Sunny Kakar was in the sixth grade when Raj Malhotra walked into his Kameyosek School classroom in Mill Woods for the first time. They were both South Asian, first-generation Canadians, and they learned they were also distant cousins with matching extroverted personalities that thrived on parties and strong social bonds.
They formed a friendship that spanned running for student council together in junior high, socializing with large circles in high school and organizing Bhangra dance parties, with hundreds in attendance, when they were students at the University of Alberta.
“That’s honestly the roots of where we’ve come from to get here,” says Kakar, who is now the senior manager, upstream risk of ATB Financial. Through management roles there, Kakar connected people, particularly through a South Asian team member network. It turned out Malhotra was doing similar work with Servus Credit Union and later the real estate world. But the friends noticed that there was a general loss of personal connection in the South Asian community, and many industries were operating in silos, particularly post-COVID.
“We thought. ‘How can we be a catalyst for people to renew those connections?’ ” Kakar says. “We were doing that work already for specific institutions, so we thought, ‘Why not connect people on a larger level and bring everyone to the table?’ ”
In 2021, they started the Sifarish Network, a Canada-wide group created by the South Asian professional community to benefit the community at large. The word, sifarish, has Hindi/Urdu roots and means a “referral” or “recommendation.” Kakar likens it to being a “community concierge,” he says. “We can point you in any direction and provide help.”
The friends started in October 2021 with a PowerPoint presentation explaining their vision to about 10 friends in Kakar’s basement. They registered as a non-profit in January 2022 and have since grown to about 500 local members and 1,000 national members.