Vidhu Mayer

The original plan was big… a first-of-its-kind in-person event at the High Commission of India, bringing together writers, thinkers and artists from across the UK for panels and keynote speeches, wrapped up nicely with a pop-up Bengali-fusion supper club delivered by chef Sohini Banerjee of Smoke and Lime… plus media lined up, special guests, and a camera crew to capture it properly. Then the second lockdown hit, and none of it could happen the way we'd planned.

So, we pivoted. We rebuilt the whole thing online in a matter of weeks, with next to no infrastructure and even less budget. I edited every single video by hand.

The conversations themselves were recorded ahead of time, but that's not really the point… what mattered was that people watched them together, live, at the same time, the way you'd watch an actual festival rather than stumble across a video months later. People commented, followed, shared, found their way into deeper conversations off the back of it. That's the bit that's genuinely hard to fake or manufacture. There was real momentum, building in real time.

We didn't shy away from anything either. Sex, the Kama Sutra, the role of men in all of this. Men were part of those conversations too. It felt cool and current to have these conversations, not serious and off-limits, which is exactly why it pulled in people from genuinely different walks of life. And the opportunity opened up ten-fold as suddenly the global diaspora could be equally involved as we were now online.

63 streamed events, 65 international speakers, over 1,300 people watched live, and we've had nearly 25k views since.

Pretty impressive for a volunteer-led event. We gave it a proper identity too; every strand of the programme had its own distinct brand colour, its own look. It felt like something people wanted to belong to. The momentum from the festival caught publisher HarperCollins' attention and the idea of a literary anthology 'Beyond the Bindi' was born, documenting the diaspora's take on India's indigenous wisdom on femininity and womanhood. From a handful of volunteers working with next to no budget, to international speakers and a publisher's attention — the entire global diaspora community had noticed.

Produced this short film for George the Poet in collaboration with Brent Council, written by George and scored by Benbrick.

And producing it properly meant properly: locations, the film crew, props, models, local residents, council liaison, messaging, talent liaison and briefing, everyone's travel, and making sure the whole crew was fed.

It was a project that was very close to George's heart as it was filmed in his mother's house on the estate that he grew up on.

The film went on to be selected by Soul Film UK to feature on the British Film Institute's BFI Player.

Co-hosted with my close friend, Minash, this passion project features the honest conversations about life, work, family and friendship that most people only have at 1am.