The ruthlessness he speaks about relates to the craft, the dedication, the demands one must make of oneself, and the purposive manner in which one must carve out time for the art, to the exclusion, often, of other pursuits one may be drawn to (by desire or obligation). I had never thought of ruthlessness in that way; it had always seemed to me to be a word devoid of compassion, a sort of clinical ferocity bordering on sociopathy. I’d thought instead of persistence and focus as the elements I needed to bring to a writing life, but yes, ruthlessness does capture that combination of single-minded dedication that allows one to excise the external world from one’s immediate consciousness and dwell on the internal, so as to bring under control the many elusive strands of thought that must come together to form legible expression.

Here’s another, from Mary Oliver (thanking the universe for her poetry and much else) something I copied on to a sticky note on my laptop:

The fact that this note, despite its bright yellowness, had disappeared into some crevice among my files, suggests that I had long given up on its message. Retirement has significantly reduced the external (“inopportune, cheerful, even loving”) interruptions from others, yet it has created a space in the restless mind for more internal interruptions. That sense, honed and heightened, of being needed and on call, remains in a state of waiting, refusing to yield to the possibility—the reality—of having time of one’s own.

How then, does one move into the benign ruthlessness needed to create without expectation or demand, to answer the call that one has refused to heed for years, from tentative ideas nudging deeper thought? How can I control the state of internal distraction, of the monkey-mind that is so ready to shift attention to random tasks of the moment, to the “shoulds” and “must-dos”?

Daphne, a schoolteacher and the central character in Ann Patchett’s 2026 novel Whistler, ruminates on what it feels like each year when the vacation begins:

There was always a period of adjustment after school let out, a sudden realization that once again my time was my own. Every year the ghost memory of obligations followed me well into June (I have to grade papers! I have to look at Persuasion before class!) until finally I shook them off, though the dreams in which I was late, unprepared or in the wrong room speaking the wrong language never left me. It was strange to have so much to think about and so little to do.

I do have much to think about, and little to do in the way of obligations, but as it all too often happens with women, domestic obligations (real, imposed, and imagined) sneakily slide into the space taken up previously by workplace demands. The time and energy that one had spent on work, however “consequential” that work may have been, may have been regarded as time away from the real purpose of one’s life—domestic care work. This becomes the “ghost memory” of obligations that one has carried through life and now cannot be set aside, because, all said and done, you have, with retirement, transcended work demands. For academics, of course, engagement with work-life can continue far beyond retirement, and it does for me, too. But I cannot deny that there are large swathes of time becoming available to me, to pursue the ideas and the writing that I have always wanted to do...or perhaps, claimed (or believed) I wanted to do.

So why is it that it has been so difficult to find a rhythm to this phase of my life?

To make it somewhat clearer (and also more pathetic, maybe?), here’s a description of my last two days (if this seems a bit like TMI to some of you, please skip the next paragraph):

I’m in my daughter’s home for a visit for no purpose other than to spend time with her and catch up with friends in the region. It’s my first trip to this part of the world (or anywhere, really), in many, many years, without a work agenda. To do this, I had to convince myself that it was okay to leave the usual running of the home and care responsibilities to my partner and my remarkably able 85-year-old mother—which, for me, is no easy task. So, I get here and the weekend passes, legitimately relaxed owing to jetlag and catching up. Monday is the first day I am entirely on my own, no routine to be subsumed by, no demands on my time. I can actually begin using the time to write, even though I do have some reviewing to do and talks to prepare for; nothing major, easily handled spaced out over a few days. My time is otherwise my own. Unused to such a luxury, I am restless. So, I spend three hours reorganizing my daughter’s kitchen cupboards, doing laundry, walking down to the grocery store. I’m pleased to hear she’s bringing a colleague home for dinner so I set to cooking. Anything to keep me away from the keyboard and blank page. Day 2 is more of the same, except this time I am reorganizing the linen cupboard and doing more laundry. I have succeeded in distracting myself completely from the act of writing.

Now, I can put it off no longer. There are no more tasks urgently calling to me. I must finish this (perhaps inconsequential) piece of writing that I have undertaken, a sort of exploration of this state of un-writerly being. A friend and I have talked about finding a writing rhythm that we can stick to no matter what, trying things like “morning pages” (recommended by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way). My arthritic fingers give up some twenty lines in, and in a few days the possibility of habit escapes me.

I am resolved to now be ruthless about finding this rhythm, about getting to a place where my fingers can fly and words are more than pre-woven strings of letters falling into habituated meaning (how else do we prove we are not stochastic parrots?). Maybe I can’t do morning pages, but I can find hours in the day when I refuse distraction from myself, can’t I? If I could find a way to end this rambling note, maybe there is hope for me yet.

...

Podcasts about writing process, finding one’s way into writing can offer inspiration— although, as The Podcast Review put it, “Listening to the podcasts on this list won’t substitute sitting down and putting words on paper.” Here are just a couple from the many out there.

· For more on the “morning pages”, here is Julia Cameron speaking to Fearne Cotton:

· One of my favourites, gentle conversations with writers, hosted by Mitzi Ripkin: https://firstdraftwriters.com

· Not so much about writing, more about what writing does/can do in our troubled world: https://linnullmann.no/en/project/how-to-proceed-2/

And of course, there is the now discontinued Longform podcast, which is still worth looking at for some insightful conversations around craft.

In the Indian public sector, retirement is an automatic rite of passage that comes at a specific age, varying across sectors from 58 to 70, with academics in central universities reaching the point of superannuation at 65. I have colleagues in other parts of the world who have moved into emeritus status long ago but now, pushing 80, are still productive and very visible in academic forums, so clearly age is not a marker for the ability to contribute—intellectually and economically. There’s always been a sense that older people contribute emotionally and spiritually, of course. But age as a marker for anything, as we’ve learned in so many contexts, can be woefully inadequate, often putting people into boxes packaged with stereotypes. But tying retirement to age can build the perception that after this point, people are no longer useful to an institutional project, or an institution’s life, as it were.

While the date of my official superannuation was 30^th September 2025, and I had already gathered a bouquet of emotional accolades from colleagues, collaborators, and students, I had a few weeks more to wrap up my teaching and grading, and clear out my office, so I’d say it was a gradual exit, merging into the December holidays. When I carried the last few boxes out of my room soon after my last working day, almost everyone was away for the break, so even as I sensed a note of finality, there were no goodbyes being said.

...

People had been asking, in the months leading up to that day:

What do you have planned?

How are you going to spend your time?

Or commenting:

I have no doubt you’ll be as busy as ever!

There’s no retirement for people like you! (and what kind of people is that?)

To be honest, I had this completely unsupported vision of slow mornings with coffee and the news, reading entirely for my own pleasure or curiosity, a lot of time writing only what felt compelled to write, taking afternoon naps, meeting people I had not had the time to catch up with, binge-watching Netflix without guilt...sounds like the perfect retired life, right? But also, even as I threatened to “quit academia cold” I found the tendrils of long-ago commitments still circling my fingers as I rested them on the laptop: reviews to be completed, chapter revisions pending, a few doctoral advisees yet to defend (and one, to submit), insistent invitations to speak at one event or another, and—most seductive of all—exciting proposals to engage further with ideas I had become invested in during the last few years of my academic career. Clearly, quitting cold was not going to be that easy...perhaps not even possible in the short term.

