Decolonizing Fashion
Our poster for our Sep 22 event last year - ‘Decolonizing Fashion’.
We’re more than halfway through 2019. (What? Where did it go?), and I wanted to take this moment to reflect on everything that’s happened thus far in the SGBG journey.
In January, we had our Los Angeles launch on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Los Angeles! Truly honoured to have collaborated with Enze Apparel & Issey Miyake for the wonderful event. And none other than Madame Gandhi performed at the party! It was truly magical and I’ll dedicate a separate post to it, but you can check out the highlights of the event on our Instagram here.
In March, we were invited to headline the "Young Guns” showcase for India Fashion Week AW’19 c/o the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), Lotus Makeup, & 6Degree! We designed a special custom collection for the show (baby’s first runway!) — check it out here. Completely mental timeline + no sleep for weeks + = a state of pure euphoria by the end of it (perhaps another dedicated post is in order…)
Last month, we hit our 2 Year Anniversary, and kickstarted a sale to commemorate it last week! As a result, we’ve been seeing a lot of fresh faces in the SGBG community, and I’m so happy to welcome them all into the fold.
We’ve been significantly growing our teams of artisans, and in-house marketing, sales, and design crew. Join the team.
Annnnd, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss one of my favourite moments last year. We hosted a panel last September, the content of which I wasn’t able to share with you adequately until now. SGBG threw a panel & showcase in NY -- Decolonizing Fashion -- featuring a number of diaspora creatives discussing their work in relation to memory, culture, & technology. Moderated by Archit Batlaw, speakers included:
Sana Amanat (VP of Content & Character at Marvel Entertainment, the Co-Creator of the first female, Muslim superhero - Kamala Khan),
Fariha Roísin (cultural critic & writer at Al Jazeera, Vice, The Guardian),
Ayanna Wilks (Celebrity PR Director at Wilhelmina), and
Trisha Sakhuja-Walia (CEO at Brown Girl Magazine).
“The biggest problem is, as soon as there’s one representation of one thing, one cultural identity...people have this expectation it has to do everything - it has to solve all the problems.””
It’s been almost a year since, and we’re still in awe of the response that we received. From one attendee: “I wish I’d heard this ten years ago when I was growing up.”
Huge relief. We had no idea whether the event would go well, let alone to this degree. We had less than 3 weeks to ideate, bring aboard this dream team of panelists, find a venue, and bring it all together. We came very (read: VERY) close to cancelling this altogether at several instances. But many late night cross-time zone phone calls, a sufficient mixture of blood sweat tears, and plenty of hugs later, we made it happen. Seeing it come together, seeing the amazing responses, all the fantastic words everyone had to say made all the sleepless nights and caffeine-filled mornings worth it. Thank you all for coming through! You packed out the house, and by the end, completely filled up the street. Thank you to the panelists, the crew, and the excellent libations from @bira91beer. Special thanks to Jivan Gandhi, Gabriel Nathan, Ani Sanyal, and Bryan Hahn for everything, and to Archit Batlaw for moderating so brilliantly.
Standing room only at the SGBG Atelier showcase. Thanks @yojoebow
“It’s important to stay in your lane and understand that race is really complex. We’re writing our stories, we’re creating history, and we’re creating narratives for ourselves. We’re not trying to take up others’ space or narratives.”
Our panel discussed origin stories, personal journeys, how to carve out a space for one’s community, sustainable consumption, and ultimately how to deconstruct norms in multiple industries. There’s so much pressure on minority voices to carry the burden to represent their entire culture/race/religion, no matter what field you’re in, and we discussed the challenges and the responsibilities of constantly being under the microscope because of that. It was an extremely thoughtful and honest conversation that was a perfect fit for our own brand - to build thoughtful, exquisite objects that speak to global culture. I’m proud we were able to make it happen, and it’s a pleasure to finally share this conversation with all of you (better late than never?).
