After a successful 20-year career as a journalist and corporate executive, Carole Hopson made a bold decision to step into the cockpit. Today, she is a Boeing 737 Captain with United Airlines, based in Newark, New Jersey, and she's one of the few Black women in the world to hold that position.
Carole’s journey wasn’t easy. Having faced an accident, financial sacrifice, the rigor of flight school, and motherhood, she pursued a dream that had waited decades to take flight. Alongside her aviation career, she remains deeply connected to her love of storytelling as the author of A Pair of Wings, a novel inspired by Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman to earn a French pilot’s license.
Through her work, Carole celebrates courage, legacy, and representation. Her nonprofit project, The Jet Black Foundation, aims to send 100 Black women to flight school by 2035 to create a new generation of pioneers in aviation.
This episode is about more than flying; it’s about resilience, purpose, and daring to rewrite your story mid-flight.
Solange Ndip is the founder of Solange Rising Star (SRS), a survivor-led movement born from her own experience of SA trauma and resilience. What began as a deeply personal journey of healing has grown into an organization uniting survivors, witnesses, and allies to transform pain into collective power.
“Our voices, once silenced by fear, can become the sound of hope.”
Through initiatives like Kacherkatan, inspired by the metamorphosis of a butterfly, Solange and her team empower survivors across Cameroon’s rural and conflict-affected regions through education, advocacy, and creativity. Her story is one of courage, community, and refusing to let silence win.
"So what if it's hard? So what if it takes time? So what if I've stumbled before? I will keep going."
Lt. Col. (Dr) Dharamdatt Goel (Retd.) is a Motivational Speaker and Corporate Trainer, with a Doctorate in Psychology, and a Postgraduate Degree in Personnel Management. In 2002, he lost a leg below the knee while on an operation at the Line of Control. However, he was undeterred as he embraced many adventure sports, and made it to the Limca Book of Records as the first Indian to paraglide with an artificial leg. He's also the author of the bestsellers 'When People Doubted My Ability to Walk, I Decided to Fly,' and 'The Magic of So What'.
Megan Davis is a lawyer turned author of two novels, The Messenger and Bay of Thieves. The latter released in 2024 follows two women, Vanessa and Kate, who get dragged into a glamorous but dangerous world of financial crime and corruption spanning London all the way to the south of France.
Bay of Thieves was the Sunday Times thriller of the month for July 2024. It's been described as "A timely, gripping, and richly nuanced financial thriller that exposes the Riviera’s seedy underbelly".
"I had this idea that fraud and corruption were very complicated concepts, and they needed time to cook up. But at that point, I realized how simple it was and how it was actually the easiest thing to do. It's very easy to bribe someone, to falsify documents and to lie. I didn't do it more out of fear than anything else, because I'm quite cautious. But I could really imagine doing that kind of thing."
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Dr. Satyen Sharma is a consulting psychiatrist who has been working in Punjab and in and around Delhi for 16 years. He was trained at the prestigious Armed Forces Medical College, in Pune, India.
Satyen has held leadership positions as Secretary and then President of the Indian Association of Private Psychiatry. His areas of interest are addiction psychiatry and general adult psychiatry.
"It would be so common for a family from Punjab to bring in a young, strapping, healthy boy, 20 years of age, who's been using heroin for some time. And they would tell me, 'Doctor, this boy, we want you to remove his heroin habit. And we have given him no work at all.'
Now he's free to work out on his addiction, which is so counterintuitive. The first thing I would say is that if he doesn't have any responsibilities or anything to look forward to, what motivation does he have to go off drugs?"
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Sindhu Wadhwa likes to call herself a glorious mess. On good days, she wears her ADHD diagnosis like a crown, on other days she is a reluctant adult. Sindhu is also a freshly minted cat lady.
For the last 19 years, Sindhu has been a clinical psychologist and a practicing psychotherapist. She currently heads the therapy team for MindSmith India which is a premium brain health platform. Sindhu is also on the advisory panel as a mental health expert for TRIOMPH (Transplant Recipients of India and Organ failure patients - a Movement to Provide Hope), a national support group in India for organ donation. Sindhu likes to write and speak on women's mental health.
"The gift was, I got a lot of time alone. I literally built a world inside me, I could imagine things. I suppose while it was undiagnosed ADHD back then, it was always somebody who had a thousand windows open in this house of life. So imagine you have all the windows of the house open. And there is a lot of wind coming in, sunlight coming in. This is my house is life in my head. So I grew my own beliefs, I started to have deeper self awareness and reflection. I was always that child who was far more aware and cognisant of internal chatter than perhaps other people. So while it can be a curse, it can lead to severe anxiety, but I see it as a gift."
