Pause and Reflect

All people of colour have been oppressed, but not all to the same degree. This is something I have been thinking a lot about. In my life, I have faced structural racism. I have faced individual racism. I have watched racism tear at the seams of my family. Yet, I have never feared for my life at the hands of the police. Black communities across the world face oppression like no other community of colour. But how did we get here and why does it take something like this before we start to address the implicit part non-Black communities of colour have played in this system? Thinking this through, my mind has gone back to colonial times and my family's history. Like many others, my family is Indian origin, but from East Africa. In the early 20th century, the British East Africa Protectorate was created using citizens from other British colonies. We became agents of the colony. They placed Indians in the likes of administration, police and army positions across East Africa to help to kee...

When I decided to quit my banking job and forge a new path, there was one thing on my mind: my privilege . Privilege is a funny thing. We know it exists, but it's often hard to fully appreciate. As a first generation, British-born Indian who has been privately school educated, I cannot refute my privilege. If the chips had fallen slightly differently for my grandfather, or for my parents, then who knows where I would be right now. Maybe I would just be another child in a rural village in India fighting against restrictive gender social norms? Recognising this privilege is what drove me to make a wholesale change in my life. However, as I now travel around some of the world's poorest places, listening to the stories and perspectives of the world's most vulnerable people, I am struggling to balance the recognition of my privilege with the guilt of it. Last week, I was wandering through the narrow streets of Kenya's slums, carefully navigating a path between the corru...