So, I found myself wondering, can one really think about retirement (in my business of academia at least) as a gated fence that one walks through and clicks shut behind you? Is a clean break even possible? But if one did want to do that, what exactly would it entail, and what accommodations—emotional, psychological, intellectual, and yes, financial—would that require?

I’ve had some conversations with older academics, some of whom carry the “emeritus” tag, and most of them have remained prodigiously active even after their formal retirement, continuing to serve not on committees and such only in their home institutions but also in national and international forums, and writing books, giving talks, and participating in round tables with unbounded energy, intellectual and physical. Clearly the mind does not stop, and it seems that it can will the rest of you to go on, too. One said her emerita status was a comfort, offering some continuity and sense of belonging while releasing her from the tedium of day-to-day responsibility and involvement. Another professor moved to a private university where superannuation is optional, “visiting” to teach and possibly guide research if he so chooses. One other, a dear friend and colleague, chose to “retire” early from a public institution but not from his career, moving on to rediscover the excitement of starting over, in a new place, and possibly, a different set of expectations for and from himself. [I guess that’s not even really retiring.]

...

People often talk about the “third act” of life, drawing broadly from narrative structures that move through a three-act structure where the third and final act leads to a climax or denouement. It’s used variously to mean the later years of life, or a shift in career after having been prepared (education, training), achieving some success or consolidation (adulthood, facing responsibilities, meeting challenges), to finally step back (or away?). We could also think of it as “stepping to/ward” something else, and an opportunity to pause and rethink one’s priorities, discover new energies, perhaps. Or bring in all those old desires, hiding like so many lost notes in the crevices of one’s desk that is overrun by books and files governed by the tyranny of deadlines. Finally, an opportunity to do embrace idleness (in the manner of Bertrand Russell) or doing nothing so that we re-capture time from the clutches of meaningless productivity (which Alan Lightman argues for in his book, In Praise of Wasting Time—with a nod to Russell). Both thinkers are not of course proposing that we “empty” our lives of activity, only that we engage more deliberately, slowly, even quietly, in ways that step away from enforced goal setting and the oppressions of what has now become an excessively quantified (and datafied) routine. The third act then becomes an opportunity to reclaim hope, desire, and forms of creativity that may not find expression in what one has seen as a job.

I watched first my father, then my husband, move into retirement with a kind of delight, proceeding from that last day of work into a gentler, slower pace of life that had many of those markers that I thought would populate my own post-university days. Mornings spent doing yoga, taking long walks, or playing tennis (okay, this last definitely not for me). Afternoons led by words that could go in uncharted directions, building stories and essays for the pure pleasure of it, no API scores or citational advantages involved. Evenings with friends and family, the occasional bit of culture that may be on offer in the city. Did that look like my future? Somehow, I had the sneaking suspicion that...maybe...not?

Much of this, of course, has to do with how one can and does use time. Amit Varma, writing recently in the context of a journey undertaken, invites us to think about thick and thin time, made so by the quality of its ‘expenditure’.

...

So how have I been expending time, in the early days of this third act of my life? Am I ending up with more ‘thin’ time than ‘thick’?

It’s been close to four months since I cleared out of my office and brought those boxes home. [Confession: no unboxing has happened in this time.] I’m still waiting for the tendrils of past commitments to wither and fall away, but new things have knocked at my door and captured my attention and imagination, despite my original resolve to stay firmly free (something wrong with that phrase? isn’t freedom more about looseness than firmness?). I still spend a lot of time sitting at my desk, fiddling away on my laptop, attending meetings online, taking calls and answering emails—sadly I have not been able to attain Inbox Zero—and of course writing reference letters, and reviewing what seems to be an unending list of manuscripts. I also was able to give myself over to one passion project—the Hyderabad Literary Festival—without having to reorganize classes or manage university duties. And be available much more to family and friends.

I do understand that one does not really retire from the life of the mind—and I don’t think I would wish to do that. I still take great pleasure in engaging with young people about ideas, and still enjoy sharing something I have discovered, without the pressure of whether it is of any consequence or not. But this is—can be—an opportunity to more deliberately think through what brings me joy, or meaning, and try to make time for that.

How much of what I am doing is by choice, and how much of it is imposed or driven by a sense of obligation, I haven’t been able to actually decipher. Rather, I have not had the time to sit down and take stock (as evident from those unopened boxes)—or maybe it’s that I have not allowed myself to sit down and take the time to figure that out. I seem to be tethered to a way of life that demands productivity, that appends guilt to downtime in the real sense. What I mean is, retirement has allowed me to time for other kinds of demands—professional, personal, civic, social—but has it nudged me to think about what might be demands I can make for (and NOT of) myself?

For some listening:

People who’ve “reinvented themselves later in life” are profiled in the National Public Radio (US) series, The Third Act: https://www.wbur.org/tag/greater-boston-new-careers-reinvention

Retirement or Graduation? There’s actually a podcast titled “Humans against Retirement” that considers this question! Be warned, though, the conversation might veer a bit more towards financial planning, which may or may not be your main concern!

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss taps into the wisdom of older women, starting with Jane Fonda, moving through Isabel Allende and most recently, Cindy Lauper, on her podcast “Wiser than Me”. Even as one might note the relative paucity of voices of people of colour or those outside the American context, one can enjoy the banter of these women, many of whom are still considered feminist icons.

Summer in the northern hemisphere is the season of [some] academic conferences. Well, in my field at least--media and communication—the two largest international conferences take place between late May and mid-July. But as academics know, there are many steps to be taken before one can get on that plane (or other mode of transport) and reach that registration desk to pick up one’s coveted badge of attendance. There’s the extended abstract or paper to be submitted, many months prior, or a panel to be proposed (and the colleagues persuaded to send their pieces in time). Then if you’re lucky to get an acceptance, there is the funding to be figured out. Most Indian public universities do not support conference expenses, and if you don’t have some travel funding built into a project, or win one of the very few travel grants that some conferences make available to “scholars from low- and middle-income countries”, it means between dipping into your personal savings. Or just telling yourself that conferences aren’t really worth that much.

So, are they?

What does a conference mean to the academic world? Really?

That has to be unpacked at multiple levels, because, as we know with pretty much anything in the world, phenomena have different meanings depending on where you stand—in life, in work, and in general.

I’ve had the opportunity to observe the organization of conferences from the inside, and it’s fair to say that they are driven largely by an unarguably commendable impulse: to create a space for the exchange of ideas, for free scholarly debate, for the formation of connections, and to offer visibility to work that may otherwise languish on someone’s hard drive. And of course, they look good on a CV. Especially if they have the word “international” in the title.

