What will we remember? (written in spurts between 10 May and 30 November, 2020; revised 3/11 Jan 2021) What will we remember? Will we have the perfect vision of twenty-twenty wisdom in hindsight and difficult lessons learned in this year of the pandemic? It all depends on where you were --and where you are when memory strikes— sheltered in place with roof and walls paid for, your life and its paraphernalia un-mortgaged, closets full of seasonal wear and cupboards neatly stocked; or leaning against the weak bamboo and flimsy tin listening to the blue plastic shiver because you did not have the strength or means to make a roof; fingering the notes, no longer crisp from the day’s labour—such as there is— counted out, a measure of sweat and muscle; or left with only your memories and the fading noise of traffic on streets once meant for travel towards dreams, or dreams of work; or waiting, walking, wanting or forced to return to a place you once escaped its borders never a refuge
This is a slightly expanded version of the column that appeared in The Hindu on 27 December, 2020, and includes links to all the podcasts mentioned. Any sort of round up must be prefaced by a disclaimer: what it includes is just a highly filtered slice of the whole, and it says a lot more about who is making the choices (and why) than it does about the quality of inclusions. So here goes... IF 2020 was the year when we discovered the delights, the challenges and for some, the near-impossibility of working from home, it was also the year podcasting went mainstream. Call it the pandemic effect, or just the maturation of a form that is just as accessible to the amateur in the bedroom closet as to the media conglomerate, but podcasting was one medium that saw advertising growth in the past year. Even before the pandemic, Deloitte had predicted that revenues in the podcasting business would rise by 30 percent in 2020, and while the numbers are a bit short of that, there’s no doubt that