A London-based Indian-origin consultant and broadcaster’s new podcast series exploring the subject of unconscious bias with prominent personalities around the world has emerged as one of Spotify’s popular offerings, heard across 38 countries.

Smita Tharoor, founder of Tharoor Associates and co-founder of Culturelytics, has covered in-depth conversations with the likes of actor Vidya Balan on society’s unconscious bias about marriages to journalists, authors and war zone photographers and politicians like her brother, senior Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.        Now in her third season, Smita Tharoor explains her motivation behind ‘Stories of Unconscious Bias’ and the urge to highlight life lessons on challenging our deeply held notions.

“In April 2020, at the peak of being locked down in Delhi, I read an interview with Vidya Balan. She was talking about lockdown and lessons learned and, in the interview, she said she hated cooking because she always felt that cooking was demeaning and not part of being a successful woman,” said Tharoor.”I don’t know Vidya Balan, have never met her but it got me thinking about why it is she had felt that way; what was in her upbringing that had influenced her. She had unconsciously believed this and had fought going into the kitchen all her life. Now during lockdown, she realised that she could cook if she wanted and in actual fact, it did not demean her,” she recalls.

That led to the critically-acclaimed actor of films such as ‘Kahaani’ becoming the launch episode of Season 1 of the new podcast series and since then there has been no looking back for Tharoor, with 28 interviews spread across sectors and regions.