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A little about me, why I created this space, what you can expect, and how you can support my work :)
For the past 8 years, I’ve had the tremendous privilege of building and leading Diaspora Spice Co. - I've grown from being a 23 year old baby gay turning a wildly idealistic art project into a small business with zero capital, to being the 31 year old CEO of a growing challenger brand managing teams across India and the USA, whilst also recently becoming a bonus parent to two toddlers! Every day is a wild, delicious ride and in so many ways, I know that I’m very much still just getting started.
Despite this being the toughest and most fun job I’ve ever had, I won’t lie that being a founder has come at the cost of… just about everything else. I studied visual art and environmental analysis in college - never without a film camera* (or three!) slung over my shoulder and with my hands in the dirt working at our on-campus organic farm. Now I can’t remember the last time I was in a dark room, and over five years have gone by since I kept a veggie garden.
*fun fact - I survived the first three years of Diaspora without a salary by photographing for restaurants, weddings and pop ups on the side!
When I was in preschool, my first report card came home with a note saying that whilst I was a curious, happy kid, my #1 pastime was roaming from classroom to classroom in pursuit of delicious snacks to pilfer from the other kids. So whilst my job might have fundamentally changed how I spend my time, in my heart I still feel like hungry little Sana willing to roam the halls for yummy treats.
In order to make sense of me, you have to know my family. I’m deeply lucky to have curious, intellectual and very progressive architects and urban planners as my parents (hi ma! hi dada!), who prioritized toting me around to construction sites, museums, archeological digs, and literally any nicely proportioned courtyard across the world since I was an infant. It meant that even if we were eating roadside falafel and crashing in a distant relative’s guest bedroom, my childhood was centered around experiencing new cultures and being curious about places and people near and far.
I’m also the result of two generations of unconventional love stories. My dadi came from a Lahori Hindu family whose family escaped to Mumbai in 1947 during partition. She fell in love with the boy next door, a young man who had recently moved from Ahmedabad looking for work as an engineering graduate. Their love story took many twists and turns, namely because that young man was a Gujarati Muslim, the furthest thing from a suitable boy for my grandma’s family, but they would persevere and eventually marry, . He would go on to become on of India’s best known architects, and my beloved Abbu :)
Meanwhile, my Nani was one of India’s first female gynecologists, fighting her family tooth and nail for the right to continue her education and become a doctor against many, many odds. She met my Nana at a ballroom dancing class and the rest is history. My childhood memories of watching my Nani get dressed for work and then accompanying her to her clinic are some of my favorite - I’m pretty sure I could take a patient’s blood pressure before I could read!
Despite all this breaking from tradition, both sets of grandparents were somehow surprised when my parents then met and fell in love in architecture school. My gentle, sensitive, 6 foot tall bearded father and my ambitious, force of nature, pint sized mother are a funny and adorable pair. They raised my brother and I with strong family values - secularism, where our many cultures of Jainism, Hinduism and Islam are all celebrated and accepted, and feminism - a term virtually unheard of in 90s Mumbai. In Mumbai today, many of my own female friends are unlikely to consider themselves feminists, yet it’s a word my dad has proudly used to describe himself for as long as I can remember, and always walked the walk on.
Still, growing up in India, a country of traditional values and tightly held social norms was not easy for my queer, tender heart. Despite significant class privilege and my incredible family, I was a sensitive kid in hostile territory. Most of my school years involved a lot of weeping into my ma’s arms and trying to dodge each new wave of bullies. I always felt like I didn’t know the rules of school politics and engagement, and like everyone else had the logic downloaded into their brains that I was completely missing.
At 16, running away from a few traumatic years of being a queer, confused teenager in highly heteronormative, high society Mumbai, I got a rare scholarship to attend the United World Colleges of the Adriatic in Duino, Italy. UWCAd was (and still is!) 200 students from ~100 countries, all chosen on merit and their willingness to become ambassadors of social change. I will always say that getting a UWC high school education was the happiest, most transformative thing that ever happened to me. We cooked each others foods, learned each others biggest ambitions and fears, and came of age in classrooms with the diversity equivalent of the United Nations, all against the backdrop of a castle on the limestone cliffs of the Adriatic Sea. It was insufferably perfect and I will spend my life paying the gift of that education forward.
So that’s a little bit about me :)
So, my hope with this space is that I can use it to share the parts of myself that exist outside of Diaspora Spice Co. The weeknight cooking inspo, the rambly thoughts, the fave shopping recs, and the travel guides from a life lived on the road.
At this time, the best way to support me and my commitment to getting y’all these travel guides and food maps is to overhaul your spice shelf with Diaspora and then have a blast cooking with them (200+ chef tested recipes here). I spent half a decade solo traveling the length and breadth of South Asia to build our supply chain - 140+ regenerative smallholder farms to who we pay 4x the commodity price for their fresh, beautiful spices, and I’d love to share the fruits of that work with all of you!