New friends & fits. Anik Khan, Surya Giri, Ani Sanyal, Archit Batlaw
SG and BG with friends who helped us make this event happen - so thankful for each and every one of them! Jivan Gandhi, Archit Batlaw, Joe Bowman, BG, SG, Gabriel Nathan, James Kogan, LucasLucas.
Here’s is the full audio from the event, edited for clarity, and the full transcript is below:
Transcript
Archit Batlaw:
A few shoutouts before we start, so special thanks to SGBG Atelier for hosting this event, and for the parent brand, Bindu Giri, for kind of birthing this occasion. I think we’re all really excited to be here. Ideally, we would have a few more seats, but lovely to see the turnout.
Special shoutouts to Bira for providing free drinks, to Green Room Creative for making this happen. And finally a few more folks - Gabe, John, James. With that, we can get started!
Sana Amanat:
My name is Sana Amanat. I’m VP of Content Development at Marvel Entertainment. I co-created a character named Kamala Khan, who’s a Muslim-American superhero. That’s right Muslims, brown people, and heroes. My go-to karaoke song is Bohemian Rhapsody - it’s a good one to sing.
Trisha Sakhuja-Walia:
Hi everyone, my name is Trisha Sakhuja-Walia, and I’m the CEO at BrownGirlMagazine.Com. I guess my go-to karaoke song would be something from the new Jay-Z-Beyonce album. I’m obsessed with it; I’ve heard it almost seven times. I’ve been at Brown Girl for almost seven years, and this is the first year I went full time.
Fariha Róisín:
Hi, I’m Fariha Roisin, I don’t like karaoke and I don’t like bios, I’m sorry. But I’m a full-time journalist, I write about pop culture and race. I’ve been doing that for almost ten years, so I’m happy to be here.
Ayanna Wilks:
Hi, my name is Ayanna Wilks. Right now, I’m the Celebrity PR Director at Wilhemina Models. My go-to karaoke song is anything ’90s R&B, so Tony Braxton, Mary J. Blige, Tevin Campbell, you name it, I’m singing it.
Origin Stories
Archit:
I want to get into everyone’s origin story, and Sana, maybe that’s a good question for you. Joke if you know what comics are. No one laughed, it’s fine. But first maybe, Surya, why don’t you explain a little bit behind this recent collection, behind the origins of SGBG, and then we can kind of move down everyone giving just a little about how you got started in your career, what kind of roadblocks you may have faced and how you dealt with those.
SG:
See, first off, not bitten by a radioactive fashion designer or a film composer. The journey was very abrupt and pretty spontaneous in the sense of I come from an orchestration background, I come from a background of detail and thinking about what does one string, what does just one violinist do in the fourth chair of the fifth row, what is she doing that creates something that is able to suss out some emotion from the listener at the end goal, right? How do you take that one detail and how does it magnify out? And I very accidentally came across to know … I didn't know my mom was so dope. I had no idea. I had really no idea. About three years ago I was still working in film and I was home and we were shooting this little documentary in Kanchipuram which is a little weaving town in India and I came across the whole story of what my mom does and my mind was blown, my mind was really blown. What she does is she's from a particular family in Kerala that protected the heritage and a lot of the handlooms that had died during and post colonization. And machinization, industrialization, the growth of power loom, completely obliterated any chance that handloom had to actually grow, survive, and sustain. These artisans are out of work. They have no skills that would be able to be passed on to the next generation. And what she does is she revives these looms. She revives a lot of these looms that have completely died out. And shooting this documentary I realized like “Holy! That is incredible. How much magic and story and heritage and roots are coded into this textile already in the warp and weft?” and it was just mind blowing to me, it was fucking mind blowing. I just lost every conceivable notion of like “Okay, you can create this detail and you can let it sing through this thing. So, that's how I'm here.”
Ayanna:
Just like anyone else striving to get into the fashion industry, you really have to have the experience to break into it. It’s not something you can necessarily apply for on Linkedin, but you really have to get the experience, and have the background.
