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Start off your new year with a quick reminder of all the amazing tips and tricks from our guests this season. And thank you for all the love and support of our new format!

In the last interview of our health & wellness season, we talk to someone who was crucial to Arjun's personal wellness journey - meditation coach Jon Aaron. Jon gives us some advice about slowing down amid the chaos of our busy lives and making the time and space for meditation, whatever form it may come in. He also reminds us that pretty everything from breakups to breakfast is an opportunity to practice mindfulness.

In the seventh episode of our health & wellness season we get to one of our most requested topics: AYURVEDA. We speak with Monica Bhanote of Sundays in Saffron and talk about moms carrying cardamom, running like deers, and why hot water is still cooling. Figure out what your dosha is here: https://www.sundaysinsaffron.com/dosha-quiz/

Episode 6 of our health and wellness season starts off with one of Arjun’s PSAs on mental health but eventually we get to talk to Navin Dargani about why therapy and mentalizing are important, and why cultural competence matters in mental health. You can learn more about Navin's practice here: http://www.darganimd.com/

In episode 5, we talked to transplant psychiatrist Akhil Shenoy about psychiatry in the desi population as it interacts with parenting, alcoholism and why Akhil's dad still wishes he was a surgeon. Producer note: When we recorded this episode in June, Akhil was at Mt Sinai but has since transitioned to Columbia University Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital.

In episode 3 of our health and wellness season we talk to yoga instructor Aditi Shah about her personal journey with the practice and how the modern gentrification of yoga has changed dramatically from what it used to be. She also provides some valuable advice for the yoga noobs among us who can't keep up with the crazy intense classes we often come across.

In the third episode of our health and wellness season we talk to Shom Chowdhury, owner of Indie Fresh and the most jacked desi dude we've ever met, about physical fitness. He teaches us why we should aim for 75% during workouts and why we need to give our bodies high quality fuel.

Episode 2 of our health and wellness season starts off with mindfulness but quickly goes much deeper into finding purpose within the chaos of our daily lives. We speak with monk Shubhani Chaitanya who leads the New York chapter of Chinmaya Mission and explains why she chose to take her very unique path towards Vedanta over a career in fashion.

The first episode of our health and wellness season is about something we all love but don’t often know what to do with: food!! In the day and age of this diet and that super food and this cleanse, we invite on to the show the chair of Queens College’s Nutritional Sciences department: Dr. Ashima Kant, to sort through the noise. She educates, demystifies, and gives us all the tools to navigate food in a healthy way that still allows us to enjoy it!

Health & Wellness Season Opener! A quick 7 minute episode to reintroduce ourselves to you because we are insecure and thought you may have forgotten about us. But also to introduce y’all to the new members and new format that hopefully will make our show better! If we happen to charm a few more people into giving us a chance, icing on the cake! Remember to check your feeds for the first interview that's also being released today!

The boys are back!...kinda...they drop in to wish everyone a MUCG belated happy new year and to share what's up! They explain why they haven't been around for a while and share what they are working on for the future of AD! Then, with the serious shit aside, they received some tweets about basketball and hip hop and realized that they had NEVER had a show about sports or hip hop. Well that is now fixed :) tune in and enjoy American Desis

The tides of change upon us and we here at American Desis are not immune to it. So we decided to drop a State of the Podcast episode to let y'all know what we are thinking, introduce our amazing new producer, and put out an APB for all the help we can get to make this show as amazing as possible. So tune in, and join in!

Happy New Year's, everyone! After a holiday hiatus (forced upon us because Arjun landed a movie role in India) we ring in the new year with an overdue Community Episode. After all, how Desi are we if we aren't late? In this episode, we discuss Arjun's time in India and the shifts that he is noticing within the country and himself, get a firsthand account of demonetization and its impact on India, and question what the best way is to praise and criticize our culture. Tune into our first episode from the Motherland (at least for Arjun)!

The idea going against your parents and marrying the person you choose is an American ideal that has become fairly commonplace for our generation. But how many times have you heard that story from someone in our parents' generation? If you're like us, it's zero. Enter Sujata Winfield- an immigration attorney in Athens, Georgia. She came onto our podcast and was kind/brave/generous enough to tell us a story of falling in love. While that's the only thing she gives herself credit for- "falling in love"- there is much more to the story than that. Tune in and listen to a fascinating and beautiful story of love.

In the second half of our interview with Yassir we make our way around to the less significant details: his racial makeup and identity, how he grew up, his views on race...you know, the stuff this podcast is based on. Or whatever. All jokes aside, even though this took place in May, it's a great discussion about some issues that are very pertinent to this podcast and even to the current state of our country. And get at us: we would love to hear your thoughts!

Our episodes the last few weeks have been quite serious in response to the goings on of the world. But balance is something we care about here at American Desis, and so we thought that this week we would drop something more fun. Enter Yassir Lester, maybe the funniest dude we know. One of those episodes that's just three people having a conversation. It starts off with the worst intro we have ever done and continues on to talk about twitter as a source of news, death threats, Cecil the Lion, why does news suck, and even the end point of humanity. But most importantly we talk about why Yassir has such a crush on Arjun.

After the stunning events of Tuesday's election, we wanted to have a safe space for people to be heard. So we read the emails and tweets that our community have shared and explore the answers to the question: What Now? *This podcast was originally uploaded two weeks ago but had quite a few technical issues. We edited as well as we could and re-uploaded.

As we realize post election the importance of making sure we are listening to more points of views and cultivating a more true diversity, it is even more exciting to drop this week's episode. Akaash and I are dudes, and in a lot of way brothers. So we brought on two people who felt truly antithetical: sisters! Meet Keertana and Pallavi Sastry. These two Texan ladies joined us in June in LA to talk about the sister relationship and how it has evolved for them throughout their life. They chart the many shifts along the way that have made them similar and the moments that caused them to diverge. We also get to hear their experience post 9/11 and how they each ended up responding quite differently. Please join us to hear about one of the most important -hoods: Sisterhood

On today's community episode, the boys focus on Diwali. They interview each other on what the holiday means to them and share different stories and traditions. Since the holiday represents to them the idea of community, they then reach into their emails and tweets to hear stories of how other Desis celebrated the holiday. They even hear from someone in Trinidad who shared what festivities look like down there! Hope you enjoy this holiday edition of American Desis, and hope your Diwali was full of light, love, and community!

There is a narrative of our community as being apolitical and somewhat isolationistic since we have gotten to this country. This is supported by our voter turnout in election, and the large scale hesitance to get involved in causes supporting other minority communities. Well, that actually does not speak to the roots of our South Asian American history. Actually, many of us don't even know our community was here before 1965. Well thankfully, Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee joined our show to put our heads straight. We drove up to Berkeley, California and partook in their Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, which they have been running for four years now. It tells stories of South Asian radicals from as far back as the early 1900's. It paints a new picture of our community: the trials and tribulations we have faced, and the power that we have when we came together. Barnali and Anirvan then sat down with us to track the origins of this tour and talk about the shifts that they see in people after learning this history. In this time of poltical and racial unrest, it is wildly important for us to know our history so we can make better decisions about how to shape the future.