NRI Affairs, Pause with Nandini

Send us Fan Mail Australia-India Relations, Dissent, and Digital Resistance In this episode of Pause with Nandini, host Nandini Sen Mehra brings together an exceptional panel of journalists, commentators, and activists to unpack the complex realities shaping India today and their ripple effects on Australia-India relations and the NRI diaspora. As geopolitical alignment strengthens between the two...

Send us Fan Mail We speak to Zia Ahmad OAM on his wonderful achievement and recognition as the first Muslim to receive the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to journalism  and the second member of his family to receive the nation’s highest civilian honour. Zia Ahmad is the editor-in-chief of the Australasian Muslim Times, AMUST, the country’s leading independent Muslim newspaper and new...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Aditya Sondhi is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India, a scholar, and an Ambedkarite. He frequently lectures on the application of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s constitutional philosophy in modern jurisprudence.  He joins us for a special Dalit History Month episode in association with Hindus for Human Rights Australia, and takes us in chamber for a free wheeling conversation...

Send us Fan Mail Mohamed Alharbi, a part of the core campaign leadership that brought Zohran Mamdani's bid for Mayor of New York to a historic win, unpacks how people centred politics triumphed. An exclusive Pause with Nandini catch up on the sidelines of Australian Progress 2026.  We speak of strategy and tactics but more about working with heart. He also reflects on what this win means for...

Send us Fan Mail To provide 10 million girls access to education in the next 10 years -  no easy feat but also not beyond the realm of possibility for an exceptional organisation, Educate Girls, which has made history as the the first Indian organisation to win the prestigious 2025 Ramon Magsaysay award.  With Gayatri Nair Lobo at the helm, Educate Girls is working at the grassroots, bringing mill...

Send us Fan Mail Four of the five founding members of The Reserved Compartment, Aleena, Gautam, Daniel and Abhijit join me to talk about their first-of-its-kind poetry initiative - The Reserved Compartment. The fifth, Shripad could not join us.  The Reserved Compartment is a pioneering, community-driven initiative to amplify Dalit, Ambedkarite, gender-inclusive voices through spoken word poetry, s...

Send us Fan Mail Part 2 of a conversation with four of the five founding members of The Reserved Compartment - Aleena, Gautam, Daniel and Abhijit.  The Reserved Compartment is a pioneering, community-driven initiative to amplify Dalit, Ambedkarite, gender-inclusive voices through spoken word poetry, storytelling, music, and performance.  By reclaiming the term "Reserved Compartment," whi...

Send us Fan Mail Sneha and Runjhun from the Aunties Fund join me to talk about The Aunties Fund. The Aunties Fund is the first permanent fund for South-Asian women, by South-Asian women. They are on a mission to raise $100,000 for culturally informed services for women facing domestic abuse. The data is startling. 1-3 migrant women face some form of domestic abuse. Many are South Asian. Visa and D...

Send us Fan Mail The British novelist, Rajeev Balasubramanyam, now a somewhat unlikely Instagram influencer, joins us on Pause with Nandini to explore the difficult questions of the psyche, and of our times. We speak of the spiritual and the political, mental health, wounded narcissism, a personal journey through sex, drugs and alcohol to a healing through self-enquiry, and the reasons for a re-en...

Send us Fan Mail Giri Sivaraman, Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner, spoke with Nandini Sen Mehra about the larger questions of racism in Australia, the institutions and structures that need an overhaul, and the genuine concerns and issues that everyday Australians are facing, across communities and ethnicities.  He talks about the critical need to implement the anti Racism Framewor...

Send us Fan Mail When Rabbi Shergill says, ‘write the truest line you know,’ he isn’t only quoting Hemingway. In a way, he is capturing a lifetime’s quest for authenticity.  In word, in artistic expression , and in navigating a life that didn't always fit into neat boxes.  In this soulful conversation, he speaks of the awakening of his passion for Panjabi, which for him is the language of lov...

Send us Fan Mail The 2025 Australian federal election has been called for May 3, 2025. Members of the 48th Parliament of Australia will be elected. All seats of the House of Representatives (150 compared to 151 in the previous election) and 40 of the 76 seats in the Senate will be contested. Two exceptional thinkers and leaders, Sukhmani Khorana and Varsha Yajman join me on Pause to talk elections...