I started off as an intern at many different places, but notably at Diane von Furstenberg, and I was able to climb the ladder there and work myself into a PR Assistant job. Before I actually got that job, I was able to interview for a position at Roc Nation and I didn’t get it, but fast forward to when my time at DvF was coming to an end, the universe was just conspiring that it was the same person I interviewed with about three years ago, and so I ended up getting the position there at Roc Nation for about five years where I handled PR plans for growing artists, new artists on the label, but also for management clients, which were rappers like Meek Mill, Fabolous, and everyone you could think of that’s under the brand there.
I really was interested in going back into fashion, and the opportunity came for me to head to Wilhemina, which was awesome because now I’m able to use both my experience in music and in fashion to grow their celebrity roster and recruit new clients for them. Yeah, that’s my career.
Fariha:
I had a very strange trajectory into my career. I dropped out of law school and decided that I wanted to be writer, which my parents were very thrilled to hear…that’s a joke. They weren’t. And I started off as an intern for this magazine/website/blog called StyleLikeU and I worked there for a year and a half. I got this opportunity to be a junior critic for IndieWire, and that sort of launched my career as it is now. That was sort of priceless education because I got to meet Olivier Assayas and Ang Lee and all of these amazing filmmakers and understand what the contribution is to film, and I think it’s so exciting to see how film has changed so much in the last 8 years that I’ve been working in it.
Representation really was a key point for me. Through that I started this podcast called 2 Brown Girls, which focused on the lack of representation in film and TV from the perspective of a black and brown woman. So my co-host was this journalist called Zeba Blay who now works for The Huffington Post, and the importance of race in every dialog, whether its fashion and film or TV, that’s sort of my primary focus still: the necessary requirement of thinking more globally about how we represent people in general.
Sana Amanat:
I think there’s a very good chance that everyone in this room is here because they all sort of started out as some version of an outlier or a misfit. And I think that’s where it all began for me as a brown girl in New Jersey of all places, and not feeling connected to the people around me and my community. Not feeling like I saw myself out in the world, and so I always knew from a very young age that I wanted to teach everyone about the fact that Muslims aren’t so bad. So I thought I had to do that by being a political scientist or going into journalism. I was completely wrong because I was terrible at it. And so I ended up in publishing and I actually ended up in comics in a very happenstance way, and I realized I was really good at it and I love making comics, and I love superheroes.
At that point I also realized that I had the power to actually create some characters and what I realized is the incredible importance of storytelling on our pop culture but just the creative arts and how it really changes people, the consciousness of a society. And in very subtle ways, in the stories that we tell, are the stories that we actually take in and that we educate the rest of the community; we educate ourselves about what people are actually like. And so, what better way to do that than through the biggest sort of cultural phenomenon that is Marvel and the entertainment world? And somehow I got away with them letting me create a Muslim character in this country with the name Marvel in the actual superhero title. So her name is Ms. Marvel, so that’s my spiel.
Representation
Archit:
I think you have this great quote that I really like, which is crafting myths to define myths. That’s part of this storytelling narrative, that we have certain constructions and certain expectations we try to live up to. And maybe all it takes to remove those is to create new narratives.
Sana:
Oh sure, yeah. Okay. Well, I gave a TED talk once about the concept of myth and mythology and the idea of the importance of being able to craft a myth and how it tells so much about identity, about cultural identity, and also about who you potentially want to become and mythology of course is such a big part of like just the superhero world in general but the entire point of it is that we consume content that — at least when I was younger — used to tell me so much about myself. One, not seeing myself in media made me feel like I had to reject myself because “Oh, I'm not Tiffani Amber Thiessen, oh my god!” and I love her but I'm not her and if I don't see myself out there, then I start becoming not only feeling invisible but feeling like I'm not enough. So, the concept of being able to create your own mythology and tell your own story because I think that's what's happening right now is that we're all sort of in a point where we realize we not only have the ability to tell our stories but we have to tell our stories. We have to become a part of the global landscape in a way that we are legitimized. And oddly enough, I think, doing it the way that I was able to do, I feel lucky but it's a mass media entertainment machine that now somehow people have validated this character because Marvel is behind it and which is why I think it's important that we sort of create as many allies as possible. This room is really incredible that way. Create as many allies as possible so people understand that we're a force so that we can go to the Wilhelmina Models and to the Marvel Entertainments of the world and let them know that it's not just one of me. There's a million of me out there. So, just the importance of being able to do it and doing it now when people are looking for it is incredibly, incredibly important.