Even so, the amount of work that goes into making a conference happen, ensuring that the organizations that run them are sustainable, and the effort that participants make to get there, sometimes doesn’t quite justify it all. Certainly, there is a great deal of positive energy that is generated at the conference, a fact that is well documented on the hundreds of social media posts that follow in its wake—images of glowing faces in front of colourful PowerPoint slides, gatherings of people from around the world their participant lanyards in clear view, the glasses and cups held aloft at the social events, young scholars in selfies with their intellectual heroes. It all seems like one giant party.

But is it?

I have to say, my own experience at conferences has been mostly very positive. I’ve come away feeling happy to have reconnected with friends from graduate school, caught up with kindred souls I only meet at such gatherings but have developed deep relationships with, and listened to some stimulating talks and exciting ideas. But when I consider the lengths I’ve had to go to for that experience (and this last one blew a fairly deep hole in the wallet), I wonder whether the cost is worth it.

The “worth” of a conference is hard to pin down. What you get out of it depends on where you are in your academic journey. For doctoral students and emerging scholars, I would say a large international conference can be an exciting and fulfilling experience. You’re suddenly face to face, over coffee sometimes, with people you’ve only met as citations. If you’re lucky, you get to tell them about your work and get direct affirmation. You get to hang out with other young scholars from around the world and can share sob-stories and anxieties and come to understand that academia can be equally cruel and tedious no matter where you are. It’s also an opportunity to find out about possible grants and job opportunities and create some face recognition. I’m sure there are multiple social media forums that offer advice on how to get the most out of a conference.

For mid-career scholars, conferences become a professional imperative. They are where you test out papers that are in the process of refinement for publication, or where you nurture collaborative transnational (or cross-institutional) relationships, and where you engage with others in your sub-field or specialization. They also carry what administrators in Indian universities are obsessed with—points contributing to the Academic Performance Index. Most university departments can be fairly isolating places for researchers who work in new or emerging areas, or on the more marginal spaces within a discipline, and conferences connect you with a larger community of interest. My own conference of choice, the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), for instance, has 17 thematic sections and 20 working groups, representing a wide range of intra-disciplinary areas.

For senior scholars, I’d say it’s a bit of the above, but mostly, it is an opportunity to give back to the field. You review and respond to the work of scholars-in-the-making, you help open up networks to include them, and you make yourself available to younger academics for conversation and guidance. And of course, you have a great time meeting people you’ve gotten to know and care about and admire over the course of your own career and have those evenings where you can together just be real people.

Okay, so what I’ve done so far is to talk about the upside. Is there a downside (apart from the hole-in-the-purse kind)?

Let’s admit it, the conference is an important element in keeping alive the notion that academia is special. It’s a gathering of people who believe in it so much that they are willing to invest the time, money, and many forms of energy needed to make it work. While everyone at the conference is enthusiastically debating ideas and methods and tools, no one is really debating the logic of the conference itself. Conferences seem to be an essential part of bolstering the myth of academia, what some critics might even call the “cult” of academia (for more on this, take a listen to some of the provocative podcasts mentioned at the end).

At this last conference, a doctoral candidate asked me a question that kind of put me on the spot: “Is there any session, or speaker, at this conference that you are really excited about listening to?” I had to think hard, and at that point, I was hard put to name anyone or any one session. She felt the same ambivalence. This is not to say that I did not find moments of intellectual excitement and stimulating discussion—there were many of those. And overall, I can honestly say that I came away from the conference with a good feeling, happy to have been there.

But increasingly, conferences seem to be becoming more and more performative, a way to check those boxes needed for professional or programmatic advancement, and for some, a way to get a funded foreign junket. Now I have no quarrel with those who seek the instrumental gains a conference can bring, but the impact of this on the level of discourse has been significant. IAMCR member Massimo Ragnedda reflecting on the 2025 conference noted the increasing presence of AI-generated abstracts and presentations, and the participation of undergraduate students from some countries—which turned many sessions into sophomoric rituals. Others spoke of the fact that some universities allow undergraduate students to earn college credit for conference presentations, funding them to attend (I could not verify this but it was mentioned often). If a conference panel is to reflect both seriousness and depth, such shifts present significant challenges.

For first timers at a large conference, it can be an overwhelming and daunting experience, with multiple sessions to choose from (over 30 concurrent sessions at IAMCR 2025) and a general feeling of too much in too little time. If you’re not a natural networker, you can spend the first two days lurking on the fringes, too scared to approach people you’ve waited all your doctoral life to meet. You see that others seem to flow naturally across the coffee and lunch spaces, striking up conversations and setting up one-on-ones, while you debate whether it’s okay to join a table and insert yourself into the chatter. Clearly, such forums have to do more to be more welcoming to first timers.

It does take some preparation to make the most of a conference, to justify the financial cost and the intellectual and emotional labour it demands. Over the years, my own ambivalence has not dissipated. As a young scholar, I often returned feeling dissatisfied with my own level of engagement, disappointed that I had not attended the right panels or made better use of opportunities to talk to people who might contribute to furthering my research. But it’s also true that one might feel a sense of overstimulation, and therefore tune out on day two of a four-day event. Possibly smaller, more focused conferences offer a better forum for real intellectual exploration and exchange.

In the balance, though, I’d have to say that it’s all been worth it for me. I’ve built friendships that will probably outlast my attendance at these events, and come away with ideas that I can work with at my own pace. Also, in these times when so much of academia is under attack, particularly areas of critical scholarship, conferences (when done right) can become spaces of solidarity and affirmation. It’s up to us to make it more fellowship, and less cult!

Afterthoughts

One of the things I kept thinking about as the conference closed, and the reason for the title of this post, was that conferences can function both as a safe space and as an enclave. They allow you to get away from the daily routine of teaching-grading-administering to a place where you can engage in the kinds of conversations that brought you to academia in the first instance. You can do this without having to think about the pressures that can turn academia toxic, and without having to explain your nerdiness to those outside it. But these very features can turn into an exclusive club, with the potential to ignore external realities, and worse, possibly allowing for smaller enclaves to sprout within it. It’s an unreal space, and while some conferences so make an effort to consciously build linkages with the world of practice, to bring the local into this bounded global congregation, there needs to be more of that.

Image caption: The campus of Nanyang Technological University, which hosted the IAMCR 2025 conference. Photo taken by the author.

Links:

https://theprofessorisin.com/podcast/episode-1-the-academy-is-a-cult/

The Atlantic, in its How To— series took on the puzzle of time in a set of six episodes that began by exploring How to Waste Time and ended by asking Can we Keep Time? Treating these questions materially rather than [only] metaphysically, hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost speak to a wide range of thinkers and researchers about how we might understand human practices around time. Our ability to control how we manage time, the pockets of a day we can own for leisure, or convert to economic activity, are often governed not just by privilege and capacity, but also by our ideas of what constitutes good and bad use of time, notions of productivity and wastefulness, and obligation and self-care. Time is at once intensely personal and entangled with the political—it intersects with and is intersected by law, regulation, gender and other socio-cultural norms. Many of these complexities emerge in the conversations between Rashid and Bogost and their many guests.