Send us Fan Mail Gaza has been front and centre for many of us as we watched the decimation of a land and its people with horror and dismay, each of us wishing we could do more. More than the sharing, the bearing witness and the fund-raising. On the cusp of a potential ceasefire, still hanging by a tenuous thread, it is our honour to have Dr Sanjay Adusumilli as a guest on this show. Dr. Sanjay wa...

Send us Fan Mail At 2:30 am Brisbane time, I got a message saying as of now the professor is alive. Just another night in Gaza. A family goes to sleep, not knowing if they will make it to dawn. At a time of violence, at a scale that has horrified the world, along with protests, petitions, BDS, we simply bear witness. We listen to the stories of people who are living through the worst times of thei...

Send us Fan Mail An extraordinary human being with an even more extraordinary story, Himanshu Kumar is an activist with a lifelong passion for social justice. In this conversation, he takes us through his days in Bastar, the unspeakable cruelty of the powers that be, his crusade to awaken people to the realities of corporate greed and its impact on ordinary lives, and most of all, to afford a life...

Send us Fan Mail I’m in conversation with historian, journalist, political commentator and Marxist thinker #vijayprashad on NRI Affairs.  Vijay is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the author of forty books. Vijay is on a speaking tour across New Zealand and Australia.  p.s. I can’t say i agree with everything he said, and for sure, I don’t know enough. But this con...

Send us Fan Mail Our guest on this episode is the extraordinary Sunita Viswanath, the co-founder and executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, that advocates for pluralism, civil and human rights in South Asia, Australia, the UK and North America.  From a childhood of transplantation from India as a migrant, to watching the ugly face of racism as a child in the UK, to a curious choice of stud...

Send us Fan Mail My guest is the indefatigable Indu Balachandran, an independent candidate in the upcoming New South Wales Local Government election, standing for the Gordon Ward in Sydney's Ku Ring Gai Council. With a track record in sustainability and  over 20 years in leadership positions  across housing, family services and first nation sectors, Indu brings the will and the skill to make...

Send us Fan Mail Bangladeshi-American academic, Dr. Farhana Sultana, professor at Syracuse University, and Indian political and social commentator who writes extensively for the Wire,  Shuddhabrata Sengupta come together on Pause with Nandini  to discuss Bangladesh, reimagined.  We cover the challenges and opportunities ahead for Bangladesh, its relationship with India, the protection of minoritie...

Send us Fan Mail A woman who asks too many questions offers a window into her world.  For Chinki Sinha, war is never elsewhere.  Armed with James Baldwin's politics of love, she finds hope in protests, reads from her grandfather's stolen diaries, finds herself locked up in a brothel, goes to Kashmir to cover silence, and eats kulfi for dinner, spent after a day chasing stories.  Of all t...

Send us Fan Mail Gender, colourism, identity, code-shifting , all of this and more in an animated and unfettered discussion on the new book Growing up Indian in Australia.  Published by Black Inc, the book has been edited by Aarti Betigeri with contributions from a wide cross-section of Australian-Indians. Aarti joins us in this conversation along with Preeti Maharaj - 'Tangle of Tenses'...

Send us Fan Mail Kashmiris, Tibetans, islanders, ancient feuds between Hindus and Buddhists, and the politics of war. Abhishek Majumdar in his new book, Abhishek Majumdar, Collected Plays,  goes into spaces that are often unvisited, and within those spaces, he arrives with and offers more questions than easy answers.   With acute humanity, and unmitigated curiosity,  Abhishek explores themes both...

Send us Fan Mail On the heels of Dalit History Month, we at NRI Affairs, wanted to begin a conversation on caste that looks at this social evil from the lens of the caste and generationally privileged, one that accepts that caste discrimination exists, that we continue to benefit from it, and explores ways to take greater collective and individual accountability.    We share our own journeys of le...

Send us Fan Mail Each year Australia marks National Reconciliation Week between 27 May to 3 June. These dates commemorate two significant milestones in the reconciliation journey - the successful 1967 referendum, and the High Court Mabo decision respectively. The first date marks the May 27 referendum in 1967, which saw more than 90 per cent of voters support the inclusion of all Indigenous Austra...

Send us Fan Mail As elections are underway in India, this is an important conversation. Human rights, hate speech, caste dynamics,  the silencing of dissent and the idea of government working with civil society for the greater good - we cover a lot of ground in this truly special conversation with the inimitable Meenakshi Ganguly. Wise, experienced, and a true humanist, she is truly a force for go...