What are words worth?

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 t...

There's an orchestra of voices out there, female, non-conforming, trans, queer...and okay, yes, men too. But today we are--ritualistically--celebrating the gender that draws from Chromosome X, and the one that society has constructed in multiple marginalising ways, constructions that over decades we are dismantling, brick by brick, sometimes whole walls at a time. The podcasting universe has a ton of shows that are made by women, and some specifically focusing on the huge range of experiences of being women, so if you have a little time on your hands here are some to listen to. As I run through the list on my regular feed, I find some that I listen to routinely, others I dip into when the mood strikes, and yet others that I save for days when I really want to immerse myself in something deep. One that launched just two days ago (disclaimer: I am somewhat involved) is Pinjra Tod Kar , tells the stories that have shaped (and been shaped by) Shaheen, an organization founded by poet...

A downside of the academic life is that it’s hard to make time for the things you enjoy watching, listening to, or reading. There seems to be always so much work-related reading and watching to catch up on (particularly in these times when research output seems to come out of a fire hose). When you’re at work the meetings and paper pushing take up all one’s hours. And so you lug the assignments home and open up your laptop in the quiet after-dinner hours for the unending catch-up. There is a space, though, where work cannot reach me…yet. It’s when my hands are tied to the steering wheel or my eyes need to focus on the pressure cooker and boiling milk. It’s a space that envelops me when I take that occasional walk and turn my ringer off. That’s when I am able to immerse myself in things that do one of several things: make me wonder and laugh, give me a small sense of understanding of this complex world, or allow me to escape into the stories of lives so unlike my own that I cannot ...