Anika Chabra | Embracing Heritage Through Conversations

Anika shares her experiences as a second-generation immigrant and how she realized she didn’t need to choose between the cultures that made her who she is.  Through learning the stories of her parents’ and ancestors she gained a deeper understanding of herself and sees the opportunity we have to celebrate ancestral greatness built out of hard experiences.  Anika also adds some great tips about having conversations to preserve your own family heritage.

 About Anika:

Anika Chabra is co-founder of the platform Root & Seed which helps others claim, honour, document and celebrate their unique family stories, traditions and culture and includes a mobile based web app that help inspire conversations with our elders. She is also the host of a podcast of the same name, The Root & Seed podcast.

Website: rootandseed.com
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LinkedIn: @rootandseedco

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Transcript

Anika Chabra | Embracing Heritage Through Conversations

Heather: Hi Anika. Thank you for joining me on my podcast today.

Anika: Thank you, Heather. Thank you so much for having me.

Heather: Could you start by giving an introduction of yourself?

Anika: Absolutely. Um, so I am a proud daughter, mother, sister, and wife, and a dog mom, to my adorable, dog Maui. And I live in Toronto, Canada. From a professional standpoint, I've spent the last two decades in the corporate world. I left about 18 months ago, to start my first entrepreneurial endeavor, a platform called Root and Seed and together with my co-founder Jen Siripong Mandel, every single day, we get to help others understand the value of their family and their cultural stories, their unique traditions, their unique recipes, and we get to give them tools in order to help them really document those special precious family stories.

Heather: And I've looked over that. And I think that is wonderful. What you are doing to help people preserve and celebrate their past and move it into the future.

Anika: It's beautiful. You know what, one of my other favorite things that I get to do and have the honor of doing is I am the podcast host for our podcast, the Root and Seed Podcast. So like you, I get to talk to lots of people from lots of different backgrounds, and that is just one of the most special titles I've ever had.

Heather: Well, that is great. And I will definitely have a link in the show notes to that so people can pop over and listen to your interviews.

Anika: Amazing. Thank you for that.

Heather: So can you tell more about your family background?

Anika: For sure. The one thing I want to start off by saying is that I'm very early on in my journey to understand my background, very much compelled by life events. I started to really start to uncover, ask some questions to help myself really understand what those stories are. So I may say things and I may pronounce things not correctly.

So I just want to make sure that that caveat is there. but the desire is definitely there and it comes from my heart. So it definitely, hopefully comes through in all of the things that we do at Root and Seed. so my background is, I come from an east Indian background, um. My parents, they immigrated from India to England, to Canada, like many people in the 1970s and 1980s, uh, to Canada.

you know, after a period of a brief period, I would say of assimilation and definitely some experiences with microaggressions and racism and those sorts of things early on. I was very, very lucky because I had a lot of exposure to culture growing up and a lot of exposure to our family traditions. My parents invited culture into our home all the time, and they proudly sort of put it on display in many ways.

After that kind of brief period of assimilation and those sort of themes that happen very naturally when someone moves from one country to another, when you're trying to figure out your footing. Um, so when I became a parent myself, I was really, really interested in making sure that my children had the same or similar type of experience so that they could really understand and to get that exposure to that, in their experience.

And then hopefully at some point pass it on to theirs. so, uh, yeah, my ethnic and cultural background is east Indian. Uh, as I mentioned. I strongly identify with being a second generation Canadian, in all expressions of that word, you know, I happen to have been born in, England. However, I really do attribute my experiences and my identification to being second generation.

My parents were the immigrants who came here. They made all the sacrifices. They did all the things that, um, you know, they needed to do in order to have us have a better life than they had growing up. So I very much, identify with that, with my peers inside my culture, but also outside my culture.

Heather: So, what does that look like for you as kind of between two different worlds? lots of people, whether it's been in the last generation or five generations go, there's always that next generation that has to kind of find their place between two different lives. And how was that for you?

Anika: Yeah, I think growing up, I definitely had some struggles early on my elementary school years and middle school years were not perfect. Um, I definitely, wasn't totally sure what my identity was and what I needed to do and who I needed to, to sort of bring out a different occasions. And one thing I I've resolved in my life is really my ability and identity to play all parts of my lives and have those different influences be a big part of who makes Anika up as opposed to needing to check boxes or identify as one or the other. And I think that's come through obviously societal changes and progression, but definitely I would say through me really understanding who I am and some mindset work that I've done very recently to help uncover who I am, what my gifts are to the world, by my superpowers are all those great things.

which I finally feel in my forties that I really understand what I can do and, and what really I want to bring to the world and what my legacy will potentially be eventually. So I think early on there was definite feelings of confusion and feelings of needing to choose between one or the other.