In the opening podcast of the series, they answer the question “How to keep time?” with the provocation “Try wasting it”. They argue that technology has significantly changed our relationship with time, making it “harder to tolerate wasting time—just doing nothing, or being alone with your thoughts.” This makes me wonder about the idea of “occupying time”—our ability to fill it in specific and random ways...but do we occupy time or does it occupy our lives?

Moving through popular psychology hacks that are supposed to help you work more purposefully and with a consciousness on “good” or smart use of time, the series also gets us thinking about other framings of time—or life cycle—that we tend to build mythologies around. Rashid and Bogost speak of, among other things, the “social clock”—a sense of what we are supposed to be doing at different points in our life. This leads to a more generalized sense of anxiety, such as women worrying about the biological clock and reproductive politics, or careerists of all genders worrying about reaching professional milestones within a given age range.

Some years ago, I noted in a review that author James Glieck, in his book Time Travel: A History,  attempted “to trace the ephemera of intellectual and imaginative pathways through an idea that is as elusive as it is mundane.” While Glieck focuses on the “grand” idea of traveling through time—which implies in some way the ability to move intentionally—Rashid and Bogost approach their object of interest in a more pragmatic manner, seeking to ground their understanding in the everyday micro-negotiations we undertake to keep up and stay ahead in our life journeys. Of course, they also go wide-angle at times, as in the Episode dated January 8, 2024 titled Time Management Tips from the Universe featuring a conversation with theoretical physicist Janna Levin. But even here, they keep it real, using life experiences of the most mundane kind to build our understanding. Bogost asks Levin:

I wonder in your job—which is to think about cosmic things—how does that impact your daily life? Like, when you’re, you know, commuting or going to the grocery store, what is your knowledge or understanding of the nature of the universe? How does it contribute to your day-to-day life?

Levin’s response avoids flippancy and draws us into the complexity of applying these concepts to our everyday relationships and activities, leaving us with much to think about, without resorting to a series of glib how-tos.

The series balances science, philosophy and pop psychology/self-help in equal proportions to result in something that could appeal to a range of listeners who are inclined to spend that time listening to what it means to spend time!

If you are a time nerd, you may enjoy reading Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman’s quirky reimagining of Einstein’s evening in the office as he completes the paper that changed everything, and/or listening to the conversation I recorded with him some years ago. Lightman has since written a provocative book In Defense of Wasting Time in which he emphasizes the need to break free from our regimented days and instead make time for doing nothing.

That seems harder and harder to do these days, given as we are given the means to do more with less time. Listen to podcasts as you cook or iron, answer emails and texts as you commute, catch up on phone calls as you take a walk, pull out your laptop to finish that presentation on the last leg of the flight. Even as I yearn for the stillness of unbroken attention, where I can sit with my thoughts (or with emptiness), there is the consciousness of time passing, slipping away, and in my eagerness to grasp it, hold it, do something with it, I forget that the only way to deal with time, to act on it, is to act within it. You cannot hold it still, but you can hold yourself still.

It’s another matter that I had neither the skills nor the accoutrements to produce something that matched my sonic imagination—such as it was—and the effect ended up being comical (with a group of fellow students enacting a collective gasp and the soundtrack of Chariots of Fire thrown in for good measure) rather than awe-inspiring.

All this was a quick flashback last night as I sat up bleary-eyed to catch NASA’s live feed of the latest solar eclipse, which passed over much of the United States, attracting perhaps more attention than most eclipses simply because of where it occurred and the near-total mediatisation of all American life. Needless to say, watching an eclipse—or really, any sort of astronomical or natural phenomenon—on a screen is nothing, but nothing, like the real experience. Still. These days one buys into the idea that one can be part of that oohing collective even if you’re only imagining the feeling of “being there” (for instance, the Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie, now streaming too). Not entirely a bad thing. But that’s a topic of discussion for another time.

Having managed only to watch the first lap of the moon’s progression across northern Mexico, I chose this morning to binge on a series of podcasts that might catch me up on eclipse-related trivia, and was rewarded with some engaging listening. On a day-old episode of The Daily (which is no longer part of my own daily routine) was the charming story of a decades-long eclipse chaser, astrophysicist Fred Espanak, otherwise known as “Mr Eclipse”. On the heels of that, on the Culture Podcast, came the voice of the same newspaper’s inimitable Wesley Morris and others recommending songs for an Eclipse soundtrack—other than, if you were thinking it, “Here Comes the Sun”! Perhaps something to think about next time a solar eclipse comes around these parts?

Alie Ward was not going to be left out of heliomania, so naturally, her episode this week dealt with what she dubs “Heliology”—or what scientists refer to as Heliophysics, featuring two physicists who unpack the big star at the centre of our corner of the universe.

Of course, even as I write this, I know that this fascination with eclipses, and possibly related things celestial will disappear just as quickly as yesterday’s news, but there will always be a residual audience of astro-nerds whose ears will prick up at the sound of anything vaguely star-fall like. And for those, there’s a delightful episode of RadioLab, about the curious case of an almost-moon, that is a must-listen—but even for those who may not spend an inordinate amount of time gazing at the night skies, it’s a treat.

Postscript: I understand the next big daytime eclipse—the eclipse of the century--will pass over the historic city of Luxor in Egypt. Advance planning is in order, with an audio recorder in the bag.

At least 300 hours of walking on the terrace or in the park.

Roughly 60 hours of ironing.

And sundry hours cooking or cleaning.

I couldn’t have done it without the music. And the stories. And the wise words that help me make sense of the world, and at times push me to ask new questions, or think in different ways.

I’ve done less writing than I had resolved to do at the start of the year but in some ways, I have also done more. More emails to get things done, more requests forwarded through bureaucratic mazes, more reviews of emerging scholarship, more activity reports. That’s not called writing, but it does take words, and often, carefully considered ones.

But then, I have done more listening. Not just to the sounds that come in through my airpods, but to those that filter through the silences that surround me. I have taken longer pauses before speaking, and tried to make meaning of the pauses in others’ speech. Podcast aficionados will appreciate the power of the pause—something I’ve been noticing and thinking about as I listen, and I will get around to discussing that at some point.

So, what contributed to those 1360 hours (and more) of listening? If roughly one-fourth is taken by music (old favourites, new recommendations, and Spotify surprises), there’s still around a thousand hours to account for.

Here’s a very brief round-up of [some of] what’s been playing on my phone.

Audiobooks

Among the highlights of the year was Abraham Verghese’s The Convenant of Water, narrated by the author. The 31 hours of what is certainly a tome in printed form flowed smoothly, not least because of the evocative reading. Two books by Ann Patchett, one recent-ish (Commonwealth), and one brand new (Tom Lake), reminded me what it is to dissect family life with a compassionate yet unsparing eye and excavate insights that make one take a deeper look into one’s own relationships. Lauren Groff’s Matrix, read by Adjoa Andoh, was an unexpected joy to listen to and one that I would like to revisit in print—this feminist fable is loosely based on the character of medieval mystic poet Marie du France. To round off the year was the Booker shortlisted The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng and read by David Oakes and Louise Mai-Newberry—a fictionalized backstory of Somerset Maugham’s work, The Letter, set in Penang in the early 1900s.

