When was the last time you settled down in a chair, put your feet up, got yourself a cup of tea… and turned on your favourite podcast? My guess is probably never. More likely than not, you put the milk to boil, brought out the vegetables to chop, set your phone on the kitchen ledge and hit play. Or maybe you got in the car, climbed on your bike, found a seat on the bus, plugged in your headphones, and ran down a playlist while weaving through traffic on your way to work. Or again, you may have donned your exercise gear and counted those steps while immersing yourself in an audio story.
Podcasts are most definitely an in-between-or-while-you-do-other-stuff thing. Not a curl-up-with-coffee thing. At the most, it could be a listen-under-the-covers-as-you-fall-asleep thing. Market research on podcasts in the U.S. and more recently reported by AudioBoom in India indicate that most people listen to podcasts on the go — while commuting or exercising — and unsurprisingly, on their smartphones. Podcast listeners in the U.S. (around a third of the podcast audience) who say they listen at home, do so while performing routine chores — laundry, cooking, cleaning; my own informal survey amongst Indian listeners backs this up.
Clearly, we are able to listen closely, carefully and deeply, even when we are engaged in other tasks, as long as those tasks are routine, mechanical, demanding a small part of our attention.
Radio evenings
But some of us may remember a time when listening was in fact a focused activity, not coupled with anything else. Remember those Wednesday evenings around the old radiogram, trying not to miss a beat of Binaca Geet Mala ? Or nights spent glued to All India Radio’s Hawa Mahal ? That was a slower, simpler time, with fewer entertainment choices and a greater willingness to stop and settle into the moment with just one thing.
When packaged sound becomes portable across time and space, it has the capacity to flow into the crevices of our lives, filling the available mindspace with all manner of listening magic — stories of different hues, information and education, laughter, and of course, music.
Most dedicated podcast listeners — and radioheads — would be familiar with This American Life (TAL), a show that’s been on the air on American public radio for over two decades, and available as a podcast since iTunes became a thing. With more than 600 episodes to browse through, and consistently rated among the top five downloads on iTunes, TAL may be described as the granddaddy of podcasts.
Hosted by Ira Glass, whose voice has been described as “hypnotic” by some (but “swallowed” elsewhere), TAL has created a culture of storytelling that’s sharp and detail-driven, taking the oddest of ideas and turning them into themes that seem to speak to all of our lives (and not just American ones). The show has been a pioneer in demonstrating how engaging audio storytelling can be, how character and plot can be built into non-fiction narratives, and how the narrator’s voice can become an important element in weaving it all together.
Broad idea
Each episode of TAL is structured around a broad idea. It begins with a short prologue that seems like a random though interesting anecdote and even as you are wondering what this is all about, Glass introduces the theme. The rest of the show unfolds in a series of “acts” — the theme interpreted across different contexts. An episode from earlier this year, The Walls, features stories from border walls around the world and the peculiar cultures that emerge around them.
“A wall has its own gravitational pull, that warps the logic around it,” says Glass. “Once a wall is up, it is a fact on the landscape, it alters the human behavior on either side of it. At that point it is like we accommodate the wall… not the other way around.” This leads into stories about walls around two Spanish cities on the border of Morocco, the “invisible” wall between the two Koreas, a barrier between Mexico and the U.S., and, finally, the neighbourhood fence between India and Pakistan.
The archive has a rich range of stories, offering many hours of engaging and often inspiring listening. You can rifle through the recommendations on the TAL website, with staff picks, funny stories, and even a selection that is family-friendly (episodes liked by children). So, the next time you have an hour-long commute, or a curry that takes forever to cook, or have to make up those 10,000 steps… you might want to listen to Ira Glass and Co.
(A fortnightly series on podcasts.)
The Hyderabad-based writer and academic is a neatnik fighting a losing battle with the clutter in her head.
