Stories Seldom Told

Charmi Chheda is a filmmaker, writer, and theatre director in Bhutan. Charmi moved to Bhutan ten years ago from India and now sees Bhutan as her home. Charmi has made two feature films, Ganganam Girl and Bulwa and is currently working with 'Samuh', Bhutan’s first streaming platform as a Creative Director. " I feel somewhere, since everyone is constantly putting up a show. The world expects you to...

Anthony Swann has been in education for 16 years as a classroom teacher and instructional coach. He has had the privilege of teaching every elementary grade except kindergarten. In 2021, Anthony became the first sitting teacher ever to be appointed to the State Board of Education by the US Governor of Virginia. Anthony is currently the assistant principal of Monterey Elementary in Roanoke, Virgini...

Remona Aly is a journalist and broadcaster in the UK with a passion for faith, lifestyle and identity. She writes for The Guardian , is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought and has been a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Something Understood , a half hour programme which explores a theme across different faiths and traditions through music, prose and poetry. She is also a podcast hos...

Ayisha Malik is author of the Sofia Khan novels, This Green and Pleasant Land and The Movement . She was winner of the Diversity Book Awards 2020, and teaches creative writing for the academies, Faber and Curtis Brown. Ayisha lives in London. "I just had a lot of questions about the culture of noise we live in. And I was also a bit fed up of people just constantly having opinions, which to me, tha...

Dr. Oshrit Birvadker is a foreign and defense policy expert, with expertise in the area of India and the Persian Gulf. Oshrit is a regular columnist in Haaretz, a writer of the “Miss India” Column in the leading business news website in Israel, The Marker . Oshrit is the first Bene Israeli, Indian Jewish person who has appeared on Israeli news channels as a commentator for India’s affairs, written...

Jodi Anderson Jr. is the CEO and Co-founder of Rézme, an EdTech platform that facilitates economic and social mobility through specialized recruiting, professional development, and personalized learning for justice-impacted citizens. After serving ten years in juvenile and adult prisons, Jodi earned his BA in Political Science and an MA in Education from Stanford University. His non-profit PipeDre...

Paul Stevenson is a lived experience ambassador at Genius Within and a public speaker. Genius Within is a social enterprise established in the UK to help neurodivergent people unlock their talents, whilst acknowledging and celebrating that this diversity forms part of the rich tapestry of human experience. They advise governments on policy and provide consultancy to businesses, driving systemic ch...

“So, when you get embedded in a network, what happens is your freedom to think wider than what the interests of the network represents is compromised. What happens is that your faithfulness to a tradition becomes unfortunately, unfaithfulness to your own personal integrity. Because there are very many questions with which you’re struggling in your life. And no system in the world, no religious ins...

Seema Anand is a  mythologist, a storyteller with a focus on women’s narratives and a specialty in the erotic literature of ancient India. Seema believes that the narrative of the Kama Sutra was deliberately silenced. It was a brave book that tried to change the position of women in society, and was the first text to give women a platform of equality. Her seminal work ‘The Arts of Seduction’,...

Octoli Tuccu is a Learning & Development expert with over a decade of experience. Octoli is originally from Nagaland in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, in the northeast of India. She has lived in five countries including the USA, Qatar, Thailand, China and India. Octoli has trained over a thousand professionals globally on various leadership development subjects. "People would consta...

Jo Uff is a Confidence Coach based in England for women who want to lead a more fulfilling life, but feel that something is holding them back from being, doing, and having more of what they want. Jo supports them to reignite their interest in life, move forward, and achieve the changes they want to make. She works with them to define their future with intention, overcome the personal blocks holdin...

Richard Thomas and his wife Susanna have led Hillside Church in Wimbledon for 27 years, where he is the pastor. Richard also serves as chaplain to The Priory Hospital, the Royal Marsden Hospital and Cancer Centre London. He is passionate about how we respond spiritually in our darkest hours. "Historically, epilepsy was believed to be caused by demons. So that automatically put anybody who had a se...

Christos Demetriou is an entrepreneur, music producer, songwriter and pastor. Chris’ commercial history embraces multiple areas of business activity, including a sports promotion and public relations company, a television broadcast network (with affiliates in 28 countries), an entertainment exchange portal, a media rights and brokerage business (still active after 32 years) and a registered c...

