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From HQ: Check out our new ✨database✨at the end. You won’t regret it.
Catching Fire 🚀 your news roundup
🗣️ Alexa becomes Amita(bh)
The man who played God will now play… your virtual assistant. The Shahenshah of Bollywood, Actor Amitabh Bachchan, is loaning his voice to Amazon’s Alexa.
While he’s not the first celebrity to voice the virtual assistant, he’s another step in the right direction. ICYMI, most of big tech’s assistants default to female voices (Alexa, Cortana, Siri). Critics are frustrated because it casts, stereotypes, and silos women into the role of assistant. Adding baritone Bachchan to the mix mitigates yet another issue of gender bias in tech, and this time, on the global mainstage. (Sorry, he’s exclusive to India).
Looking forward to the day I can cross the Atlantic and hear this poster:
📰 Journalism in Jeopardy
Media in South Asia faces a reckoning, and the fault lines call attention to issues of gender inequality that run rampant.
Two weeks ago, Pakistani TV journalist Shaheena Shaheen was murdered by her husband. Protests have erupted, demanding justice for her and protections for women across the country, as this marks the second death of a female journalist in recent months.
In India, the patience with news media — specifically state-sponsored media — wears thin, partially a product of the coverage of Sushant Rajput Singh’s death. The media’s crucifixion of his girlfriend Rhea Chrakborty led journalists to quit and label the press a hazard. Read one RepublicTV employee’s resignation letter here.
👩🚀 Out of this World: Kalpana Chawla
A new spacecraft will be named for Kalpana Chawla, the first female NASA astronaut of Indian descent to go into space. She lost her life in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003 while returning to Earth. Kalpana was a trailblazer, and we’re thrilled to see her legacy honored in this way.
Hot off the Pod 🎧 Nandini Jammi
A conversation with Nandini Jammi, brand safety expert and digital advertising activist. She is the co-founder of Sleeping Giants and Check My Ads, both of which help companies understand where their paid ads are appearing.
You remember Nandini from our first issue, which included a piece in which she reclaims the narrative around her co-founding of Sleeping Giants. In this episode, she shares her story in vivid color — from campaigns against disinformation to advice for women at risk of being erased from movements they've built. In a world where The Social Dilemma is the new norm, this is an episode you can't miss. Nandini is pioneering the path forward in advertising tech and for women everywhere.
Business Bonfire 🔥 Rooshy Roy, CEO of Aavrani
Rooshy Roy is co-founder and CEO of Aavrani. Aavrani is a premium skincare brand for women, inspired by ancient Indian beauty traditions and rituals. Rooshy co-founded Aavrani in 2017 while at Wharton. To date, the company has raised upwards of $2 million in funding. In the last several months, she not only launched Aavrani 2.0, but was also recently named a Forbes 30 under 30.
You met your Co-Founder, Justin, the first week of business school, and Aavrani was born. How did that all play out?
I met Justin at a networking night and he's telling me about his experience serving as an operating partner at Tatcha beauty, a Japanese-inspired brand. Here is this white Jewish man telling me about this founder bringing in these ancient traditions, so we start talking about Indian skincare traditions.
And he's like, ‘Okay, so you're saying that there's literally no ready-made turmeric mask that I could just go to the store and buy?’ And I'm like, ‘No, you just can't do that. You have to make it at home. I specifically remember how my grandmother would add neem if I had acne issues; raw honey if it was dehydration; chickpea flour yogurt; all these things that had very intentional and specific benefits for the skin.’ And he says, ‘Okay, so why don't we do it?’ I'm like, alright, I'll entertain this conversation: ‘Okay yes, if we lived in Paris and quit our jobs and had a million dollars, sure.’ And he was at every turn. When he would sense my hesitation or reluctance to continue the conversation, he would say, ‘Well, why don't you think we can do it?’ and put me on the spot.
Within two weeks of that conversation, we transferred all our savings meant for tuition into a joint business account, took out loans for the rest of business school, and created a business plan.
While covering the beauty industry in finance, I was shocked to find it dominated by white men. Has that been your experience? Has that presented any challenges and how have you approached that?
One-hundred percent. And it's not just the back-end, it's the front-end: beauty editors, writers, the people that control access to media and entertainment. One of the biggest learnings I had to internalize through the first year is: a lot of people aren't going to get it. They're not going to understand why this product is special. A lot of times, people have these certain senses of Indian culture, right — Taj Mahal, spices, and overpopulation, etc. People don’t have that sense of inherent luxury or prestige, that a brand like Tatcha gets so easily from a country like Japan. I took that stuff very personally: people not understanding what we're trying to do; not thinking that it’s special; denying the fact that Indian beauty might be the next big wave. You have to have so much conviction in what you're doing and not worry about the fact that it's all men or all white people or this and that. Because we can focus on that stuff forever, kicking and screaming, and it doesn't go anywhere. It's important to bring attention to the facts of the situation, but I I have tried to shift my mind to: ‘How do we navigate this? How do we help people understand where we're coming from?’
The pod drops in the next issue!
Opportunities and Events
Check out our database. To access, enter “trailblazers” — the code changes with every newsletter, so be sure to… you guessed it:
If you’re new, these are opportunities geared toward South Asians or shared by orgs founded by South Asians. To submit, email us @ trailblazersmediaco@gmail.com
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