“When I wanted to become a fashion designer my biggest struggle was to get my father agree to it. Like most men and women back home, he had a very homophobic and typical Bollywood condescending representation of what a fashion designer is like. But eventually he had to listen. And then in college it was the artistic struggle of getting across your point of view as a designer to professors without being taken lightly. I wasn’t willing to follow their rule book of creativity. At work now I am struggling between the idea of myself as someone who just gets paid to do the job or someone who is looking for a partnership. Just because it pays me doesn’t mean I will bow my head down. My fight here is not and has never with ‘them’ but with their mindset about what it means to be living off of creativity and how effective a creative medium can be in shaping society.” (Angel Muktan, Brooklyn, New York)

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