Anarkali and Kiran Rai

CBC Our Toronto: Everyone been Anarkali at one point in their life, and I think that why everyone relates to her." Rai herself has a huge social media following, with more than one million views of her video blogs and 37,000 Instagram followers, according to CBC. Kiran Rai, star of Anarkali, tells CBC Our Toronto she didn't think she would ever have a starring role in a series. That because the eponymous Youtube series follows a young South Asian woman navigating the complex world of dating, while trying to balance — or ignore — her cultural and familial expectations. "We don't get to see what it like to be dating on-screen in the diaspora," Rai told CBC Our Toronto. "So I think for me, Anarkali is basically everyone I know, it their story. Anarkali is produced by a small team in Brampton, but has a massive worldwide following online. But one fan group support is particularly special for the show creator, Rakhi Mutta: parents. "I guess the more open-minded or modern ones have come up and said, 'thank you so much for creating this kind of content because as an immigrant I have no idea what my child is going through over here, so now I have an understanding and can kind of speak to them,'" Mutta told Our Toronto. "And I think that the best compliment that we could ever receive as content creators." The series began with the young woman getting dumped by her fiancé, which kicked off a story that part romantic comedy and part cultural study on South Asian immigrants in North America. The series' two seasons have more than 650,000 views and 20,000 subscribers as far away as the United Kingdom and Australia. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.