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Robert Newcome is an author and retired Army officer best known for his novel The Name Beneath the Stone. In addition, Robert has worked a retail manager and a management consultant specialising in leadership training. During lockdown he posted a 500-word story every Saturday and he now writes full time. War is often a setting for his novels.
"I joined the Army, at the age of 19. At the age of 20 I was serving in Northern Ireland, leading a platoon of soldiers. When I joined the Army, my mindset would have been, we're the good guys. In Northern Ireland, it was the time of The Troubles. We were there essentially stopping Catholics from attacking Protestants and vice versa. And the sense of, I'm part of an organisation that is here primarily to benefit people. And my whole upbringing I guess up to that point had been, England, Britain, a good place. We've done good around the world."
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Shubha Priya shares her opinion on death, dying and how to grow old. Shubha has previously served as a Creative Director in leading advertising agencies around the world. She is currently fulfilling her lost childhood dreams of being an author and musician. She wrote, illustrated and designed her book of satirical verses for adults, called Whimsical Brew.
When Shubha was in her teens, she heard Maurice Chevalier singing the lyrics of a song in the movie Gigi: ‘Oh I’m glad that I’m not young anymore!” Struck by the way he sang it with such conviction, she wondered how growing old could ever be joyful.
Fast forward to her 60s, Shubha moved with her mother to what most people referred to as an ‘old age home’. The stark side of ageing was visible all around her, a daily reminder of a Shakespearean vision coming true. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Shubha’s mother passed away in 2021. But Shubha chose to stay on at the old age home. Shubha is hoping to keep dementia at bay by learning to play the piano!
"One of the things that always struck me is it takes a village to raise a child. Right? And that's how we grew up. We had a whole neighborhood bringing us up. We could stroll into anybody's house and be fed, by some aunty or the other. And the parents didn't worry. Now to the elderly, it takes a community to transition the elder into death.You need, you know, you need all of the support of not just family in your old age. I think it needs a community. I think it needs the community of elderly who can empathise."
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Rachel Thomas was the first Indian woman to compete for India in a skydiving competition in 1987. After 23 years, she ended her career in 2002, when she skydived from 7,000 ft over the North Pole also creating the record of being the first Indian female to skydive over the North Pole. During her career, Rachel has completed 650 jumps in 18 countries. She has won multiple awards including the winner of the National Adventure Sports Award and is a TedX speaker.
In 1979, this small-town mother of two kids, just 23 years old, decided one evening at an Army Party to join a Skydiving Course at Agra. Unknowingly history was created.
In 2005, Rachel was honoured again by the Government of India, with the fourth highest Indian civilian award - the Padma Shri.
"At 28 years old, my marriage broke. And in those days, to say that you're divorced was very difficult. At this point. My son was about ten, My daughter was about nine. They were young and I thank God that my mother and my sister was there to give me support and help me and be there for me because I had to keep going for training. To lift my head high and walk in Agra, the place where I was, was difficult."
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Maggie Steber is an internationally renowned documentary photographer, educator, and photo editor. Her work has appeared in major magazines, newspapers and book anthologies as well as national and international exhibitions. She has worked in 72 countries specializing in telling the stories of underrepresented people and her work has been seen in 70 exhibitions in 35 countries. Best known for her photo essays in National Geographic Magazine and her humanistic documentation of Haiti, she published Dancing on Fire: Photographs from Haiti with Aperture. Her nine-year project on her mother’s melancholic voyage through memory loss was made into a multimedia presentation by MediaStorm and won a Webby award. In her career Maggie has worked as a picture editor for Associated Press, a contract photographer for Newsweek, and as the Director of Photography at The Miami Herald. Maggie is a member of VII Photo Agency. Maggie has received wide recongition including as a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Guggenheim Fellow and a the Medal of Honor for Distinguished Service to Journalism from the University of Missouri.
To see some of Maggie’s moving photographs just check out her website: maggiesteber.com/main.html To stay up to date, follow me on Instagram and on X (Twitter) @smitatharoor. Stream and follow us on your favourite podcast platform.
Nematullah Ahangosh is an activist, poet and social worker from Afghanistan. He studied in school in Kabul from 2014 to 2018. He's also been a young member with a group of peace activists there too.
