Today is one of those gray, rainy, early Spring days in D.C when all you want to do is day-drink with your best friend. Who can blame you? Well, lucky for me one of my absolute favorite people in the world is also one of the most talented radio producers.

Bilal Qureshi works in Washington as a journalist for NPR and a culture writer and his work has been published in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He graduated with high distinction from the University of Virginia and received a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Columbia. I know him from our college days at the University of Virginia (UVA), so for my very first podcast episode I had to speak with him about a world he knows so well -radio.

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Welcome to “Spilling Chai” with Anushay & Friends. You may know Anushay Hossain as the Bangladeshi-American cable news commentator who debates toxic masculinity with Tucker Carlson on Fox News or maybe you’ve read her articles on CNN about toxic white supremacy.

While Anushay may be a pro at giving her opinion and analysis on the headlines, something you don’t get to hear her do is ask the questions and talk about something other than the news.

This podcast, “Spilling Chai” is about conversations. Anushay wants to feel inspired, and radio is such a great medium to have really in-depth conversations and to take the time to have them.

In this show, Anushay is going to be talking to brilliant writers, passionate activists, and amazing artists and she wants you to join us!

“Spilling Chai” is also a PSA on behalf of all Brown people that in most of Asia and the Middle East, chai is not a latte. Instead, it’s the best kind of tea and on this podcast, we are all about spilling it.

So pour your cup and pull up a seat!

I want to begin this week by thanking you all for the warm and so very toasty welcome you gave the inaugural episode of “Spilling Chai” earlier this month. Thank you for subscribing, reviewing, and most importantly, listening to us!

So it’s isolation days here in Washington, DC and quite frankly time could not be passing any slower. We are all feeling isolated, frustrated, and frankly, scared of what’s to come. But if there’s something at the forefront of all of our minds, aside from when the heck we can get out of our homes, it’s health: Our own health, our family’s health, the health of our kids, the health of our elderly parents or grandparents.

Although we’ve been told that it’s older people who are most at risk for coronavirus, as a mother, and someone who has worked in women’s health and rights for most of my professional career, what I’ve been thinking about is what a scary time it must be right now to be pregnant. Pregnancy can sometimes be an uncertain and stressful period in the best of circumstances. But during a pandemic, that anxiety can quickly multiply.

Well, no one knows more about women’s health, especially maternal health and rights than our guest today, Dr. Jamila Taylor! Jamila recently became the Director of Healthcare Reform at the Century Foundation, and we are truly lucky to have her with us today to talk about all things pregnancy, women, and health.

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Welcome to episode 3 of “Spilling Chai” coming to you LIVE from what used to be my children’s playhouse! Thank goodness my husband and I converted it into an office just in time to be locked down at home with no childcare. Did I mention NO CHILDCARE? Outside my now-home-podcast-recording-studio, it’s an absolutely stunning Spring day here in DC-- birds are chirping, cherry blossoms blooming, and azalea flowers getting ready to burst in all their glory. But none of this matters because Coronavirus has made us prisoners in our own homes. In quarantine and under lockdown going on week 4, (maybe 5?) I feel like it’s getting harder and harder to keep it altogether-- especially on the mental health front and especially as a mom. Ladies, for those of you doing self-isolating with no kids PLEASE TAKE MINE. Like most things, there’s a gendered impact to Coronavirus and it’s not only impacting women’s health, which is what we talked about in our previous episode, but also what experts call women's “emotional labor,” and what I like to call “some serious, sexist BS.” Lucky for all of us, our guest today, Shannon Kane Winters, my fabulous friend and neighbor, is joining me to spill some serious- “mental health chai in the time of Corona.”

Hello Everyone! Welcome to Episode 4 of Spilling Chai coming to you live from Washington, DC on yet another sunny and stunning Spring day. I cannot believe we are already on the FOURTH episode of this podcast. Thank you guys for making me feel so welcome in this new space and for spilling chai with us!

So when I first decided that I was going to do a podcast, one thing I was sure of before I even knew how to work a podcast app was that I wanted this show to feature the voices of really strong women of color— our perspectives, our expertise, our stories, our lives, and our work.

Today’s guest not only epitomizes what I mean when I say a “strong woman of color,” but she is also someone who when I came across her work early in my career made a huge impact on me: I am talking about Melody Moezzi.

These days, I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams. When I was growing up in Bangladesh in the 1980’s, my biggest dream was to get Bollywood but lucky for everyone, especially my parents, I found and settled on my true passion pretty early on-- journalism and writing--by my senior year of high school.

That being said, I never imagined any kind of career or even a cameo in American media. I first came to the States to go to college in 1998 at the University of Virginia (UVA) and the number of people who looked like me on TV back then compared to the diversity you see on-air now, has barely changed.

Don’t believe me? Look at the numbers. The US population might be changing, but American newsrooms aren’t reflecting that diversity. It’s a just a fact. According The Status Of Women In The United States Media 2017 report, not only is 79% of people working in the publishing industry white, only 16.6% of newspaper staff are people of color.

The report also found that 37 percent of news articles and opinion pieces regarding reproductive rights and related issues were written by women. In a nutshell, when newsrooms and the media aren’t diverse, crucial perspectives and facts get missed.

My point is that there are so few women of color in the news as anchors, commentators, reporters, on-air talent basically, media personalities in American media that even when you make it from the control room to the Green room, you’ll be lucky if you find anyone else that looks like you.

Which is what makes our guest today even more amazing. How does one become an unapologetic woman of color in the media and the world? Lucky for us, we have Rula Jebreal here today to ask her exactly that.

Hello Everyone! Welcome to Episode 6 of Spilling Chai coming to you direct from Washington, DC where I have been quarantining in my home with my husband, our two young girls, and our two not-so-young Persian cats.

I try to stay focused on how lucky we are-- that in the middle of a global pandemic we are home, safe, together, have food, and even though we can’t see them, we are surrounded by dear neighbors and old friends. Staying grateful and bringing myself back to the present, really helps me fight the urge to just run away from my kids and find the nearest, tallest building to jump off of.

But something else that has been giving me hope and keeping me afloat is resilience-- the resilience of people, of local businesses, and communities. Something I learned from my parents, and something I really admire about my husband, is the ability to pivot-- pivot when life throws you a curveball, adapt, survive.

Hello, My Dear Listeners! Welcome to episode 7 of Spilling Chai. Like so many people that grew up outside of America, American TV shows and movies made up such a big part of my childhood, so this idea about America being all about law and order, and justice, and the bad guys vs the good guys, and legal systems that work was something that was so ingrained in me from what I watched and saw on screen. The message was clear-- no one in America is above the law. I really believed that once. Well, all that went to hell with Trump. Can we even count the ways this man has rendered the American system of checks, balances, accountability, and the whole concept of no one being above the law, to oblivion?