What are words worth?

This was written originally for my column in The HIndu's Sunday Magazine, Peace in a Pod, to be carried on July 22, 2018. However, the publication declined to carry this saying that it highlighted the work of a rival newspaper. While I can understand (though still disagree) with this policy, I do want to talk about podcasts that I think the Indian audience might find interesting, so decided to place it here instead...for those who might be interested. --- There’s no longer any doubt, this is the moment for digital audio on demand. Over the past couple of years, the mainstream media industry in India has begun looking seriously at audio content that both complements and extends its offering, whether in news, features or all the genres in between. Several legacy media outlets have had the weekly, fortnightly or occasional podcast available on their web site, but there has been little systematic investment in the audio component, with distinct resources or planning. But that seem...

It’s a little over a week since my sabbatical leave began. “I envy you,” said a colleague I ran into at a city event a few days into the week. “So, what have you planned?” asked another. “You should just take it easy,” said a third, striking a welcome note but clearly in the minority. I veer dangerously from wanting to take the last piece of advice seriously to wanting to make sure I execute every word of the detailed plan I had submitted in order to win this year off. A sabbatical is an opportunity to slow down and do the things that most academics complain they never have time to do during the regular school year: read, reflect, write. Those three words that attracted me to this job in the first place. Yes, I love the teaching too, but once in a while it’s good to get a break from the daily grind of lectures and grading. People outside academia look at the idea of a sabbatical somewhat enviously and some see it as an indulgence— time off with pay that doesn’t get co...

A WhatsApp message makes the rounds, asking you to join a candlelight vigil protesting the brutal rapes in Kathua and Unnao and asserting that #thisisnotmyindia. I am held up doing my job, sitting in on student presentations while a part of me chafes, wanting to be where many of my friends and fellow citizens are, holding placards and melting candles, trying to find hope in collective presence. I do not make it to the event, and a part of me shrivels a bit in an unavoidable guilt, while the rest of me tries to make sense...of the need for visible assembly, of the necessity of being seen as part of a group that refuses to be silent, of what we achieve through marking our outrage and articulating our refusal to be implicated in the actions that give rise to it.  I want to be there for all those reasons, and I want to be there to gain a bit of strength from the sense that we share the sense of outrage, frustration and are all overcome with a sense of helplessness while wondering ho...

I’m in the car with my niece, and we’re listening to one of my playlists. It’s a song from the late 1970s, Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, and she sings along to the words, which edge from slow to fast, from somewhat reflective to belted out, all the way to the plaintive last line. She stops, suddenly, and says, “This is kind of pathetic, that I know all the words to songs from my parents’ generation!” Our musical memory is inextricably associated with the context(s) of our lives, the people who come and go at different points, the places we are in when we listen to something or the mood that specific songs and tunes link us to. Even after the incidents that gave rise to those moods are long forgotten, the sense of feeling lingers, and comes alive each time we encounter the tune. If my young companion’s parents listened to Led Zeppelin when they were dropping her off to school every morning, the song gets imprinted in her mind in a way that is difficult to erase. It probably gets ...