Subsequently Nemat went to Chennai in India to study a Bachelor of Social Work at Madras School of Social Work where he was awarded the Budding Social Worker Award and the Best Library User Award in 2021. This was followed by a one-year diploma course in Trivandrum, Kerala in leadership and social entrepreneurship. Nemat has been busy writing poems in English since 2017, mainly about the day-to-day life of refugees, women and overall life in Afghanistan alongside studying an MA in Conflict, Security and Development at the University of Sussex. Apart from this, Nemat is a good swimmer and coach. He is the founder of Stretch More, a mobile empowerment parkour that empowers people with disabilities to survive natural and man-made disasters. Parkour (French: [paʁkuʁ]) is an athletic training discipline or sport in which practitioners attempt to get from point A to point B in the fastest and most efficient way possible. Nemat’s first and upcoming poetry book, The Color of Peace, will be published by Haley’s Publishing, a company based in Massachusetts, USA. He is 28 years old. He says his ambition is to bring about change in the future leadership of Afghanistan, mainly in the social sector.
"People around me, including my family, they believe that one day, a miracle will happen to me and that will cure my disability. But I don't want that right now. I have accepted myself through my disability. I really care for empowerment. I want to be empowered and I want other people with disabilities also to be empowered."
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Onir is an award-winning Indian director, producer, screenwriter and editor. He's one of the few openly gay directors in India. Born Anirban Dhar in Samchi, Bhutan, Onir spent much of his childhood going to the cinema. Onir is best known for his 2011 anthology film, I Am. The film dealt with single motherhood, child sexual abuse, displacement and LGBTQI rights. For I Am, Onir won the National Film Award for Best Hindi Feature Film.
He is also well known for his 2005 film My Brother...Nikhil, based on the life of Indian AIDS activist, Dominic D'Souza. It was one of the first mainstream Hindi films to deal with AIDS and same-sex relationships. In 2023, Onir released Pine Cone, a semi-autobiographical film that narrates the story of an proud filmmaker Sid Mehra falling in love for the first time and over two decades becoming cynical about love and the changing landscape of queer rights in India in the year 1999.
"I suddenly felt that I don't belong, until then I felt that I was a part of this group. Very often people say that it's important to have discourse, have discussions with people. I've spent my lifetime doing that, and at some point, you're exhausted in constantly trying to validate your identity. And now I'm at a point of life where I am like, it's your shortcoming. And it's not my job in life. It's not my duty, to spend my time, energy, effort to constantly educate people, about learning to respect someone else."
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Kushanava Choudhury is the writer of the The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta (2017). He has worked as an academic and a journalist in India and in the US. Most recently he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He spent much of the last decade living in India and is currently working on a book about what he witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic in New Delhi, and how it changed him.
"I went back to Calcutta once to visit I found a little magazine, where they had published an issue on the Bengal famine. And in that issue, there were 16 interviews of people who were witnesses of the famine, who were still alive. They had their photographs, and testimony. And these people are in their 90s, oldest person was 112 years old. And I just could not believe that these people were alive to tell the stories. These are just ordinary people who were farmers in the countryside. What happened when the rice disappeared, what they did, how they sold their house and home, fled for their lives, many of them went into the jungles in the Sunderbans, with the tigers. And when I read those stories, I really did not want to read them. Because in a way they were shocking to me, but in another way, they were stories I wish did not exist. Because the fact that they existed, meant that there were 10s, 100’s, 1000s of people who were out there who had stories to tell, who had simply not been asked, and one of the people who had not asked them was me."
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Annette Smith (née Julien) was born in December 1927 on the small Caribbean Island of Grenada into a privileged family. She was educated in Trinidad and returned to Grenada where she completed a year of Nursing before embarking on her journey to England aged just 18. She travelled completely alone and this was her first trip abroad. In 1946, post the 2nd world war, Annette became the only black nurse at the Guildford Royal Surrey Hospital. She married a Londoner and had three children before returning to her nursing profession as a community nurse. She has many interests including poetry, singing, the arts, sport and continues to be a positive member of the community.
"And I think the important too at our age is to have interests. At my very old age, I am a member of a singing group, which I love. And I must say I do have a good voice. I've always ben able to sing from school days. So that is one of the lovely things that I do." To stay up to date, follow me on Instagram and X (Twitter) @smitatharoor. Stream and follow us on your favourite podcast platform.
Akkai Padmashali is an Indian transgender social and political activist. She is the Founder of Ondede, an organization that works with LGBTQI+ minorities on the idea of convergence (also known as intersectionality). Akkai has written a memoir entitled, A Small Step in a Long Journey.
"From criminalisation to decriminalisation to re-criminalisation. How do you accept why your society is so rigid in deciding your identity? Lakhs of people have been killed, have been assassinated. Even in the United States of America or different parts of the world, people who are black, lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex people are being killed."
