Mumbai born Ishita Malaviya (
@Surfishita) began surfing in 2007 and nowadays runs the
Shaka Surf Club on Karnataka’s coast with her partner Tushar Pathiyan. She is the first and (uptil now) only professional female surfer in India.
In 2013, She was joined by a group of foreign female surfers, including
Crystal Thornburg-Homcy from Hawaii, to make a
feature-length documentary- Beyond the Surface,
which looks at the ways surfing can be used to empower women in India.
“It was very different to what
we were used to,” says Thornburg-Homcy. “Women are often not allowed in
the ocean for a variety of reasons: such as their dowry can be affected
if they are injured or that families don’t want their girls to have dark
skin. The cities are a bit different, but this is what we found in the
villages,” she says.
Thornburg-Homcy adds: “I think when other
women saw Ishita in the ocean that was really eye opening for them. She
was breaking a lot of cultural boundaries.”
Published by
Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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