I'm raising a toddler in Dallas, thousands of miles from the home I grew up in, and I keep running into the same quiet question: how much of "home" am I actually able to give my child?
Not the big, obvious things — the festivals, the language classes, the trips back to India every couple of years. The smaller, harder things. The instinct my parents had without ever explaining it. The way a grandmother's voice in a kitchen taught you something no school ever could. The feeling of belonging to a place, fully, without having to translate yourself for anyone.
I don't have answers. I have a full-time job, a toddler, and a list of questions I couldn't stop asking other people who've walked further down this road than I have. So I started recording the conversations instead of having them alone in my head.
This isn't a parenting-advice show. I'm not interested in five-step frameworks or "10 tips for raising bicultural kids." I wanted something closer to sitting across the table from someone who's actually lived this — a founder who built an entire institution to keep classical music alive on foreign soil, a mother who quietly held a household together while five daughters became athletes and leaders, a doctor who's spent his career on the question of what a body actually needs versus what a chart says it needs.
I wanted the conversations to feel the way the best conversations actually feel — intimate enough that it feels like eavesdropping on something real, expansive enough that it stays with you after the episode ends.
Raising NRI Kids is a conversation-driven podcast for parents raising Indian-origin children outside India. Each episode features one guest — a founder, artist, physician, teacher, or parent — who has spent years, sometimes decades, wrestling with the same tension so many of us feel quietly every day: how do you hold onto something essential from where you came from, while raising a child fully in the world you live in now?
We talk about identity, culture, health, tradition, and the invisible weight of being "the one who has to carry it forward." We talk about the moments that made it worth it — a performance on stage, a child at the US Open, a patient who finally got better — and the moments it genuinely cost something. No guest is asked to perform inspiration. They're asked to tell the truth.
This show is for the NRI parent who is tired in a very specific way — not too tired to care, just tired of pretending the balancing act is easy. It's for the parent lying awake wondering if their child will ever feel what "home" felt like to them. It's for anyone raising a child between two cultures who wants to hear from people who've actually done it — not perfectly, but honestly.
I'm Poonam Agrawal — a mother, a working professional in tech, and, most days, a person figuring this out one conversation at a time, just like you. I'm producing this podcast on my own, in whatever hours are left after work and bedtime, because I believe these conversations matter more than most of what's on offer for parents like us right now.
I'm not an expert. I'm just someone who kept asking better people the questions I couldn't answer myself — and decided to share what I learned.