Is podcast the latest trend amongst millennials in India

When an email from Apple landed in Mae Mariyam Thomas’s inbox last month, it felt like an affirmation of two leaps of faith she had taken. The first leap was in 2015 when she launched the country’s first indie music podcast, Maed in India, at a time when the concept of listening to a recorded audio series on the internet had not caught popular imagination. The second was her decision to start a podcasting company last year though the medium is yet to mature in India.

Thomas’s podcast, the Apple email said, was one of the top Indian podcasts of 2018. Also, the only other podcast her new company had produced — No Sugarcoat by Pooja Dhingra — had also made it to the Apple list. “I was like, ‘Whaaat’! I felt so honoured,” says Thomas, a former radio jockey who relocated to Mumbai after studying and working in the UK. More podcasts are now in the works, she told ET Magazine.

The year 2015 was also when the Indian market came to the notice of Audioboom, a UK-headquartered company that hosts, distributes and helps monetise podcasts.

While doing the podcast for the ICC during the Cricket World Cup, the company noticed a jump in listenership from India though it wasn’t even present there. “We realised there was a lot of potential,” says Audioboom’s India head Aman Goklani.

Since opening its India office in 2016, the company has worked with more than 70 Indian podcasters and its average monthly listens (the metric used in podcasting, like views in videos) have jumped to 15 lakh from under two lakh in 2016.

In the last six months, Audioboom has also helped several news organisations launch their podcasts. And advertisements, too, have begun trickling in.

“In a country like India, the potential for spoken audio content is huge. Things are not going to change overnight but it is headed in the right direction,” says Goklani, who believes there are strong undercurrents that will make the medium mainstream in five to 10 years.

Taking It Slow
Talking about the growth of podcasting in India is tricky. For some, the pace has been as frustrating as watching paint dry.

“The adoption rate of podcasts in India is much lower than it should be. The people with the muscle to educate users are not doing it,” says Chhavi Sachdev, an independent producer who has been making podcasts since 2008 and now conducts podcasting workshops.

The slow growth in India is in stark contrast to the US, where podcasting was a $314 million industry in 2017, or China, where the market size is an estimated $7 billion, thanks to subscription-driven revenue and preference for premium educational content.

In India, the advertising industry is yet to take much notice. “Podcasts will take off when brands see their business increase because of investing in the media. Some will experiment with it, just like a few brands did with social media in the initial days,” says Prashanth Challapalli, COO of Leo Burnett Orchard.

In India, the content in general also feels uneven, says Sachdev. “Producers and creators lose momentum and direction because the industry is growing so slowly,” she says, leading to a vicious cycle and a phenomenon called ‘podfade’ when, as the name suggests, a podcast fades out.

At the same time, anecdotal evidence suggests a growing interest in the medium among the urban Indian millennial familiar with US pop culture. And people are not just talking about what their favourite podcasts are but also about launching their own. As a Twitter user remarked that people are talking about launching podcasts in the same vein they once used to talk about blogging.

Source: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/podcasting-growth-is-slowly-picking-up-in-india/articleshow/67398243.cms

Read more about: Hindi Podcasting

An Interview With Yatindra Mishra: Hindi Literature Today

Yatindra Mishra has four collections of Hindi poetry to his credit – Yada Kada, Ayodhya tatha Anya Kavitayein, Dyorhi par Aalap and Vibhas. As a music and film critic he has also written Girija (the life  and works of thumri singer Girija Devi), ‘Devpriya’, ‘Sur ki Baradari’ and ‘Humsafar’. His Meelon Se Din won the Best Publication Award for year 2010. He has also translated the twelfth century Lingayat mystic poet Akka Mahadevi’s Vachanas in Hindi language, titled Bhairavi. Translations of his English writings have been well received in German, Urdu and English languages. He is a recipient of numerous awards including Bhartiya Jnanputha Fellowship. He has worked as a Chanel advisor of DD Bharati New Delhi for the term 2014-16. Recently he published a book on the Musical journey of the Legendary playback singer Lata Mangeshkar titled Lata: Sur-Gatha.