Podcasts

The bulk of my “mike-time” is of course still spent listening to the spoken word in the form of packaged streaming audio. I realized this year that it’s hard to keep up with the new, when one also wants to keep up with the regular shows that drop weekly or sometimes more frequently. Apart from the daily news podcasts that open my queue, these are just a few that have kept me going in 2023.

Empire, of course, the runaway hit that now has over a million downloads and its own inner-circle club. Hosted by the irrepressible duo comprising historian/author William Dalrymple and journalist/author Anita Anand, the show was launched in August 2022 and has been a runaway hit. Having cycled through the British in India, the Ottoman Empire, the global history of slavery, the Russian Empire and the Persians (not quite finished), the show is, at the turn of the year, taking a brief tangent with a set of four special episodes that make up a “Christmas mini-series”. It’s hard to describe the podcast in simple terms—it is clearly a huge undertaking that rests largely on the hosts’ abilities to tell compelling, research-backed stories, while also drawing on their enviable literary and scholarly networks to bring in an enviable array of experts on the minutiae of global histories. The unflagging energy and enthusiasm of both Dalrymple and Anand as they weave through the complex dynamics of politics, culture, geography, and just plain accident, is what keeps the listener agog, not to mention the ready laughter (sometimes at the bleakest of gallows humour) and the evident chemistry that lends a spark (or two) to the show. I don’t know how they keep it up, but twice a week for over a year, without a break, is quite something.

Wiser than me, a limited series hosted by Veep and Seinfeld regular Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, celebrates older women and their wisdom. In several of her works, and most poignantly in her essay Space Crone, author Ursula le Guin has spoken of the post-menopausal—or older—woman, as the perfect repository of worldly wisdom, an apt representative of humanity when facing an alien culture. Louis-Dreyfuss engages with ten American women, starting with actor Jane Fonda, and ending with another actor, Carol Burnett, to unearth much laughter, a few tears, and many life lessons from those who are going through their “third act”. While I would not recommend listening to these at one go (the host can get a bit cloying), an episode here and there every few weeks can be enjoyable.

I edged back into true crime after a long break, having been persuaded by a review of Bear Brook, reported and produced by Jason Moon of New Hampshire Public Radio in the US. In a compelling narrative that spans more than four decades and traverses North America, Moon attempts to uncover the mystery behind four unidentified bodies in the woods of New Hampshire. What’s remarkable is the tenacity with which Moon pursues the story, going into levels of detail that reveal connections not only with these killings, but with evolving approaches to forensics and criminology.

It was also a delight to reconnect with an old favourite closer to home, City of Women, produced by Vaaka Media, which launched a new season in August this year. Their short personal essays and interview-based stories train an ear on what it means to be a woman and to navigate and experience the city.

I was introduced to Alie Ward’s show Ologies by my daughter. This is a nerdy, funny, imaginative show based on no-holds-barred conversations with people studying the things they are fascinated by, even love—from quasithanology (near-death experiences) to teratology (monsters) to gustology (taste) and more. Ward’s insatiable curiosity leads to questions big and small, mundane and outlandish, and the guests’ enthusiasm and passion for their subject of study keeps the answers interesting and intriguing. One of my favorite recent episodes, and one I would recommend for starters, is an exploration of the emotional side of abstract mathematics with Prof Eugenia Cheng.

From among the shows I [more or less] regularly listen to, here are some standout episodes:

Interstitium from RadioLab takes us on a voyage through the human body to discover a new...organ? system?

The doctors of Gaza from NYT’s The Daily is heartbreaking as it shows us what it means to deal with the injured and dying every day, with next to nothing in supplies and tools.

The life and times of Jerry Pinto, a marathon (even longer) episode from Amit Varma’s The Seen and the Unseen but Pinto is, as always, thoughtful and funny and irreverent.

Chinatown Fading from Suno India, a three-part mini-series about Calcutta’s vanishing Chinese community.

So as I set my airpods down this New Year’s Eve, I turn my ear to the sounds immediately around me: the trundling trucks, the honking cars, the screech of the motorbike tyres, but also the birdsong and the laughter of neighbours’ children, the music (right now it’s Abba’s Waterloo from one side of the house and Ranjani-Gayatri’s abhangs from another),...I am grateful for the spectrum of sound that enriches my life.

Here’s to more stories for the ear and for the mind, in 2024!

But this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup (July 20 – August 20) has been something else, and in spite of myself, I have been drawn into the drama, the joy, the stories behind the women’s game and the players themselves. I catch snippets of what’s happening on the various news podcasts I listen to, mainly BBC (which has a daily round up for those keen on following the game) and The Guardian, which in addition to its weekly podcast and an episode last week of Today in Focus, for noobs like me has a lovely interactive set of profilesthat allow you to learn about the teams across all the groups. A short curtain raiser, though almost entirely US focused, is offered by NPR in this 3-minute listen. Most outlets have paid a fair amount of attention to the politics behind the women’s game, the bittersweet stories of failure and triumph that seem to have riding on them so much more than a trophy or ranking. In many of the countries represented, women have had to struggle for a space in the sporting world, and to have a spot in the arena is itself a victory of sorts.

For the footballers from Afghanistan, some of whom were airlifted to Australia, there can be no national team, as their country forbids women from playing and FIFA will only recognize teams that have their country’s recognition. For the US women, this is the first World Cup where their payout will match the men’s, largely due to the activism of players like Megan Rapinoe. For the players from countries like Portugal and Chile, where the men’s game is religion, the women play not just for themselves, but to build hope among the next generation. The sporting gear and attire are as much in the news as are the togs—there’s discussion around how the New Zealand team decided against white shorts due to period anxiety, and Pakistan midfielder Amina Hanif talks about what it’s like to play football in the hijab. Eight of the 32 teams will be playing their first World Cup tournament—including Zambia, Haiti and Morocco.

It's no secret that this very minimal attention (on my part) to the athletic world is entirely because I have a couple of sports crazy people in my family, including one who played first class cricket for the better part of two decades and missed the national team by an over or two, and a tennis buff whose retired life is organized around playing and watching the game. I’ve written about the seesaw of heartache and hope that parents must ride when a child enters this ultra-competitive world, and there is a particular poignancy when that child happens to identify as female.

So much of so many women’s sports—particularly team sports—are under pressure to prove that they belong on the professional stage, are worthy of investment, and can draw audiences and build loyal fan bases. The pressure to perform is thus not just about taking back a championship, but felt in homes and hometowns, a burden of proof [of worth] carried on the shoulders of so many of the young women who had to fight to be allowed to play, to claw out resources and permissions to even enter the fray, let alone make the grade.

A recent viral video made by the French company Orange made the point that the women’s game is as [if not more] exciting as [than] the men’s, and it’s deep seated biases that prejudice how we watch. But course it’s not just the economics of play, which might be argued with evidence and education, but the embedding of play as legitimate leisure for women in cultural and social imaginaries. Greater visibility of women’s sports allows girls to themselves on the playing field, having fun, and possibly leveling it at some point in the future.

