serves as an anchor for South Asians who believe in gender equality. Their content provides a connection between the readers, the trailblazers, community leaders, and all the badass women in the South Asian community. We spoke to Trisha about how this small idea had started back in 2008, and how 10 years later, they’ve grown and expanded in the US, London and Canada. Not only do they...

This week, we’re delighted to bring you one the most inspiring stories you will hear on this podcast. Our guest Malvika Iyer was just 13 when a grenade blast in her own bedroom in Bikaner almost killed her. She immediately lost both her hands, her feet were completely disfigured, she suffered from 80% blood loss, and her BP was zero. Doctors were not sure if she’d survive and once she survived, they weren’t sure if she’d ever walk again in her life. 18 months later, Malvika bagged a State...

This week, we have two very special guests on our show! Chris and Renata have been tirelessly working on building the first ever cricket academy in Czech Republic. Since they started the project in 2015, they have dealt with rejection, theft, extreme weather conditions and culture barriers. Just three months into 2018, they have managed to reach over 10,000 kids and introduce them to the sport. Despite the resistance they have faced from many locals who have no idea about the sport, they have...

This week, we spoke to Manpreet Toor, a dancer, choreographer, and entrepreneur based in California. You must know Manpreet from her early days where she danced with her friend, Naina. Now Manpreet has been collaborating with big names in the industry - she recently worked with Punjabi By Nature and also gave us some exclusive news which she hasn’t spoken about just yet!

This mini Navrati, we bring you the internet’s favourite Gujju, Parle Patel from Planet Parle. We discuss his life as a British Asian who spent 6 years of his life in Australia, and also has family roots in Kenya and Gujarat. Parle talks to us about being a blend of these three cultures, his experience with mental health, and his journey from the time he was a child and his parents forced a camera in his face, asking him to make a home documentary, to how he started his own YouTube channel....

Last Thursday, on International Women’s Day, we interviewed Lauren C. Anderson, one of the first ever women selected for the FBI swat team! When an 11-year-old Lauren toured the FBI Headquarters in New York, she was told by her tour guide that girls could never be FBI agents because they would just sit around all day painting their nails. 15 years later, she not only joined the FBI but also travelled all around the globe after the 9/11 attacks. Lauren speaks to us about her views on women's...

On Women’s Day, we present to you our second male guest of this season, Shobhit Banwait. We’re quite sure most of our Desi listeners have seen Shobhit playing his Tabla with his six-winged ceiling fan in the background. He started off by making videos using his simple smartphone and zero equipment but today, Shobhit is one of the most famous tabla artists on the internet, creating beautiful fusions within all genres of music. Enjoy!

This week, we bring you our conversation with Zohra Moosa, the Executive Director of Mama Cash, an organization that supports the financial prospects of women, girls, trans and intersex people around the world who fight for their human rights. Mama Cash was conceived around a kitchen table in Amsterdam in 1983\. Since then, they have grown from a group of five feminist activists into an international fund that supports women’s, girls’ and trans people’s movements around the world. As a brown,...

This week we are in conversation with Pranav Punjabi - a youtube, Viner, and online content creator. Pranav started his comedy journey at the age of 16 and he fell in love with the laughter of others around him. He continued to work hard on his passion for comedy and today uses his platform to address some very serious social issues which are difficult to voice in our desi community. So join us as we discuss comedy, mental health, and feminism with Pranav!

This week we bring you our conversation Shaili Chopra, a face you might already be familiar with. She’s an Indian business journalist, author and entrepreneur who has worked extensively with NDTV and is also the founder of shethepeople.tv - “A video story-telling space that inspires women, strengthens their efforts, exchanges leadership ideas, fosters networking and reinforces their ability to contribute to growth.” Shaili’s world is full of incredible experiences as a journalist including...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 -...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...