Encompassing over a billion people on earth, South Asians have taken over every industry and every domain—including podcasting.

But despite one in every six people being of South Asian descent, the podcast world has remained woefully unrepresentative of desi shows.

Enter The Woke Desi.

Female-led, South Asian, and with hosts in their twenties and thirties—formative years for career and family, and characteristic examples of first-generation children raised in the United States during the South Asian population boom—The Woke Desi is a podcast created by and for brown women (and men!).

 

Delving into topics whispered about behind closed doors within brown communities, TWD has explored issues like miscarriage and infertility, with gutwrenching and powerful stories from guests like Shreeda Tailor. They’ve confronted their own straight privilege with LGBTQ activist Priya Arora. They’ve argued over whether dating apps make brown millennials less committed, and shared funny stories about their own experiences navigating the opposite sex, a unique issue faced by this generation as they reconcile their parents’ era of arranged marriage with the concept of globalized love marriages.

 

 

Founded by Annika Sharma, with co-hosts Nehal Tenany and Resham Dhaduk, The Woke Desi came together over social media when published author Annika recognized the rarity of brown voices on podcasting stations. She put out a call for co-hosts on a Facebook group for desi women, and after a series of interviews, landed the dream partnership with Nehal and Resham, a digital marketing specialist and blogger extraordinaire and health and wellness entrepreneur, respectively. Together, the three women solicit ideas from newsworthy hot topics, discussion boards where women post about their day-to-day issues, and conversations with friends. Guests are selected from calls put out to the audience, allowing the community to have a voice in stories that the TWD hosts may not be able to tell firsthand but strive to give accurate representation to.

 

Ultimately, the hope is that topics like mental health, relationships, troubles with in-laws, childbearing and sexual health, will become mainstream—and more than that, that the discussion on a public forum will allow a sense of community rather than leaving South Asian brothers and sisters to suffer in silence. And when a one-billion strong population comes together for positive change, TWD believes they’ll be unstoppable.

Find out all about this podcast on www.thewokedesi.com