Archit:
Yeah, and I think, Fariha, you have a few thoughts on this? I know you’ve written a lot about M.I.A. and about that thrill of seeing someone who looks like you and is, in some way, an icon, but there’s also maybe a little nuance there. So I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this.
Fariha:
Yeah, I interviewed M.I.A. earlier this year at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), and it was one of the most thrilling and exciting moments of my career, but I have a lot of problems with M.I.A., namely because she is problematic, as a lot of celebrities are. The sad thing about M.I.A. is that she’s the only one - she’s the only brown person we have. We’ve seen Riz, we’ve seen Mindy, we’ve seen Dev, like there’s all of these names that we can now turn to and be like, “Oh yes, we’re not alone.” But there is really nobody who occupies the landscape like M.I.A. does. She’s political, she’s brash, and that’s exciting. It’s exciting to see a woman like that.
I wrote this piece called “In the Defense of Nuance”, which was basically about trying to understand the complexity of being brown in this country where race is oftentimes written and talked about in a binary, so black and white. And brownness is such a murky thing in between, where it means that a lot of brown folks often feel like they align closer to whiteness. But then when you don’t, you don’t also understand that you don’t exist in the same way as a black person does in America, for example. So she has said some frustrating things about Black Lives Matter, which is just like dismissive.
So I think I am really curious about, as a brown person, how I navigate the landscape and what I write about. And I think it is important to stay in your lane and understand that race is really complex, especially in North America. And it is really exciting to see we are taking up space and we are doing it in our own way. We’re writing our stories, as you said, we’re creating history and we’re creating narratives for ourselves. We’re not trying to take up other people’s space, we’re not trying to take other narratives. But about being a Muslim woman who has tattoos and has sex and all of these other things, and what does that mean as a modern Muslim woman? As a Muslim woman who believes herself to be Muslim, how do I write about something like that, which there’s not a lot of literature or conversation around.
Ayanna:
The things that you go through on a daily basis aren’t similar to theirs, you know. Whether it’s the way you wear your hair, or what you look like when you come to work, just the general discomfort. So, obviously, with everything happening in these times in America and what we have to deal with, people getting killed by the police, working in a black environment at Roc Nation, I can’t even say it was easier to really talk about those uncomfortable things because there are still people who aren’t black that don’t necessarily want to have those conversations. And yet it is a company that was run and owned by black people, but it was still something that wasn’t being tackled. I’ve seen it in the white environment that I’ve had to go through, and more black environment, and yet it is a little more comfortable to wear your hair in braids and not be judged. And overall, I think it’s important to have those conversations. And being an outsider now working back in fashion, you know, you go through things every day that people don’t necessarily relate to you on, and you just kind of have to be the bigger person sometimes, especially tackling issues, because you don’t want to be labeled an aggressor or creating situations because ultimately it is going to come back on you as a black woman.
