City of Residence:
Woodbury, MN
Occupation:
Civil Engineer
Excerpt:
“The diversity I found in my youth was simply astonishing. I mean, to be honest with you, when I was growing up in East Africa, I was in a very closed and very Indian environment. But when I went to the UK, as well as later on as I grew up in East Africa, we had to interact with people from the Middle East, we had to interact with people from the African subcontinent itself, who were natives, as well as Europeans who were there as settlers in East Africa. So, we had a very multicultural upbringing, and as I grew up, particularly through senior high school, it was a very, very multicultural group that we, I, grew up with. And we shared a lot of very interesting observations.
Over the last 20 years I have seen Minnesota, certainly in the metro area, grow up with a huge diversity of peoples from different cultures and communities, and they have been accommodated.
I have two TV programs. One is Geet Mala. Geet mala is essentially a necklace of pearls and it is a music-based entertainment program. The other one is Diversity in Focus. Diversity in Focus aims to bring your new immigrant neighbors into your living room. So what we do is, we have a lot of new immigrants living all over the metro area and people are wondering, “What is my neighbor doing?” you know? So if he’s a doctor, we invite them and we ask them about what they do. If it’s a dentist, we’ll come ask them and all that. If it is somebody who is a professor, we’ll come back and we invite them to talk about professor. If they’re an economist in the community, we’ll ask them to talk about economy and what their perceptions are, just so that the broader community can get to see who these people are that are living amongst themselves to understand.”
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