“Family is about finding the people you can build a life with — and discovering there are no rules to how that life should look,” Aditi Anand tells The Better India.

It’s a thought that feels both simple and quietly radical — especially in a world where families are so often defined for us before we can define them for ourselves.

For Aditi Anand (42), an entrepreneur and film producer who has founded two successful media companies, Little Red Car Films and Neelam Studios, and worked on films like Tere Bin Laden, No One Killed Jessica, Paan Singh Tomar, and Chillar Party, this understanding didn’t arrive all at once. It was shaped slowly — through the people she grew up with, the love she found, and the life she chose to build.

Today, as a filmmaker and producer, Aditi has spent years telling stories that challenge norms and expand representation. But beyond the screen, her own life has become a reflection of those very ideas.

Together with her partner, Susan Dias (37) — who has built a life with her for over a decade, co-founded the venture Native Brews, and stood alongside her in petitioning the Supreme Court of India for marriage equality and legal recognition of same-sex parents, Aditi has created a family that moves beyond conventional labels.

As a queer couple in India, their journey has unfolded both in deeply personal ways and in the public eye. They are among those who have not only imagined a different kind of family but also worked to make space for it — legally, socially, and emotionally.

And yet, what they have built feels strikingly simple.

It is a family shaped by choice as much as by love. One that holds space for grandparents and friends, for tradition and reinvention, for both inherited bonds and chosen ones.

And at its heart is a quiet but powerful belief: that family isn’t something you fit into, it's something you build, together.

A childhood that expanded the idea of belonging

Long before she began redefining family, Aditi had already experienced a version of it that felt unusually expansive.

“I grew up very lucky,” she says. “With both sets of my grandparents and all of their siblings.” 

What she describes fondly as a ‘herd of elephants’ wasn’t just a large family — it was a deeply interconnected one. Grandparents, their siblings, and extended relatives all form a web of care, memory, and belonging.

It’s only in hindsight, she reflects, that she realised how rare that kind of upbringing was.

But what truly shaped her was not just the number of people........

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