And I have really, since, that period in my life and through growing up and through all the different life experiences I've experienced have realized I don't really need to choose.

Heather: How has then getting a stronger connection with your heritage translated into this mindset work and this work that you've been doing to look to your future. Can you give us an example of how a story from the past strengthens that future?

Anika: Absolutely. So one of the cool things that I've discovered through birthing the platform Root and Seed, is that I actually have some lineage and some ancestors that have, experience in business. So on paper, if you just go back one generation or even two generations, I had understood that I came from a long, long line of educators.

So what I did when I went to university was naturally go into education. So I went and I did my bachelor of education. I just thought, oh, I'm following in the footsteps of my parents and my grandparents who are also in education. So it felt very natural for me and almost like a magnet. Okay. of course, I'm going to go into education it made total sense.

However, through uncovering some stories, speaking with my father, I'm speaking with my father's sister, who's a bit of our matriarch in our family, knows all the stories. She knows all the birthdays. She knows all the facts, through those, uh, those conversations and having my father write a write

a bit of a memoir. I've actually discovered that his grandfather. So my paternal grandfather was actually an entrepreneur himself. So when he immigrated from India to east Africa, he set up one of the first Indian sweet shops, where he sold samosas and Indian sweets and helped establish the east Indian community in Kenya.

And his wife was apparently a really amazing, uh, she would sell garments out of her home. So she was a bit of an entrepreneur. And not until I was 46, 47 did I realize that I had a bit of a calling to entrepreneurial-ism. And it sort of made a lot of sense when I heard that story, because like I said, I thought, you know, education was what I do and what we all do.

It's what the Chabra family does. and so what's cool about it is that through that identification, it feels almost like I have a answer as to why, and it feels a little resolved. Like I feel like a complete answer has been, sort of made, through a learning about that story, which helps me again, fuel myself because being an entrepreneur is not all sunshine and roses, as you know, Um, so it really helps me to remember where I came from, why I came from that sort of, you know, a place and then potentially what the attraction was. And it almost feels like it was part of my blood, which is kind of cool.

Heather: I think that's interesting that your perspective can change the more you know about your family. And that was just a perfect example of you thought you were one thing, but it was okay to be another thing. Because it's still part of your family tradition.

Anika: Absolutely. And then back to my, my point on choice, I don't have to forego being an educator. I still teach, I teach at a community college here in Toronto. You know, that's a part of my life. It's a part of my respect for my family and my parents' generation and my grandparents' generation. but then I get to be all those things, which is kind of fun. 

Heather: What other stories could you share that you've learned about your ancestry that has impacted you in some way?

Anika: Sure. So, um, one thing that I find very fascinating is comparing and contrasting my parents' experiences and then how they ended up coming together. So are you familiar with the movie sliding doors?

Heather: I am not.

Anika: Okay. So it's a series, it's a movie. I think it's Gwyneth Paltrow is in the movie. So it's a famous movie from the eighties. and it basically Chronicles her life based on one sliding door moment. And it's a subway door shutting, either she gets on the subway or she doesn't get on the subway and they literally show the paths that would happen from those two experiences. From that one experience. Am I going there or I'm not?

and it's one of those movies that kind of stuck with me. I watched it growing up. I just watched it recently again. And what's really cool is I'm thinking about all the different moments and, all the choices and decisions that my parents and their, their parents had had made, that led to me even existing today, uh, and being in a place where I'm allowed all the freedoms and privileged that I am today. It's just fascinating to me.

But what's cool in, in my family history is even though my parents both came from India, Just because they were born in slightly different cities and towns, they actually ended up having very different experiences, which I think is really interesting. So both my parents were born in small cities in Punjab, which was India and now is Pakistan through Partition. But because of where my father's family was born uh, most of them had actually immigrated to east Africa. So they weren't actually affected very closely by Partition because in the 1920s, Their family moved to east Africa and almost avoided the pains that came with Partition. and I'm not trying to say that they had some rosy, beautiful, luxurious life in east Africa, but they didn't have to go through the trauma that was Partition. 