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Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. He is the winner of the 2023 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize for his most recent poetry collection “Heritage Aesthetics” published by Granta.
The chair of judges, journalist Samira Ahmed, described Anthony’s poetry as “beautiful, but does not sugar coat. The arsenic of historical imperial arrogance permeates the Britain he explores in his writing. And the joy of this collection comes from his strength, knowledge, maturity, but also from deeply felt love.”
His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.
"That's the deal breaker. If you can meet someone, and you can see something in them, that reflects you, be it a principle, be it a belief, be it a way that you would like to be seen. I think that's the one that draws you in. We talk about being charismatic, we talk about being charming. Some people are very naturally charismatic, which means it's not trained. But I also think there's an element of how does that charisma impact and affect us in different ways?"
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Yasmin is a journalist, broadcaster, author and part time professor of journalism. She writes for the i newspaper and Sunday Times magazine and has written for the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, New York Times, Time Magazine and other publications.
She has won several awards including the Orwell Prize for political writing and National Press Awards columnist of the year prize. She is a national and international public speaker, a consultant on diversity and inclusion and trustee of various arts organisations.
She is also the co-founder of the charity British Muslims for Secular Democracy. Their new report The Inner Lives of Troubled Young Muslims was published in November 2020.
Her recent books include Refusing the Veil, Exotic England about England’s infatuation with the east, In Defence of Political Correctness and Ladies Who Punch. She has twice been voted the 10th most influential Asian in Britain. She has eight honorary degrees and sits on the boards of arts organisations. She is also a keen cook and theatre buff.
"I think because I had such a difficult childhood. I have a very strong centre. And it was destabilised by Oxford, but it wasn't destroyed. And that kind of self belief I has saved me. I don't think I'm better than anybody else, or a superwoman or any of that. But I do know that the stuff I do, I can do, and I'm good at it. And that these bastards will not beat me, that really drives me all the time."
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Charmi Chheda is a filmmaker, writer, and theatre director in Bhutan. Charmi moved to Bhutan ten years ago from India and now sees Bhutan as her home. Charmi has made two feature films, Ganganam Girl and Bulwa and is currently working with 'Samuh', Bhutan’s first streaming platform as a Creative Director.
"I feel somewhere, since everyone is constantly putting up a show. The world expects you to constantly put up a show. And now with social media platforms, I wouldn't be surprised that people are confused about the reel and the real, as time passes. This judgement about one's intelligence really comes out of show. If you are sitting in a meeting or you're with friends, you need to have something to say. If you don't have anything to say and decide to be quiet, they say 'oh, this person is not smart enough.'"
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Anthony Swann has been in education for 16 years as a classroom teacher and instructional coach. He has had the privilege of teaching every elementary grade except kindergarten.
In 2021, Anthony became the first sitting teacher ever to be appointed to the State Board of Education by the US Governor of Virginia.Anthony is currently the assistant principal of Monterey Elementary in Roanoke, Virginia.
In 2018, Anthony began a program entitled “Guys with Ties” to teach boys the importance of honesty, integrity, and character inside and outside of the classroom. In 2021, Anthony was elected by his peers to be the Teacher of the Year in two different schools. Anthony then went on to become the 2021 Virginia State Teacher of the Year.
"My dream was to become a teacher and I would play school every single day. And I could go places in my mind. All when I was in foster care, although I was not having the best situation with my life. I began to dream and I would play school every day and when I would play school it would take me away from foster care. It would take me away from the abuse. It would take me away from the neglect. It would take me away from the feelings of wishing that I was dead, and so playing school was my safe place. And so I just realised that I could go anywhere if I just dream."
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Remona Aly is a journalist and broadcaster in the UK with a passion for faith, lifestyle and identity. She writes for The Guardian, is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought and has been a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Something Understood, a half hour programme which explores a theme across different faiths and traditions through music, prose and poetry. She is also a podcast host for various platforms.
Remona is Director of Communications for Exploring Islam Foundation which specialises in PR campaigns and creative resources to better understand Islam.
Remona is the former Deputy Editor of Emel, a vibrant and glossy British Muslim lifestyle magazine which was the first of its kind to launch nationwide in the UK.
"I have always loved my faith, and I have wanted to fully embrace who I am. So wearing a headscarf, praying, being Muslim is just, it's literally a core part of who I am, it's everything that I am. And I want to be able to write about anything I want to with passion, authenticity and honesty. I also want to be able to communicate with people, I don't want to create a barrier between me and anybody else. Even though, my physical appearance might create certain barriers, but I work really hard to remove them."
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