Archit:
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, and Surya, I know that you have a somewhat similar experience, in terms of staying in the US and moving back to India, and kind of having another interesting coming home story, if you will, because now maybe you feel like you should belong, but potentially don’t? I’d be interested in hearing how that’s different from Ayanna’s, what your experience was there…
Surya:
Absolutely. I would assume a lot of you relate to the idea of you being sort of from more than one culture or being privy to all or being beholden to more than one culture that has weight, it has traditions, it has memory, it has resonances that you have to throw your weight behind, whether that be ritual, whether that be those very traditions or whether that’d be the way you go forward in your daily lives, right? I think you do have to pay homage to that, but it's really difficult when you're coming from …
So, my story is that I spent some time the US, I grew up kind of all around the world and this is the first time that I'm back in India, living in India, and it's bizarre because I walk around the streets, (maybe it's the jacket, maybe it's the hair) but it's very clear that I’m not from there, and no one immediately speaks to me in the local language. They immediately speak to me in English. When I'm here, I'm never really quite from here either. I've been asked several times, “Wow! Your English is so good?” I'm like “Wow! Yeah, colonialism does that. It's really dope, 200 years yeah.”
There have been several instances where we've shown the clothes to particular folks in the know in the fashion industry and they say “Wow! This is from India? Really?! Wow! Okay, I don't believe you,” because in particular circles I think India is always seen as perpetuating this sort of BPO culture. It's always this culture of back office & operations and [when approaching the global mainstream,]
There's always a sense of “You're from this “third world developing nation”. What do you know? What can you contribute to the global narrative?” And going back to Sana’s and Fariha’s point in particular, I think that for the global diaspora of any culture at this point, I think voices, technology has made that available, technology has given everyone the power to actually speak to some degree, right?
It’s a very specific moment in time where I think POC voices can come forward and… It’s a necessity, not an option, to be able to push that story forward. I think that’s very important. I think it’s a point where the entire globe, and we’re, looking at a room that is mad diverse. There is acceptance out there, and it’s just really about speaking about that and pushing that forward.
Archit:
I’d be interested to hear from some of you, how you’ve negotiated tradition and your own modernity, or coming into yourself, but still being true to your roots.
Fariha:
Like Surya, I’m a third-culture kid. I was born in Canada, raised in Australia. My dad lives in Abu Dhabi, I now live here. So my understanding of myself, but also race, is very complicated and very messy and nuanced, which is why I think colonization has affected everybody. Everybody in this room has been impacted by it. And so especially as a Muslim woman who still gets stopped at the airport and being an immigrant…you know, the Muslim ban was really an interesting time to be alive, where I was like, “Wow, I might not be allowed into this country.”
Sana:
Because the problem is, as soon as there’s one representation of one thing, one cultural identity, one racial, sexual, whatever it is, people have this expectation that it has do everything, solve all the problems, and I had a question from a journalist when Ms. Marvel first came out, which was, “Oh, so okay, so she’s a young Muslim, she’s from Jersey City, ok interesting, interesting, interesting. So she’s 16, cool, so are you going to be tackling, like, the issues of child marriage in Islam?” And I was like, “Whaaaaaa- She’s just trying to get a date, you know, and she can’t!” I was like, that’s the issues we’re trying to tackle and to kind of normalize it. But it is kind of crazy how people want us to solve the problems…
I hate when every Muslim narrative has to be about terrorism, because it’s not. Sometimes it’s about frickin’ cheeseburgers, and I think that’s the most relatable thing and that’s how we change conversations and I totally agree, that’s absolutely why we need a lot of more it.
Trisha:
I agree with the burden, because we feel the burden at Brown Girl all the time. We’ve created this space and we’re so grateful to have this space. But at the same time, we can’t answer every question and we can’t cover every single identity. And there are so many times where we’re looking at our calendar and we’re covering basically every holiday there is, every national day there is from an American standpoint, from a South Asian standpoint, from a Muslim standpoint, from a Hindu standpoint, from a Black Lives Matter standpoint, then from a Spanish standpoint, so it’s like, there are so many facets that we’re trying to cover that it’s almost like, it’s impossible, we’re never going to do fully right. We can always try. And our staff is diverse, but it could always be more diverse, right? I think our identity has so many layers to it that being a Hindu Indian-American, I can easily hang out with my Muslim friends for Eid and probably know more about their own food than I know about mine. So that’s the world we live in, why not be able to write about it?
