Naveen Makker

Until I sat down with Naveen Makker to record this show I knew very little of his life in India before he came to study at Griffith University. It wasn’t until Naveen began to talk about his life that he describes as 'pampered' and 'spoon-fed' that I realised he’d come from a privileged background and that he’d taken the extraordinary step of turning his back on his family’s wealth that I began to understand what he’d relinquished just so that he could study on the Gold Coast.

In the course of our conversation we covered everything from his father’s expectations and tough love to diminish Naveen’s sense of entitlement, through to a theoretical discussion on the emergence of India’s rapidly rising middle class and how it has changed the identity of what it means to be Indian in the 21st century. This episode is a revealing insight into a life of privilege and a young man’s desire to turn his back on it in order to prove himself on his own terms.