For many years as a public speaking coach, I have encouraged people to share their personal stories and open up their lives to strangers. Sometimes this involves deeply emotional and tender subjects that aren’t easy to address but can have a powerful impact in opening eyes and sharing perspective. I have to say, it is much harder to do this in practice than to teach it.
I have a memory from when I must have been around seven or eight years old. My mother and I lived in South Jamaica, Queens in an apartment that we rented upstairs from a very large family on the ground floor. I think we were sitting in the kitchen. I remember that it...
There are no hard and fast rules for what I look like to people in terms of ethnicity. Often it seems to depend on context and who I am with. Although Indians in the US frequently recognize me, I remember an Indian-American girl I met once years ago who...
Whenever I pick up the phone and the person asks for Sharada Chandrasekaran with flawless accuracy, I immediately know that this has got to be from an Indian call center making me some sort of offer. It gives me particular amusement when they follow up the...
This may be a contradiction but I love to travel and I hate being a tourist. My best travel memories are sleeping in the living room of someone's (if not my own) extended family or sitting cross-legged on a mat around a cooking-fire. I prefer to be somewhere as an...
My mother has never offered me a whole lot of information about her relationship with my father. He was an international graduate student in chemistry at Michigan State University. She was an undergraduate student in urban planning. It was the 70s. He had...
Two moments touched me in my identity feels at the airport in Goa: 1) I saw an ad for sunscreen with a very pale woman (at least ten shades lighter than nearly any locals I have encountered since I have been in Southern India) promising to let you enjoy the sun...
Before my trip, an Indian friend told me not to expect to find anything in particular on my visit to India and not to be bound by any specific expectations. She said I would see vast contradictions and it would be impossible to simplify India into one thing or even a...
I have what I refer to as the “universal brown girl” look. I have caramel brown skin, dark brown eyes and black curly hair. As far as global diversity goes, I may posses some of the most geographically non-specific physical traits possible. If I keep my...