Conscious Consumption
Archit:
We’re going to shift a little bit to conscious consumption. I think, at least to me, this global diaspora, these kind of racial issues, are part and parcel with consumption and how we consume - media, fashion etc - so I’d be interested to hear what role sustainability plays in your consumption, if any. How you kind of factor that into your clothing choices, your food choices etc. And maybe, Surya, you can kind of kick this off because I know you have thoughts on sustainability.
Surya:
So I run a brand…I spend a lot of time working with a lot of weavers in India…so everything you see around you actually, including this crazy thing over here is hand-woven and hand-embroidered, and every single piece takes upwards of at least 100 [hours], all the way up to 1000 hours of work. And what’s fascinating to me in this day of very voracious consumption - you have consumption that’s pretty much untenable, that’s not going to last - what’s interesting is when you can take the machinization out of the picture, if you take the cog out of the machine, and you give the artisanship and the skill back to the artisans who once carried that forward, you can actually build these incredible pieces that have story. I really don’t think the world needs more clothes, the world doesn’t need more clothes. I think you need objects, you need things with emotion, you need things that will last you, things you can pass on generations down the line. Things that mean something - I think objects need to have soul, and I think clothing is another form of that. From the textile up, everything that we do is built by hand. I don’t think that the machine can be as powerfully precise as the hand, which is…there’s power behind that, there’s definitely power behind that.
Archit:
I think you’re right. It’s that trace of the hand, knowing that everything is different, knowing that everything was created one of a kind in a way, that makes something really unique.
Fariha:
How do we support local businesses? Understanding that I can be a conscious consumer has been a really vital part of me, understanding that when I contribute to a cycle, to something like SGBG, I’m helping so many different people. It’s like a family operation and it’s sustainable…
As a brown femme, understanding that wellness has never been offered to me. I wasn’t raised with an understanding that I should look after myself. My mom suffers from schizophrenia, bipolar, and borderline, so she’s incredibly mentally afflicted, to say it in the nicest way possible, and so a lot of my life, I was her caretaker, and I never really prioritized myself, and I never really prioritized my health. And, sort of early on in my adulthood, I was faced with a lot of things. My own mental illness and really feeling shitty about myself. Just my body turning on me, like, “Oh shit, like I need to really start looking after myself.” So wellness and self-care, especially in black and brown communities is so important for us to talk about because a lot of us weren’t raised with that understanding. So, in South Asian communities, mental illness is such a stigma still, and so, you know, talking about the fact that my mom has schizophrenia has opened up a lot of different conversations with people who read my work, but it’s been really sad to see that so many of us don’t know what to say. I get emails all the time - I wrote this one piece in 2015 that was called “Living With My Mother’s Mental Illness” for VICE and it went viral, and I still get letters from people saying: This is the story of my mother. Or: This is the story of my father. I totally know what you’re talking about, and I felt alone my whole life and I’ve read this piece and now I understand that I’m not alone. I mean, that’s such a wonderful feeling, but it just goes to show that we need a lot of transparency, but we also need to talk more about how to move forward as a community.
Archit:
I would just be interested, one by one, in hearing from you - what’s one way you prioritize your wellness, in your daily, weekly, monthly life?
I meditate every day, for 15 minutes at least, and that’s one way I stay sane in this busy and chaotic world. I have that on deck, it’s on you now.
Sana:
For me, I also pray. I have my own version of prayer. I’m supposed to be praying five times a day, but I’ve decided that I have to do it the way that I want to do it, and it gives me a lot of clarity. I also try to make sure that I am reading an actual book, like not a digital device, but actual paper, and I try to do that every evening, make sure everything is shut off.
Trisha:
Honestly just saying that I’m not going to look at my phone for 30 minutes, literally that is so hard. It is so hard to be like: I can’t answer a Slack message, I cannot answer an email, and no, I will not respond to your text, and I will definitely not pick up your phone call for 30 minutes. And that is so tough. I think the second thing is, and I think this is really silly but it really helps, is turning on ocean sounds before you go to sleep. Honestly, that is just the smallest, simplest thing that I can add to my day.