Also listen:

Women’s football: passion versus profit

Plus: Netflix has a forthcoming series focusing on the US team and Megan Rapinoe’s “last dance” at the 2023 World Cup

I returned to the latest season of Slow Burn, a podcast that I followed closely when it first started in 2017 with a look at the Watergate scandal and kind of gave up on after Season Two (the Clinton-Lewinsky story which was excellent) only because so many other shows consumed my attention, and I needed something other than a focus on US politics and journalism. Six years on the show in its eighth season unpacks the life and times of US Supreme Court Justice Thomas Clarence, someone who has acquired a reputation for being among the most conservative voices on the bench, and whose appointment followed some serious allegations of sexual harassment that have never been fully resolved. Perhaps unsurprising, but it continues to amaze me that the issues raised at that confirmation hearing are still salient. Anita Hill, whose experience with Thomas brought up the harassment charge, was cross examined by a panel of all male judges, and despite her damning testimony Thomas was voted in. We saw something similar happen a few years ago with another US Supreme Court nominee, who also was voted in despite allegations of sexual assault. The four-episode series, Becoming Justice Thomas, is about more than the confirmation hearings, and explores the nuances of black conservatism in the United States.

I rarely listen to fiction podcasts (other than Indian Noir when I’m in the mood for darkness or The Writer’s Voice from The New Yorker when I’m looking for what’s new) but a promo on the BBC’s Global News Podcast intrigued me and I went looking through the audio-shelves. Rosamund Pike and Hugh Lawrie star in this limited series (in OTT terms) show called People who knew me produced by BBC Sounds, based on the novel by Kim Hopper. Pike plays a woman who reinvents herself after faking her own death in the aftermath of 9/11 and then must confront the truth of her past when she is diagnosed with cancer. It’s a simple but engrossing plot line and in some ways perfect for Pike, who seems to find it hard to escape the persona of Gone Girl, a character whose deviousness is mirrored in some of the other film roles she’s played. But People who knew me is also about vulnerability and the tangled web of lies that can be woven almost unconsciously once the first untruth is told—by ordinary people who in the process create complex traps for themselves. Interestingly, the audio format allows actors to play roles that may otherwise never be offered to them. As Pike remarked in an interview in The Guardian, “On screen I’d only get to play the new version [of the character] in her 40s. But because it’s audio, I can be the girl in her 20s, too.”

That reminds me of my first encounter with audio—rather, with voice work—as a host for All India Radio’s Yuvavani show Listener’s Choice (way back when). After I’d hosted a couple of shows the station director summoned me to his office and told me that I’d have to modulate my voice if I didn’t want to sound like “a pre-pubescent boy”! I smarted, of course, but then that quality of voice led to me my own first role in an audio drama—where I played a 12-year-old boy!

That relationship between voice and age? It’s complex, clearly.

Start a Substack

Sometimes, all you need is a well told story to perceive, with sudden clarity, a whole landscape of interconnected streams that run through the past and ripple under the present, showing us how today’s violence radiates from trauma in the past, how injustices of our times emanate from troubled histories of conquest and dominance.

A few days ago, I received an email from the organizers of a conference I was to attend in Toronto, with a short paragraph to be read out at the start of every session. It has become customary in some countries, such as Australia and Canada and parts of the United States, to formally recognize the relationship of indigenous peoples over un-ceded territories, a tacit apology for the injustices of settler colonialism. While such symbolic statements are no doubt necessary, they also underscore the fact that nothing, really, can make up for those injustices. Reparations, when made, are always too little, too late.

Just a few days before this email I had binge-listened to the second season of the podcast series Stolen, reported and narrated Connie Walker and produced by Gimlet Media for Spotify. The series, titled “Surviving St Michael’s” received a double honour this year—a Peabody and a Pulitzer. It’s not an easy listen, but well worth the time taken to finish the eight episodes, and it will leave you wondering, sad, and with a faint ray of hope that some sort of healing is possible.

It’s a theme that made the headlines in Canada and traveled through much of the world and forced and apology from Justin Trudeau and the Vatican—the atrocity that was the Residential School system for First Nations people of Canada. St Michael’s was one of those, and Walker tells the story of the horrific sexual and physical abuse that hundreds of children, taken from their families, suffered there. The story is personal; Walker’s father was one of those, and the trauma of his early years left a burning rage that burned through many years of his life, affecting those around him. Walker’s story begins with wanting to know what happened to her father at St Michael’s but it’s a story of the entire Cree community of Saskatchewan, with every single family seared by the experience of alienation and abuse.

In Episode 4, survivors share their memories. The voices are old now, but you can still hear the frightened child inside. Some were just 6 or 7 when they were taken from their homes, forced to speak in a new language, in the effort to “assimilate” them into Canadian society.

“We had numbers, we were not known by our names...my number was 654...”

“They made us ashamed of who we were...who we are.”

“My mother had made long braids, and when we went to St Michael’s they cut them all off....”

“...the trauma is etched in your brain.”

And the trauma, once etched in the brain, becomes a poison seeping through family interactions, across generations.

“All the growing up years that were taken away from me...”

“Sometimes we cry for each other...who has been held accountable for the things they have done to us?”

Connie Walker’s investigation exposed more than 200 allegations of child sexual abuse against 16 members of St Michael’s staff. While some of the survivors went through the additionally traumatic process of filing claims for compensation, several just could not face having to dredge up painful memories in a process that placed the burden of proof on the victims of abuse.

So where does the hope come from?

In Episode 3, “Don’t play with this,” Walker speaks with a survivor who has found a way to heal by reclaiming indigenous language and knowledge. The healing, he says, must come from a return to the old traditions, from the wisdom of the Cree, cautioning her against turning it into a vengeful crusade. “We gotta help fix this with indigenous language, indigenous thinking... we don’t profiteer from this...we’ve been to hell and back...but we’re back.”

Stolen: Surviving St Michael’s represents the kind of journalism that podcasting makes particularly effective—intensely personal but no less rigorous. Walker spends as much time in the archives hunting through newspaper clippings and microfilm as she does speaking to scores of elders who attended St Michael’s in the 1950s and 1960s. She reflects, each step of the way, on the ethics of storytelling, of appropriating the voices and stories she has heard, but in the end, you understand that it is her story too.

...

With the request to voice the formal acknowledgment of indigenous people’s relationship with the land on which that conference was being held was the gentle exhortation to not simply pay lip service but to try to feel, to understand, and to speak it with sincerity. Listening to stories like Surviving St Michael’s can to some extent lead us into such feeling, such understanding.

For more information on the residential school system, here’s a start:

For the past month or so I’ve been dwelling in the memories and meanderings of a wizard of our times, someone whose words—and worlds—have built and housed magic of the most useful kind. That which makes us think, and opens pathways to ideas so preposterous that the only way to deal with them is to take them seriously.