Contrast that with my mom. So she was also born in a small town in Pakistan, now Pakistan was India. And through Partition, she actually was very strongly affected by Partition. Her parents had to leave because they're from a Hindu family and we're from the Hindu religion. And they had to leave within a moment's notice with very little assets, and actually had to experience the difference of having a slightly more affluent life in then India, now Pakistan, and then having to walk the border, and moved to India where unfortunately, they were not able to set up the same level of standard of life.

And when I contrast those two experiences, I just find it super fascinating and they ended up being, you know, together and experience, uh, you know, very traditional arranged marriage. In fact, they got married and met in four days or something crazy like that. But then to the fact that they have such different experiences in some way explains my mother's drive. She had like a fire in her. She was just like determined to, to like sort of leave some of the more negative experiences of her past behind. She met, like I said, my father lived in four days. Wanted to see and wanted to move across the world and sort of leave those stories behind. And then she had such a fire and a determination.

And such a great, sense of perseverance in her personality, which was really cool, you know, up until unfortunately she passed away three years ago, but, you know, she had that until literally the day she died was like absolutely had that a fire in her. 

and then in contrast, my dad got a little bit more chill. Right. He's a little bit more relaxed. incredibly driven, incredibly successful. Absolutely. They both are in their own rights, but it helps me to like, sort of resolve the difference in their personalities and maybe why together they were kind of in their zones of genius. And then they kind of got together and became, uh, you know, a really amazing inspirational couple, certainly that I looked up to, when they were married.

Heather: I love that you looked at your parents' past to try to understand kind of why they are the way they are. Because this has come up before with other interviews where you really understand people they're so close you better if you look at their past. And sometimes we just think of our parents or our grandparents and their adult status, and we forget everything that happened that 20 or 30 years before we even knew them.

Anika: It's so true. And you know, one of the other things I think is special about uncovering some of these stories is I get to now, like I sort of talking about the idea of choice. I guess it's a bit of a theme in our conversation here, but I get to sift and sort through all of those stores. But if I don't know those stories, I don't get to sift and sort, I just kind of go, okay, everything at face value. I'm going to go into teaching.

I'm going to do this. And it kind of like you sort of default to, I guess, in some ways, the present outside world affecting you as a person. Whereas if you really understand yourself, you understand where you came from, you can kind of sift and sort through those stories and you can go, I want to take this forward, I don't really know if I want to take this forward. Right? So you Everyone talks about generational trauma and I'm not going to downplay it at all. It absolutely exists a hundred percent. I feel it. I want to have a couple of things stop in my life from a generational trauma and make sure I'm not passing it onto my, my children's generation.

But what if we celebrated like generational greatness? Like totally flip it on its head and just be like, there were these things that were so great about my family struggles and about, you know, their life story that made them hard workers and all these other things that I've now inherited. And I've inherited a bit of that fire from my mom. Yes. It came from a place that she, where she had experienced some unfortunate life stories. Absolutely. But what if I had the choice now to flip it on its head and go, if I doubled down on that, maybe that could be my superpower. So, I do like that notion and idea that you can absolutely, I don't know, lean into those things, right.

Heather: Right. And if you don't know, then, I mean, there's this opportunity for you to have so much power over your life. If, you know those stories, if you know that history to be able to, like you said, to sift and sort through it.

Anika: Absolutely. And what's been exciting about my journey, particularly with your mindset is I've sort of stitched together a bit of a life now, right? So I've taken some things I want from the past, some things from my leg, more immediate future and where I see myself in the future, and I've kind of stitched those three things together.

We were talking earlier about like the past, the present and the future. and I think that's really cool and interesting, right? It's like, what do I want to have now? What do I want to forego, you know, I was really lucky because Probably and likely because of my mom's early experience. And then her sort of, you know, she was highly educated.

She kind of did her BA and then she did her BEd and then she did her master's, you know, she was highly educated for somebody of that, uh, of that generation and a woman. And she was a bit of a trailblazer when it came to all the different things that she accomplished in her life professionally, you know, she became an accomplished special ed teacher, and then she became a principal and all those other things.

I didn't really grow up in a home that was very patriarchal, even though a lot of my friends have certainly experienced it, but that's not something that I experienced very strongly. In fact, they treated my brother and I very equally. What a gift that is to my, own daughter, that she was able to like have that time with her grandmother, albeit a little bit shorter than we all thought.

