Down to Brown

Lahari Rao is a quirky, opinionated, & curious gal who vowed on her 18th birthday, that her Indian-American confusion would be remedied in her adulthood if she pretended she was a brown Carrie Bradshaw. Instead, Lahari found herself in the following situations: negotiating with her dad the number of years she could date on her own before he put her profile in a Telugu marriage bureau site, being the only South Asian person in a 700-person Cheerios factory in rural Georgia, and frantically pulling beach towels to cover her body to avoid getting ‘even darker,’ while her friends embraced the sun. When she wanted to talk about being Indian socially, she was met with a lot of enthusiasm about butter chicken, arranged marriage, and Slumdog Millionaire (“Jai Ho!”) At 30, she decided enough was enough—she would awaken from her denial, embrace her identity, and dive deeper in its psychology.

Now, in this podcast, Lahari talks with every day, badass brown women about topics that were often taboo at the South Asian-American dinner table. Here is a community obsessed with the question: What would life look like if we freed ourselves from the pressures of American assimilation and South Asian stigma, to be our best, most authentic selves?