When I moved to America at age 6, we made bookmarks in school with pictures of everyone in the classroom and a poem celebrating our diversity. A few weeks ago my niece's preschool class melted hearts singing along to "Hello to all the children of the world" at their holiday recital. I'd like to believe that the ideals we're taught as kids about the sheer joy of being different, are not just performative acts of inclusion, but rather projections of our innate ability to see ourselves reflected in each other's stories. So, what happens between our early years and adulthood that derails us into such divisiveness? 

I think the idealism fades as the effort to challenge systems often seemingly beyond our control far outweighs the lukewarm relationships we might have with our neighbours. I have been interviewing some of my elder family members about their experience during the India-Pakistan partition. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians all lived together in harmony and with a sense of belonging until they were told they shouldn't. When I was in high school, my friends and I cherished our regular lunch time shenanigans until the day after 9/11 when they felt threatened about my place at the table. There must be countless examples of how we have all at some point in our lives so quickly unlearned what we thought we once knew with such certainty about the people in our lives who look, cook, speak, pray differently from us, when fear and misinformation take the reigns. 

I wonder, then, whether it can be just as easy to relearn, to re-present, to re-engage in dialogue, to remember what it was like to charge through the playground in locked arms. I do not know the answer to this question, but I have spent the last 15 years and what I imagine to be the rest of my career, in hopes that it is possible. I have reached out to the Ministry of Education to discuss perspectives offered in curriculum, I have presented to media organizations on greater representation, I have developed countless strategies and platforms, I have tried to continue studying about social equity and addressing my own biases, and I have taught what little I understand to the next generation of stewards. 

But, one thing I have not had the courage to pursue until now is to go into grassroots communities to create my own educational media content with the purpose to expand horizons (firstly my own), about all of the wonderful contributions these communities are making to our shared global human experience. 

Leaving my job and home and family to travel to the other side of the world and take on this ambitious entrepreneurial goal is one of the hardest decisions I've dared to make in my professional life. It is a risk at best, one that I do not expect many to understand, but one that I owe to my six-year-old self and her sense of hopeless idealism that there is something out there still worth getting up to bat for, even if I strike out along the way. 

I am indebted to numerous colleagues, mentors, artists, friends, and above all, to my family, for this priceless investment advice.