However, at the same time she had saw a very strong role model in her grandmother. And now I hope in me, as she, now this year flocks the nest and she goes off to university. So I'm just like, I mean, that gives me full body shivers. When I start to think about. I dunno, the privilege of experience, I think is the best way to describe it, that she has now the potential to take forward into her life as she makes massive decisions in her life and she flocks our nest. I mean, I think I've done my self and my husband. I think we've done an okay job, but let's see, time will tell.

Heather: I think it's significant that you're not looking back at your past and saying women have been subordinated in our family lines. And like you were saying before that, that trauma or that submission instead you're looking at case we have this three generations right in front of us and what impact even just those three generations can make and that you can change the past. You don't have to succumb to it and you can make a new legacy moving forward that can go on for more generations than the past.

Anika: Absolutely. Yeah. There's things that I definitely, you know, don't want to replay. Right. And I don't want to uncover, in fact, I'm not even probably going to mention them today because it's like, why would I even give mental space to that? It's like, you know, there's only a certain amount of space in your mind and I don't want the renters who are not paying rent to like, to occupy any of that mind space. and you know, I'll be honest, like that sense of optimism and looking at the positive side of the things, again comes from my parents right. They had hardship growing up, but they were trailblazers. They were adventures.

They like moved all the time. You know, my parents had a home in Phoenix, Arizona, like, so for them it was like being a snowbird made total sense because why would they sit still and stay still, even in their retirement, people would probably look at me and go, like, why are your parents going down there?

Like, don't they want to be close to you? No, I wanted them to have an amazing, you know, retirement and they got to experience that, but because it was in their blood, that sense of adventure, which now has been passed down to me, which now has passed down to my daughter. There is no way shape and form that she is staying anywhere close to Toronto Canada.

I can tell you that right now, but I love that. And I love seeing that she is as a young woman, she has the ability now to be able to do that because it's part of her ancestral blood is part of her. the generations before her and obviously part of privilege, which came from all of the amazing things that my parents sacrificed to get us to this place and their parents and the parents before us. So to me, there is no greater honor, but to live their legacy out in that way. It's a gift.

Heather: Yeah, it is. And I like how you've been saying that you can look back on the past and yeah, those hard thing happened, but look at how your ancestors overcame them or drove through them and got on the other side and that you can gain the strength in the challenges that you face because of their examples, even with the hard times.

Anika: So true. The only other thing I wanted to mention, I love that that notion, was just, you know, we're, we're a bit of a generation of, like we want to just talk about our feelings, right? So we want to like uncover some things, I'm quite sure my father, who will listen to this podcast, is probably like, why is she even thinking about the past?

Like they were such forward-thinkers right. Like, what is next? How am I going to better myself? How can I better my life for my children? They thought, always thought about the future. And in some ways it was like, well, why are you rehashing the past? Right. The past is in the past. And I get that and I get, I absolutely get that, but I don't think that he has quite understood.

And, and maybe now he's starting to, what power there is and understanding some of those things and what power there is in us as a generation, so the Gen X, the like kind of older millennials, in us owning those stories and owning those traditions and owning those recipes and all those things. You know, I want, when my daughter goes to university, when it's Devale, which is, you know, Christmas, um, in November more than likely she's not going to have that off school because she's not in India. but I want her to light a candle in her dorm room. And I want her to understand why she's doing that. And I want her to think about the stories of why that was such an important holiday in her grandmother's memory and why and how we celebrated it differently.

And that's what one of the parts of Root and Seed that we're trying to do is help to uncover those unique family stories that Google is just not going to provide. I mean, she could, she could, if she had to, you know, fill in the gaps, she could Google, why do we light a candle at the, uh, at Christmas and help herself understand why that is, but nothing is going to replace those family traditions, stories, the unique things that came from each and every one of us, If we don't start document them.

And if our generation, as our parents' generation get older, if we don't take the time to document them, if we don't take the time to ask the questions, to record them, to practice these things, to ask the why's, to talk about our feelings, to, you know, Even though don't my, dad's not totally sure if he wants to answer all the questions, like I push him, I dig deeper with him and so far he sort of entertained, entertained me for sure. So, uh, I do thank him for that.

