TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

In a sense, we’re all as humans basically unfinished. We grow and develop each with a different pace, a different rhythm, and a different style, and hopefully we can be introspective, thoughtful, corrective, and even celebratory along the way. And speaking of celebrating, thank you so much for listening to this and sharing it with your friends and family, for kindly reviewing and rating it, and for following us on social media @drabhaydandekar. It’s seemingly rare through this evolution of our personal and professional identity, that we find peace in enjoying the work in progress, but that’s pretty much how I found actor, director, and producer, Karan Brar. Karan is from Bothell near Seattle in Washington and was thrust into weaving that personal and professional discovery as an actor who moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was around 11 years old. He starred in a number of commercials and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid trilogy, but his steady place in American and global households during the 2010’s was through his role as Ravi on the Disney Channel’s hit “Jessie” and its spinoff “Bunk’d”, as he was the network’s first ever series regular Indian character. Coinciding with this timeframe of on screen success, of course, were navigating through his own adolescent years into adulthood and finding peace with the many highs and lows of growing as a professional and as a person. He’s as candid and open about the vulnerability of handling anxiety and depression as he is about the responsibility and challenge of South Asian representation. His thoughtful and heartfelt approach is also evident in his service, whether as a celebrity ambassador for the Thirst Project, or on the Advisory Board for the Cameron Boyce Foundation, named after his late best friend and Jessie costar who succumbed to epilepsy. While he’s had numerous noteworthy acting and voice roles in recent films and television projects, Karan’s portfolio of work has also included leveraging his experience and talent as a director and a producer. We recently caught up for a conversation about his ongoing discoveries as an actor, as a South Asian American, and as a person, but we started off by chatting about the behaviors he’s encountered around pronouncing his name…

Thanks again Karan. It’s mental health awareness month in the US, and so please visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness for more resources at NAMI - nami.org. Till next time, I’m Abhay Dandekar