Reema Patel
Reema Patel holds a B.A. from McGill University and a J.D. from the University of Windsor. After working in Mumbai in the youth non-profit sector and in human rights advocacy, she has spent the last ten years working in provincial and municipal government. Such Big Dreams is her first novel, an excerpt of which won the Penguin Random House Student Award for Fiction at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives in Toronto, where she works as a lawyer.
In this episode, Shane and Reema discuss her experiences of returning back to India that inspired the writing of her novel, Such Big Dreams. They discuss topics of identity, social norms, colonialism, and subjective experience. Our perspectives and experiences change depending on the context in a world filled with identity politics. One’s experience in Canada is distinctly different from one’s experience in India – despite you remaining the same. Social context and subjective perception and experience shape how we interact with others and experience the world.
Such Big Dreams: A Novel
A savvy former street child working at a law office in Mumbai fights for redemption and a chance to live life on her own terms in this fresh, propulsive debut novel about fortune and survival.
“A heartbreaking yet hopeful story about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of insurmountable odds.”—Etaf Rum, New York Times bestselling author of A Woman Is No Man
“A savvy former street child working at a law office in Mumbai fights for redemption and a chance to live life on her own terms in this “smart, haunting, and compulsively readable” debut novel about fortune and survival.” – Amy Jones, author of We’re All in This Together
Underground Antics Podcast 