She was told by many people that it is very hard to break into the media scene here in Canada. “But I believe if you really want to do something, you can,” says award-winning documentary film-maker Lalita Krishna. “Just don’t let anyone dissuade you! I understood the class and caste privileges I’d enjoyed in India and it made me question, who was I to point a finger? The emphasis...

“Dance is my life, my being, my consciousness. I approach dance with spirituality and scholarship. I see the world through my dance,” he says. “Dance helps educate, challenge and provoke my awareness and my thinking of the world around me. Through dance, I see life in a more varied, wider way. Not compartmentalized.” When he moved to Canada in 1991, Krishnan revelled in the feeling...

Harinder Takhar became Ontario’s first South Asian minister way back in 2004. “I am delighted and also very humbled by the opportunity,” he had said then. “It’s a big responsibility when people refer to you as the first this or the first that! I have to live up to people’s expectations. It’s very important that I do a good job and keep the doors open for those who come after...

Musharraf Ali Farooqi describes himself as a professional writer, one who writes full time. No day job to help pay the bills, no fall-back option. But then, his agent loved his first book, the associate publisher of Knopf Canada, loved it, too, and The Story of A Widow was published to rave reviews. “It takes time to find a suitable publisher, I was lucky,” he says modestly. “The...

Not many debut authors get to see their novels make the best-seller list and when Padma Viswanathan’s husband sent her an e-mail about her being at number 6, at first she thought it was a joke e-mail. “I thought it was one of those e-mails in which an image is Photoshopped onto another, you know, like you have been photographed with Putin or something!” she laughs. “But...