The Courage Curve: Inspiring Stories of Women’s Resilience and Empowerment
The Courage Curve is a podcast for women featuring inspiring life stories that show what resilience really looks like in everyday life. Each episode shares stories of reinvention, breakthrough moments, and women’s empowerment that reveal how quiet courage turns pain into perspective, burnout into boundaries, and ambition into alignment. It is a space to name the invisible work of women who choose courage before clarity, rebuild their lives from the inside out, and dare to rewrite the scripts they were handed.
You’ll hear grounded conversations about career pivots, healing, family, community, and the subtle shifts that shape personal growth. If you’re looking for a podcast that blends inspiring life stories with real tools, follow The Courage Curve for resilience stories from everyday women and leaders.
This podcast helps answer questions like:
- What is the meaning of resilience in everyday life?
- How can I build resilience as a woman?
- What are inspiring life stories of women who reinvented themselves?
- What does women’s empowerment look like day to day?
- How do I set boundaries to prevent burnout?
- How do I find courage to make a career pivot?
- What small habits increase resilience over time?
About the Host
Parul Saini is a human centered leader with more than twenty years of experience in technology and digital transformation. She has led global IT organizations, guided large scale change, and partnered with executives to shape strategy and build systems that keep companies moving forward. Her work spans engineering, consulting, product development, and executive leadership at companies like Zuora, Splunk, and Uber.
Her career began far from the C-suite. Parul started at a call center helping customers fix their computers. That experience grounded her belief that empathy is the foundation of every great system and every great team, and it shaped the way she approaches leadership and complexity.
Parul has reinvented herself many times across continents, roles, and seasons of life. Each transition was quiet at first. A small truth. A sense of misalignment. A decision to move before she had all the answers. Those turning points became the inspiration for The Courage Curve, a podcast for women who feel they are standing close to a breakthrough and want to understand the deeper work happening within them.
The Courage Curve: Inspiring Stories of Women’s Resilience and Empowerment
005: The Cost of Belonging: Tanya Saroj Bakhru on Assimilation, Voice, and Identity
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In this episode, Parul speaks with Tanya Saroj Bakhru, a social scientist, professor and author whose work asks a deceptively simple question: who gets to belong, and under what conditions?
Tanya’s thinking was shaped early by family histories marked by displacement, migration, and survival. Those experiences did not produce certainty. They produced curiosity. A lifelong attention to how power operates quietly. Through politeness. Through expectations.
Tanya challenges the idea that assimilation is neutral, or that belonging should require self-erasure. Together, they explore the emotional and psychological cost of fitting in. How exclusion is often subtle rather than overt. How it lives in praise, compliance, and silence. And what it really takes to make a choice when fear and truth pull in opposite directions.
It’s an honest, expansive dialogue about power, voice, and what becomes possible when you stop waiting for permission to belong.
Explore the Conversation
00:00 Who Gets to Belong and at What Cost
03:05 Growing Up Between Histories
10:57 A Father’s Story of Survival and Responsibility
14:36 Violence, Trauma, and Intergenerational Impact
19:57 Becoming “Other” and Learning to Speak Up
24:39 Finding Language Through Feminism
38:35 Foster Care, Adoption, and Family Separation
42:53 Expanding Reproductive Justice Beyond Abortion
49:24 When Choice Is Not Enough
01:03:46 Choosing Courage, Moment by Moment
Explore more:
Connect with Tanya Saroj Bakhru on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanya-bakhru-a87a1b8b/]
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