(translated from Hindi, by the interviewer)

 WHAT ARE YOUR INSPIRATIONS WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR WORKS BECAUSE YOU HAVE WRITTEN OVER A VARIED RANGE OF TOPICS, FROM ABOUT AYODHYA TO MORE RECENTLY ABOUT LATA MANGESHKAR?
I’ve been a poet from the beginning and I’ve always written poetry in Hindi. I write about political and social issues and about cultures, how cultures are changing. But later I had the urge to write about art forms. I’ve written on Bismilllah Khan, Girija Devi and recently on Lata Mangeshkar and her music journey in ‘Lata: Sur Gatha’. But I am primarily a poet, and I write from the perspective of a poet.

WHAT ARE YOUR VIEWS ON THE STATE OF HINDI LITERATURE IN INDIA TODAY?
Nothing is dying out, I think that’s a clichéd and over hyped phrase – that it’s happening. Literature doesn’t die. The medium changes. We used to read paperback books, now we read on kindle, we read on Facebook, we read blogs; so the medium, the expression changed, it has become more democratic. We used to go to publishers and editors earlier who would reject it. Today you can write your poems on blogs and express yourself, and get people who appreciate your work. There is a different cyber culture today – every newspaper uses the online medium to get articles out as well. So I think this is a lot more democratic because people get to have their say more. But I don’t think literature died out. Just like in case of cinemas, we say that the Golden Age of movies is dead and gone, but it’s still there. So the expression of thoughts have changed with the times; and with every age the questions asked change, and their impact changes. Every age has its own ideologies, and the questions to be asked have been modified as well. For example if we talk about the independence of our country today, we’d talk it in the context of us celebrating 7 decades of freedom. However if we went back in time and talked about it in 1947, then we’d be talking about just achieving it. So similar is the situation in case of literature. If you talk about Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay and a writer of today, there would definitely be a stark difference in styles of writing, and what they write about.

Source: http://kolkatabookfair.net/an-interview-with-yatindra-mishra-hindi-literature-today/

Read more about: Hindi Literature Video

Being a judge at a poetry competition

After the assembly, the principal gave a short, motivational & influential speech, which I heard like a student. After that all of the students spread into different directions to move towards their respective places designated for separate competitions. And those two girls escorted me to the place where the Hindi poetry competition was to be held. Over there I met the other judge, who is a Sanskrit professor at a government girls college in Gurgaon.

I was glad to see that there were almost forty students from classes 7th to 10th, including a few children from two other schools as well. As I sat on the judge’s chair, I felt a great sense of responsibility. The students were given three topics, out of which they had to pick one of their choice & had to write a poem of 10-12 lines in the given 20 minutes time. When they were done, one by one they came on the stage to recite their poems. We had to judge them on four criteria: relevance, expressions, confidence & expressions. I heard each of them attentively. After that I, along with the other judge, took the best marks from both of us’ sheets & added them to decide the first & second position.

They called me on the stage to announce the winner. I was a bit nervous but I knew being a poetess, I have to give them some poetry tips honestly. I first thanked the school authorities for inviting me. Then I said that I am glad to see you many in numbers as there is a lot of work to be done in the field of hindi poetry and you are the future & it’s great that you are taking interest in it. Then I told the children a little about writing poetry. I said, ‘a poetry should be like a river, just like a river flows flawlessly, a poetry must be flowing. It must have a message in it. There must be a proper beginning, middle & an end, rhyming is also equally important. I told them it is not easy to write, not everyone can, because for writing a poetry one has to be in sync with the universe, so that one can pick just the right words from the stream of thoughts flowing into the cosmos. Use of selectively chosen words should be there & one can use a lot of synonyms as well.’ Then I announced the first & second winners, called them on stage, told them why they have been chosen.

We were told that the selected poetry would be uploaded on the CBSE website. I was happy that behind that uploaded poetry, my judgement would be there.

This way I thought I did justice to my being a Judge.

Besides all this I gone through many other tiny feelings & emotions, which I would share some other day.

Source: https://www.speakingtree.in/blog/being-a-judge-at-a-poetry-competition

Read more about: Hindi Poetry Recitation