Heather: So that's kind of, one of the things that I know I have difficulty with too, is approaching your parent or your grandparent and asking them these kind of, really personal questions that really get at the root. And it's going beyond the, when did you graduate from high school type thing? How has your experience been asking those kinds of questions to your father?

Anika: At first, it was a little harder. the great thing about Root and Seed is we have a conversation tool. So the digital experience helps serve up questions for people and they can record it right on our tool, which is great. and what we do is we have a main question and then if you're getting those one word answers, we have like dig deeper questions would help people like, sort of like get into the nitty-gritty to your points.

What I find that is very helpful is pre telling him that I'm going to be asking him these questions. So I sort of like give him a bit of a notice. I sort of say to him, dad, I'm sort of interested in these type of questions and I give him those, those questions before that. I also find when we're not sitting across from each other, There's something about us, like in the car side-by-side or one of my most amazing memories is documenting some of my father's stories, And his home in Phoenix, where we were sitting on a swing, you know, one of those swings where you can kind of sit side by side. And I had my phone in between us with our Root and Seed conversation tool app open asked him the question. We sort of swung on the swing a little bit, and we both were sort of looking at the sunset and I asked him all these questions and it just sort of flowed.

Um, so I think a couple of tips I would have is definitely to pre-seed some of the questions, cause I think, catching people off guard is not always fair. but also setting the mood in such a way that it doesn't feel intrusive. Because some of these stories are really hard. And I get that. and we just kind of skip over the ones that feel really difficult and we, you know, decide to revisit them another day and there's no harm in that. There'll be many times that we'll be able to do this. but I really think that setting the mood and having a sit by side-by-side, there's something about that, that just lets the, uh, the stories start flowing.

Heather: That is great advice, kind of takes the pressure off of them too, that interview style, where they need to perform to you where it kind of sets it up more like a conversation.

Anika: Yeah, exactly. And then he could focus in on the beautiful sunset or the highway ahead of us type of thing.

Heather: And then that way you said what you called, they call you, call them conversations in your app?

Anika: Yeah. So our tool is actually, we actually named it a conversation tool because what it's trying to do is really, um, inspire those conversations, the back and forth, because at the end of the day, I think it's, it's really. Important for our generation to take that ownership of this. Right. And start to ask those questions, you know, it's fine to have a memoir that kind of sits there and, collects dust and sort of like exists.

I'm not, I'm not going to downplay that at all. It's really amazing to have those things, but how special it is for me, you know, I'd asked him a question about what our family name means. And so he told me that. You know, again, I could, again, I could Google this, but I'll get the Wikipedia answer to what our family name means as opposed to, he told me like a hilarious story about how him and his brother has something slightly different from each other on their interpretation of it. And then when I interviewed my aunt a couple of weeks ago, she had another thing to add to it. So just like the stories just compound and compound and get better and better.

And now I have that in my father's voice so that my children can now listen to it when they need to like, listen and understand and want to connect back with their grandfather and I, and that generation as well.

Heather: Well, this has been a great conversation. Would you have anything to add just a little bit of advice or words of wisdom for other people like you, whose parents are immigrants and finding themselves between those, between that place?

Anika: I think my answer to that question would be you might not get everything you want and be okay with that. Because like I said earlier, the immigration story comes with a lot of struggle and it comes with a lot of pain. And even if you're not able to get everything out of your family, in documenting your stories, try to get as much as you can.

The great thing about platforms like yours and mine and things like fiction and stories and documentaries is they can fill the void of potentially not having all the facts in your life story. so if I, I know I don't have a lot of stories about Partition, unfortunately, I have one small precious story that I have, and that's pretty much it for my mom. But I can watch and I can learn and I can listen and I could listen to podcasts about Partition and I could dig deeper. And from a fictional standpoint, I could help myself resolve some of the unanswered questions.

So I would say to any immigrant families out there, or second generation people like me is get as much as you can out of your stories with, and your interviews and your question asking of your elders. Do it before it's too late, for sure. and then just start to dig a little bit deeper into some of the other resources out there.

Like I said, your, a podcast, my platform, and any other, other kind of fictional stories that I think just fill you up. There's relate-ability in that story. And the immigrants experience and the second generation immigrant experience that transcends culture and it transcends cultural groups that I think we can all sort of really learn from each other.

Heather: Great. Thank you so much, Anika, for being here and sharing your experiences and thoughts on these things.

Anika: I could talk about this all day. Thank you so much for having me.