Nicola Horlick is a British investment fund manager nicknamed 'superwoman' in the media for balancing her high-flying finance career with bringing up six children. She graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in Jurisprudence, later joining SG Warburg as a graduate trainee in 1983. She was initially placed in the asset management division of Mercury Asset Management, where sh...

Ashok Ferrey is the author of five books, all of them nominated either for Sri Lanka's Gratiaen Prize or its State Literary Award. He read pure mathematics at Oxford and was a builder in London before becoming a writer. Ashok Ferrey's new book, The Unmarriageable Man just won the Gratiaen Prize - Sri Lanka's premier literary prize founded by Michael Ondaatje. In a parallel world Ashok is an archit...

Vanessa Maria is a DJ, Broadcaster at Foundation FM, and a host at Resident Advisor. Named as one of the most important young people in music, Vanessa has made her mark on radio stations across the country sharing her love for underground UK music. She’s been busy making appearances at Boiler room, Dazed Magazine, Warehouse Project and HÖR in Berlin.  Vanessa’s work in and around mental healt...

Monica Alcazar-Duarte is a Mexican-British multi-disciplinary visual artist, whose work acknowledges her indigenous heritage while exploring current ideals of progress. Her work references Western society’s obsession with speed, expansion, and resource accumulation as an index of advancement, at a time in which ecological disaster looms. It considers other ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the...

Carlos Hidalgo has more than four decades of executive management expertise and development of strategic programs for Fortune 500, mid-market  companies and non-profits. With an extensive knowledge of Latin America, Carlos has developed programs for Logoi (publishing), the Government Tourist  Office of Mexico, and for bus builders in Mexico and Brazil. He also has widespread experience o...

Carlos Hidalgo is a Life Design coach, a Corporate Culture Development Consultant, two-time author, TEDx speaker and international keynote speaker. Over the span of the last 25 years, Carlos has held corporate roles, started his own entrepreneurial ventures, led his company to receive multiple Inc. 5000 awards and has served in non-profit organisations. Carlos is now dedicated to helping...

"We all have an unconsious bias, where we're walking down the road, and I could see somebody and I will just presume their life, or wonder what they do, or how many kids they have. I will just be inquisitive like that, because it's in my nature, I think, as a barber." Content warning: This episode deals with themes of sexual exploitation and death. Laura is a competitive powerlifter, mother of fou...

Visit www.audibletrial.com/tharoorassociates for a 30 day free Audible trial and one free book token! #Sponsored “And then when my turn was there, I go to the stage, I realised that I couldn't utter a single word. I was completely, like, nervous, and I couldn't. I was stammering as you know, I was stammering , I was spitting. A lot of struggle was there. So the words were not  coming out...

Visit www.audibletrial.com/tharoorassociates for a 30 day free Audible trial and one free book token! #Sponsored “Forgiveness is quite different. First of all, we do it for ourselves. So, I had to get rid of the bias that I am doing it for somebody else. I am doing it for myself. I don’t want to be carrying around this anger inside me. It’s like a form of taking poison when we are angry with anybo...

Visit www.audibletrial.com/tharoorassociates for a 30 day free Audible trial and one free book token! #Sponsored “There is a basic core principle of the work that I have done all these decades. It is the principle that nobody should be punished simply for what we put into our bodies. There is no legitimate basis in science, in medicine and ethics, the Bible, you name it, for distinguishing between...

Trigger warning to listeners. This episode deals with stories around abortion and racism that could be distressing to some listeners. “Here's an unconscious bias and a cognitive phenomenon. The human brain likes simple causality. So if a case got in front of a jury, the experience from talking to lots of people, including on long flights from one part of the country to another is that, if it comes...

This week’s episode is sponsored by Audible, Visit www.audibletrial.com/tharoorassociates for a 30 day free Audible trial and one free book token! “I don't have to become British, I don't have to become Japanese and I don't have to put on a front or a mask in order to just exist. This is the centre in my body that gives me the validation that I need. That it's fine to just be exactly who I am. And...