Fariha:
Yeah, meditation is prayer, they sort of go hand in hand. I also get acupunctured twice a week - I have an acupuncture column, which is really wild. And it’s really changed my life in a lot of ways, where like it’s really forced me to confront my body, and I love it.
Ayanna:
Not bringing work home is so helpful. In terms of recharging physical wellness, running has been super helpful to me. I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon earlier this year.
Surya:
Immigrant parents always had this narrative of: “Fit in, assimilate, do the thing, be part of the mainstream culture, and move forward.” You leave your culture, you leave your prayer, you leave your Zen at home. For me, trying to navigate all that with respect to operating in several global cultures, you know, what does prayer mean today, what does religion even mean today? When my mum tries to teach me, for the sake of my own sanity, some mantra or some piece of tradition, for me to say, it just won’t work for me. I think there are a lot of questions there.
Archit:
These are all good answers. Guys, this is the speed round though, so you gotta keep up. That was not quick. I’m looking for five words or less!
Fariha:
Especially in this world right now, and I think like in a post-Trump world, more than ever before, I don’t know, maybe, we need to work together. But that means that we need to listen and we need to talk, and a lot of black and brown people need to take up space [and] from that, birth so much compassion.
Trisha:
I’m brown, you’re black, but for two minutes, it doesn’t matter because let’s just be, and I hope our kids see it as. We’ve peeled a layer so much and we’ve talked about it so much, and we’ve worked through all our demons together that the next generation may not have to anymore. So that’s what I’m really hoping for, and I think in order to do that, these collective spaces that we’re in today where it doesn’t matter what race or color or background we’re from, we’re just here together and we’re just being, and that’s it.
Sana:
The story of Kamala Khan is actually the story of not finding herself as like a Muslim or a South Asian or a girl from Jersey. It's a story of her just finding herself as a person and what her identity is and it is about the concept of the fact that like you're born, you're Muslim, you're South Asian, you're whatever it is, all these different categories you end up belonging to and all of these definitions that society’s imposed upon them and you thinking that you have to live within that space and that's a really hard thing. I think a lot of minorities struggle with that is like “Oh, these are all the boxes I have to fill. These are the definitions of those boxes.” So, the hardest part is pushing yourself outside of that and I think everyone probably has done that in some capacity or the other is being able to push past the definitions around those categories and like finding your own unique identity. And I think that's the stuff that people actually end up connecting on more than anything else, the sort of human experience … but that's a really hard challenge and that’s something that we have to really encourage in the next generation, our nephews, our nieces, our kids, encourage that individual identity above any other identity. Be proud of those other identities, racial, cultural, be proud of them but also kind of within that find that unique being within it all.
Archit:
I think just to summate, and I think Sana did a great job of this, it’s just like finding what’s common ground, leaving room for compassion potentially, and just like finding what is individual about you beyond the cross-sections you live in.
At this point, unless someone has a burning question that they really want answered - this is your one chance to do it, this is never going to come again - we are going to break for some food, some beverage, we have beer, we have wine. Give us five minutes to set all that up, and it’s just going to be a party. Feel free to browse the clothes, and I’ll have Surya have a few words before we move out.
Surya:
One, thank you so much for coming through, I really really appreciate it. I can see friends who have actually traveled from not only across the states, but also across the country, across the universe. Going back to that earlier point and what you guys were saying - I think the idea that we’re not alone. Family and friends are - not to sound hokey or anything - there’s comfort. There’s comfort in that. And seeing you guys all here, really, really…I feel full. So, thank you, thank you so much.
Couple shoutouts - our beautiful moderator, Archit. Jivan out back. But most importantly, my mom, somewhere out there. She has an incredible story. One day, I hope to be 1% as cool as she is, and you should all go meet her. Go say hi, check out the clothes.