Tea Chat: Navigating South Asian Ancestral Grief
This is an opportunity to share your own experiences in a more intimate setting, as well as a chance to get to know your fellow audience members.
We created Tea Chats as a time set aside specifically for our audience members who may not get a chance to have their voices heard at our larger, more formal events. Imagine that this is the event's cocktail hour, (except that you're in your sweatpants!)
Bring your stories, bring yourself, and be ready to reflect on how your family ties have changed over time, as well as how they can transform further with your leadership in the future.
About Table Talk
Table Talk is an honest, lively, and unscripted conversation among health professionals, spiritual and faith-based leaders, artists and other creative individuals to address this central question: "What does it mean to live and die well in our respective communities?"
Every community and culture -- Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Disabled, LGBTQ+, etc. -- has its own unique perspective and shared truth. How do we deal with serious illness, dying, grief, discrimination, and inequity? What does it mean to flourish, celebrate, honor, and connect?
Many of us describe more than one of these groups as home, and many of us have experienced oppression based on multiple aspects of our intersecting identities: race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and more. At present, we have few spaces to talk about these questions freely, in ways that make sense for who we are. That’s why Reimagine launched Table Talk. While this ongoing series is explicitly created by and for underrepresented communities, we invite people of all backgrounds to join us to witness, listen and learn. Ultimately we are creating space rooted in the principles of Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion in order for everyone to thrive.
About the Organizers
Roshni Kavate is the Founder and Creative Director of Cardamom and Kavate, a wellness platform dedicated to reclaiming nourishing practices rooted in ancestral wisdom for collective liberation. She believes grief is a portal to wholeness. Through rituals and storytelling, we can reconnect to our origins and be our wild selves. She sees the path to being whole as a radical art and political practice.
Roshni's early childhood was marked by the grief her mother and ancestors experienced by living on the margins based on gender and caste. As a Palliative Care Nurse in the US, Roshni witnessed racialized trauma and its lasting impact on the health and wellness of communities of color. Combining her interest in art, wellness and advocacy she has launched a startup, Cardamom and Kavate to reimagine what it means to rebirth ourselves, embody our freedom and live in our pleasure.
Zubin Desai is the Head of Product & Design at Reimagine, a nonprofit organization that draws on the arts, design, medicine, and spirituality to transform taboo cultural attitudes around death and grief, and to address the inequities surrounding how we live and die.
Zubin met Reimagine's founder, Brad Wolfe, when they were classmates and housemates at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. In 2018, Zubin embarked on a spiritual journey through Bali and India and has since dedicated his career to designing products and services that elevate and shine light on the hardest parts of the shared human experience.
