Shaana which I have been told means “pride/ prestige” in Hindi and “beautiful” in Hebrew. Her mother is a Gujarati from India raised in Kenya where her grandparents still live, her father is a Swiss Hungarian Jew raised in Zurich. Both were educated in England, which explains how two polar opposite worlds came together, fell in love and decided to create one world.

She was born in Kenya with pale skin, jet-black, poker straight hair and green eyes, but strangely enough looked Oriental. "I was this genetically interesting concoction that looked neither Swiss nor Indian. My genes decided to continue changing and turned my green eyes brown and my straight hair wavy..." says Shaana. "I still didn’t look like I belonged. The Japanese children in Swiss pre-school spoke to me in Japanese, my babysitter spoke to me in French, my family spoke to me in English, my neighbors spoke to me in Swiss-German and the movies I watched spoke to me in Hindi." She was neither here nor there. Nevertheless, no matter what she looked like and no matter where she lived, I always felt my core was Indian. I used to sob to my mother and her siblings exclaiming that I didn’t want my last name to be Levy, I wanted it to be Nathwani like them! Despite my Swiss passport, when asked where I was from, I used to say, “I am half Indian/half Swiss.” I am too anal with being on time and too much of a perfectionist to be Indian; I am too passionate and emotional to be Swiss. I am a constant dichotomy, never feeling like a local yet being a resident, never feeling like a foreigner yet being an outsider, and always being a foreigner behaving like a local.