Every year, I teach a course that [ostensibly] is about understanding how the digital has permeated our lives, running screens through our relationships and notions of self, filtering the world through algorithms and designed interfaces, making and remaking our social, cultural, political, and professional worlds. Into the mix of academic and semi-popular readings there’s one I throw in for effect, and I’m never quite sure how it will land. She Unnames Them, a short story by  the science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K Le Guin (you can listen to the author read it here.) sets the scene for [possibly] the much more puzzling Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, a contested but essential reading for anyone developing a feminist critique of the Internet. My goal is to get my students thinking about the power of names and naming. Or words and the realities they build, and often cement. For words are the starting points for the code that constructs the digital.

I started early in the new year listening to Le Guin’s work being read aloud—her book of essays, Dancing at the Edge of the World—engaging, as I drove through the messy urban wonder that is my city, with her ideas on gender, on humanity, on nature, on the remarkable stupidities and possibilities of modern life as we have made it. She notes in the introduction to the book, “I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.” But through the book, in annotation upon annotation, she revisits her mind as it was in the past and proceeds to change it, acknowledging where she got things wrong, noting where she might have put things better. or even where she is happy to completely let go of an assertion. Rather than simply revise and republish, she revises with full transparency, giving the reader (or listener, in my case) the benefit of seeing the evolution in her thinking. Even as the essays serve as lessons for the hopeful writer, guidance for those seeking gender justice, openings for new ways of thinking about the relationship between sentient beings, for me, they are an affirmation that the writing life can matter, that words do matter.

“To me, words do make magic, they make something new...just like a potter making a pot...I see my job as holding doors open, or opening window...I have no idea who will walk through those doors, or look through the windows...my responsibility is to keep the mind open”.

Her words, in her voice, begin each episode of the podcast series Crafting with Ursula, lovingly and meticulously curated and hosted by writer and literary critic David Naimon. Rippling under her voice is a melody that recalls a forest brook, from her own co-produced Music and Poetry of the Kesh. The twelve-part series, which was launched in 2022 with an episode dropping each month, features extended conversations with writers who have been influenced by Ursula in some way, through interaction with her as an artist and an individual. From the first conversation, with Becky Chambers on Creating Aliens and Alien Worlds, to the last, with Neil Gaiman on Word Magic & the Power of Telling Stories, these are journeys not only through Le Guin’s worlds but also excursions into the complex politics of language, gender norms, anthropocentrism, even climate change. Listening to Julie Philips talking about the Writing Mother, and the difficulties that women face, even today, of claiming a writerly life or having to choose between that and domesticity, is sure to resonate with many a female writer.

There’s more of Ursula (three long interviews with her) on the Between the Covers podcast of which this series is a part, along with many other literary conversations.

The podcast made me go back to my bookshelves and pull out my own small collection of Le Guins, among them a favourite that I was thrilled made the lists of several of the writers featured in the podcast—Changing Planes. I bought it, appropriately enough, at an airport bookshop that for once seemed to have more than the usual bestsellers. Like stepping into the no-person’s neither-earth-nor-sky space of the terminal gate, moving from the contents page to each of the short stories takes you into an alternative world where the rules are different, where we are no longer constrained by the social and cultural norms that bind us into often toxic behaviours. It makes you wonder, like so many of Ursula’s stories do, who makes those rules, who do they serve, and what would it take to change them?

Using words would be a start.

There used to be a cloth bag hung on a coat stand (remember those things?) in the common hall of my childhood home, stuffed with garments requiring repair. Missing buttons, ripped seams, undone hems, tears sustained during playtime—needing darning, hemming, tacking, or fixing in some way with thread and needle. Through my growing years, all I needed to do if my clothes needed mending was to stuff it into that bag, and I knew that sooner or later my nimble-thimble-fingered mother would fix it. As a result, clothes lasted longer, were worn more regularly, and we thought nothing of putting on a shirt that showed evidence of a small, neatly patched hole.  

In many of the stories I read as a young girl, people (okay, mostly women, mostly mothers or grandmothers) were always sitting with their mending, collected in a pretty wicker basket, often on a sunlit porch or by a big window that let the light in as they worked with needle and thread. My mother didn’t have a wicker basket but she did sit in the sun with her sewing, and it got done over conversations with other women in the household, or listening to All India Radio’s afternoon fare. I’m sure repairing rents, tears and casually popped off buttons and hooks was not the most creative of tasks, but it got done with care and precision, a chore that was made a little bit easier with music or radio drama.

If you detect a faint whiff of nostalgia there you would not be mistaken; as an adult I had pretty much given up repairing my clothes unless my mother was within shouting distance. Safety pins and tape were used in emergencies (and at a pinch even a stapler), but mostly those slightly damaged items got pushed way back into a drawer and ultimately given away.

And then, about a year ago I discovered the Audiobook.

Many of my friends had been listening for years, swearing by the convenience of being able to fall asleep to a story being told, or being entertained on a long drive. It was a boon to bibliophiles with vision impairment offered a way to get away from the screen and rest one’s eyes even when your mind was wide awake. But despite being a podcast junkie, I had resisted the audiobook—it seemed not quite the same as reading a book, somehow less than. Yes, I do on occasion listen to fiction podcasts, a favourite being the New Yorker’s The Writer’s Voice, or even the darkly innovative Indian Noir. Another recent discovery was Radioman, an audible original that features a podcast within a podcast, richly engineered in binaural sound.

But books seemed to be another matter. They had to be held and consumed through typeface and white space, the smell of paper and binding glue so intrinsic to the experience. [Okay, I do also own a Kindle...but you get my drift.]

It was an episode of The Lit Pickers, hosted by a delightful if somewhat snooty pair of bibliophiles, that turned me. The recommendation was for the audio version of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (Virago, reissued 2008), read by Meryl Streep. Maybe it was the voice, maybe it was the story, but it sold me on audiobooks. From there it was a short journey to Tom Hanks reading The Dutch House by his good friend Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury, 2019), then back to Meryl Streep voicing Colm Toibin’s Testament of Mary (Simon & Schuster, 2013), a couple of light crime novels, and then—

Many titles later, I decided it was time to get back to mending.

[What’s the point of a good audiobook if you can’t also get something else done while listening?]

There is a handsome multi-volume set of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (Vertigo, 30th anniversary edition 2018) sitting on a bookshelf. I’ve taken them down several times but the weight of the books and the sensory stimulation of the excellent graphics has had me staring at them for long minutes without actually reading. A few weeks ago, the video series started streaming on Netflix. But I would rather get done with the book first, I thought.

Some time ago, inspired by what at the time seemed to be a long period of leave, I started setting aside clothes that needed minor repairs. A missing hook or button, a sari fall that had come unattached, blouses that needed “taking out” (don’t ask why). No wicker basket, but they did pile up. And that vision of a leisurely afternoon in an armchair, needle and thread in hand, beckoned. [No matter that the afternoons in Hyderabad have been mostly cloudy in this monsoon gone climate crazy.]

It seemed like the perfect time to get started on The Sandman as an audiobook. Narrated by Neil Gaiman himself, the cast includes James McAvoy (in the title role), Riz Ahmed (The Corinthian), and Kat Dennings (Death). The voices get into your head, and Gaiman’s voice is perfect for his words.

