So far in this podcast, most of my guests have told us about their aspirations in life and their quest to achieve their dream.  My guest today, Deirdre Barrett, is different. She studies dreams. She writes books about the dreams people have in their sleep and she teaches classes at Harvard about those dreams. Deirdre has been interested in dreams from a very young age and her search is, in part, about the dreams we have while asleep and their bearing on our waking lives. Support the show...

Jeremy Sherman set out, fairly early in life – to be a hippie. He now asserts that science is his spiritual path. Possessing a naturally questioning mind, Jeremy abandoned the quest for undefined enlightenment to seek out answers to higher truths by applying scientific methods. Working closely with Harvard and Berkley neuroscientist and biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon he seeks to explain the basis on which biological organisms aspire or try. He told me that this aspect of life –...

Michael Smolens has been a serial entrepreneur all his life. He says he went with his gut at every stage. The motivation was never money, it was to do things that were never done before. Even when he fell down, he just continued. Now, approaching the fourth quarter of life, he has labeled himself Collector of Puzzle Pieces. Give it a listen. Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/biz/fund?id=HGJKF8TKYSKRN)

Ruby Hembrom is the founder of Adivaani – a platform for indigenous people’s expression in India. She, has been awarded the Asia Foundation Development Fellowship and an Atlantic Fellowship – among other honors. However, Ruby did not set out in life imagining she would become a publisher and archivist of indigenous literature and culture in India. Born into a Santal tribal family, her formative years were spent with experiences of colorism that affected her deeply. Ultimately, her dream...

Ruth Jeannoel’s mother fled the oppressive Duvalier regime in Haiti and settled in Boston, Massachusetts where Ruth was born. From all accounts, it was hard to be a single mother, without knowing any English and never having had faced the brutal New England winters. Ruth, who learnt Haitian Creole at home and English at School became her mother’s interpreter, as she tried to make her way in the United States. In the absence of money – the church was their sole source of solace and...

Bijayini Satpathy, came of age as a classical Odissi dancer at Nrityagram – a dance village in South India, founded in 1990 by the socialite and danseuse Protima Gauri Bedi. When Bijayini decided to leave Nrityagram and strike out on her own in 2018, she told Marina Harss of the New York Times that she had a (I quote) “strong urge to push into an untouched and unexplored dimension, before it was too late.” And, even though she felt a “shocking sense of loss” of her hold on dance at the...

Imagine you are walking along a road in rural Central India, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. A place where infrastructure is sparse and people continue to live in poverty, many excluded by circumstance to fully participate in India’s heady economic development. It’s quiet, and then you hear the unmistakable low rumble of a Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike’s 4-stroke engine. Then you see it. It’s blue in color and astride it is a venerable European woman. My guest, Ulrike Reinhard, grew up in...

Almost four decades ago, while still in college in India, I played bass in a rock band. My guest today, Rahul Ram, was the bassist in a rival band. Then we lost touch, until one day, in the early 2000s, the song Bandé by the band Indian Ocean for the Bollywood film Black Friday came bursting into the scene. Rahul Ram was ostensibly the band’s front man. In our conversation, he outlines his various interests and how they got channeled, and defined his music and life. Rahul spoke to me from his...

In November 1969, when Sesame Street premiered on Public Television, my guest Dr. Loretta Long was there. As we will hear, based on her fortitude and thinking on her feet, she had landed the role of Susan Robinson - a housewife. Later, her character developed into a working nurse and mother to an adopted son. Sesame Street was pathbreaking in that it aimed to be an influential educational program for American children by combining rigorous research, educational content and entertainment; to...

Steven Lavine spent 29 years of his working life as the president of California Institute of the Arts –  CALARTS. Having grown up in a small Wisconsin town, Steven could not wait to go out into the world. As he puts it, invoking his distant cousin Bob Dylan, he wanted to explore where the wind was blowing. After attending Ivy League institutions and becoming a professor for a while, he landed a job at the Rockefeller Foundation to discover the possibility that elite institutions could be...

Trained as an engineer at the Indian Institutes of Technology or IIT, my guest Rahul Banerjee gave up the securities of an Indian middle class life to serve his country. He threw his lot behind the indigenous Bhil tribal folk in central India. Along the way, he has completed a PhD, become an Ashoka Fellow and completed numerous research projects for organizations internationally. But the central focus, as Banerjee explains, has been a lifelong process of unlearning and then organizing to...

Amy Lehman, my guest today, trained to be a surgeon to be a better doctor than the ones who treated her when she was younger. She found her passion in working with underserved communities along the shores of Lake Tangayanika in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the past decade, her original dream of creating the Lake Tangayanika Floating Health Clinic has evolved into something much more holistic. Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/biz/fund?id=HGJKF8TKYSKRN)

Sarnath Banerjee, is best known for his incisive portrayal of South Asian characters in his graphic novels and serial graphic publications. But a conversation with him quickly reveals his multifaceted search for purpose and the right medium to express the mystical cities and apparitional characters that, it would seem, took up residence in his imagination and were struggling to come out and speak to all of us. At once, a science communicator, filmmaker, historian, anthropologist - artist –...

Pablo Corral Vega is an Ecuadoran photographer and winner of many accolades including a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University. From a childhood balanced between a patient and practical lawyer father and a very creative mother – as he tells it –...

From an early age, Mitchell Kaplan was afforded the freedom to go explore life and discover possibilities. For him, finding an exact focal point for his passion for a literary life came in stages. It took from being and English major in Colorado where...

Top underwater director of photography shares how his early dreams drove his passion to succeed.

From a privileged Bangladeshi background to following the dream of giving voice to the voiceless through photography.

Thinking about the outstanding career of photographer Maggie Steber, the words Resilience, Persistence and Faith in the World – come to mind. Having found photography quite by chance, Steber has followed her passion from her first journalism job in...

Dr. Isaac Prilleltensky is Vice Provost for Institutional Culture. He speaks here to Media for Change founder Sanjeev Chatterjee about his very humble beginnings in Argentina and his dream of a world that cares about community and happiness. Dr. Prilleltensky is a leading figure in the field of critical psychology and is the former dean of the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami. Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/biz/fund?id=HGJKF8TKYSKRN)