All You Need Is Radio Ga Ga

Inventive podcasters are changing the way we consume information on audio.

- Priyadarshini Sen

SWEET-smelling mist from boiling sugarcane juice seeps into dark, fudgy pyramids of cane jaggery. When a scraping of this is spread on hot chapatis, it makes for compulsive eating. Now consider rich, syrupy nolen gur spilling out like lava from a quintessentially Bengali dessert. “Gur is the vertex of health, heritage and taste,” says food writer Vikram Doctor in the Real Food Podcast, a show curated by him on stories of Indian food—from the everyday to the extraordinary. Doctor takes us on a sensory trip to ancestral kitchens, exotic vegetable farms and gourmet restaurants. We hear from modern agriculturalists, health practitioners and heirloom aficionados about India’s gourmet secrets. Like Doctor, other podcasters too are breaking into the new talk-radio scene in India. These episodic series of digital audio files made available on the internet are now being touted as “the new radio of the millennial era”.

Talk-radio shows, built on the do-it-yourself model, are recorded in professional studios or at home using basic mobile applications. Podcasters believe it will trump traditional radio in the not-so-distant future, just as it did in the West. Unlike traditional radio, which passes off as background score for many passive listeners, talk-radio draws the consumer in. “Podcasts are a more active medium. They offer insights and opinions across genres,” says Ankit Dhadda, a marketing and product head at Bloomberg Quint in Mumbai.