A few things Kriti Sarav, a junior at University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (IL), loves about being Indian American are eating dal and rice or chapati and roti and visiting her family in India. Still, her feelings about her culture have been complicated, she says. She explores this and talks about internalizing feelings of otherness in her podcast, My Very Own Bully, which won the high school grand prize in the 2021 NPR Student Podcast Challenge. “I hated the way other kids would look at my grandma and me shopping. I hated the way they would ask if her bindi was a mole," she says in the podcast.She felt different, and other people treated her that way, mispronouncing her name. She remembers being 9 years old and having a classmate tell her that her skin was “the color of poop.” His words reverberated over the years, becoming a pain point on which she mapped other experiences. By making the podcast, which she recorded in March, she decided to write a different script for herself and come to grips with her identity.
“It really doesn't matter what you or anyone else, for that matter, says to me," Sarav says toward the end of her podcast. "What matters are the words that I whisper, day in and day out, to myself.”
Her podcast can be found on soundcloud.com and npr.org.
Above: Kriti Sarav sits where she recorded her winning podcast, My Very Own Bully.
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