My work progresses swiftly, traveling through time and space with Morpheus and the other “Endless”, thinking about the nature of life, death, reality, dream. Before I know it, the items in my basket (okay, unruly pile) are fixed and ready to wear.

I’m not dissing those audiobooks any more.

“Martha was right,” spelt out in a large floral arrangement fills the screen in the last several seconds of ‘Gaslit’, an 8-part series from Starz that offers a view of the Watergate scandal that’s less about Nixon than about the machinery that made and sustained him. The Martha who was right was the wife of John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General and the Chairman of his campaign for re-election and one of the main accused in the Watergate break-in. Martha Mitchell was among those who saw through Richard Nixon early on, speaking out about his involvement in the illegal wiretapping, going so far as to suggest that he had not only known about it but had authorized it. While Martha Mitchell’s story forms the narrative cord that ties the series together, there are also a number of parallel threads that fill out the complex saga of corruption and jockeying for influence that was the Nixon presidency—or indeed, any seat of power. One of these is John Dean, White House counsel, who testified against the President and helped usher in the articles of impeachment, while another is G Gordon Liddy, who planned the actual break in. Both Dean and Liddy had successful post-Watergate careers in media, but another minor character in the drama, Frank Wills, the security guard who foiled the break in had his life upended as a result of the “notoriety” gained from all the publicity—and he chose to leave DC for anonymity and quiet in his Georgia hometown.

Most of us in journalism and media studies/practice today can perhaps point to a few instances that stand out as points of intellectual/professional inspiration—big investigative stories, dogged war or crisis reporting, uncovering corruption and social issues. For me, as a rising eighth grader in the early seventies, the Watergate story was what first sparked my interest in journalism. And honestly, it was the story about the story: the book, All the President’s Men, and its 1976 Hollywood version starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Missing in the television series Gaslit are the two people whose names are perhaps most associated with Watergate, apart from Nixon—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, played by Redford and Hoffman respectively. The journalistic legend that has been built around the investigation that brought down a president is no doubt based in truth, but what ultimately made the case for impeachment was meticulous police and legal work, and that to some extent is reflected in Gaslit

.

It’s fifty years since the Watergate break-in, and next year is the anniversary of the journalistic scoop, so it’s no surprise that this series dropped when it did. The Washington Post has spent a fair amount of time and newsprint on Watergate nostalgia too, with retrospectives and retellings. Their daily news podcast, Post Reports featured a conversation with Bob Woodward in which he spoke about how the movie came to be (including the persistence of Robert Redford), and the slippages between the gritty and time consuming work that the actual investigation involved (painfully detailed in the book) and the dramatization for the film version.

Anniversaries are, in the cynic’s view, opportunities to monetize memory. But they are also occasions to train a critical eye on the past, to excavate from it the nuggets that yield insight and learning, and possibly draw from it some purpose and inspiration. Journalism today is beleaguered by political and business control, and few publications allow the kind of painstaking, months-long investigations that can bring down presidents. And even when they do, it is the rare judicial and legislative system that will take the results of journalism and use it to clean up the mess that was uncovered.

As a journalism teacher, I find it hard these days to spark in students a sense of this possibility that solid reportage and well researched stories can be powerful tools, that they can speak truth to power. But it’s not impossible to find that kind of journalism—incremental, dogged, characterized by a willingness to spend hours in dusty archives or burrowing through the wormholes of the internet—if one looks closely. In India and elsewhere. But the risks have multiplied, and for those who do this kind of journalism, especially if their target is political or business power, hard work may not be a deterrent but threat to life and liberty certainly is.

Fifty years on, the Watergate story is both inspiring and sobering, for these reasons. It shows what is possible when the watchdog is watching a system that has strong corrective mechanisms. And it reminds us how quickly those corrective mechanisms are being eroded, even in the largest of self-proclaimed democracies.

Postscript: Gaslit is based on a 2017 podcast from Slate, Slow Burn produced and narrated by Leon Nayfakh, which is most definitely worth a listen if you haven’t already.

My mornings have settled into a listening routine; once the first cup of coffee is had, the sleepiness slowly and reluctantly persuaded to leave as the caffeine seeps into my bloodstream and consciousness of the day’s duties nudges its way into my brain. First up: The Indian Express’ 3 Things. And then, BBC’s Global News Podcast. Somewhere in there, vegetables get chopped, the pressure cooker is ‘chadao-ed’ and the mat gets laid out for yoga, as I get my morning news fix.

In the pre-internet, pre-television era, I remember being woken up by the plaintive notes of Akashvani, or All India Radio, opening the day not with news, but with music. My father insisted on turning up the volume right around 6:10 a.m. so that the shehnai or nadaswaram could startle us “late Lateefs” out of slumber almost straight into our navy or khaki school uniforms. AIR News came on the hour but the real news of the day (more correctly, the previous day) had to wait for the newspaper—and usually, for my father to call out any headlines of relevance as he browsed through it.

Daily news podcasts have changed all that, for me at least. Armed with some sense of the nation and the globe by 7 a.m., I then queue up a selection of others, ranging from The Guardian’s Today in Focus, Newslaundry’s Daily Dose, the New York Times’ The Daily, Vox’s Today Explained and The Washington Post’s Post Reports, or the weekly shows, such as The Hindu’s In Focus or The Suno India Show. If you’re wondering where all those hours of listening come from, here’s the answer: I have a long commute (2 hours plus), I spend quite a bit of time in the kitchen (3 hours approximately) and I take longish walks (1 hour at least).

While the BBC’s long history of international broadcasting made it a natural for the news podcasting space, other media organizations seem to have woken up to the potential of on-demand audio streaming only in the past five years or so. Some credit the boom to the success of NYT’s The Daily, which began in January 2017, prompted by what they saw as a “moment that demanded an explanation”, aka the Trump victory. The Guardian, in a 2018 article, called it “the genre’s breakout hit”, it’s popularity owing in part to its redefining of the news podcast format. Rather than simply offering a round-up of the day’s news with a smattering of commentary (which is what the BBC offers in the Global News Podcast), Michael Barbaro of The Daily talks to the Times’ journalist to get at the whys, hows and so-whats of the stories they have written. The Indian Express’ 3 Things in some ways follows this format, although the nature of the exchange on The Daily is qualitatively different, pushing the reporters to reflect more deeply on the coverage and their own interactions with the field and their sources.

But how different, really, is the news podcast, regardless of periodicity, from good old news radio? Is it just an old form served up in a new digital package that is easier to move around, untethered to space and time? Is it even that different from Internet Radio, that transposition of an old form onto a new platform—except of course, it’s packaged and delivered differently?

Writing in New York magazine, Adam Sternbegh thinks through the podcast as a cultural and commercial phenomenon, argues that “podcasts are learning to do things no medium has done before”, noting that audio on demand “might be the future of media and not just a quaint variation on its past”.

This is perhaps something for media scholars to explore, along with other questions about form, function, and the place of news media in our lives. What is it that makes us more likely to hook up our phones to the car audio and listen to a news podcast rather than simply turn the dial on the FM radio? What does the news podcast do for us that prime time news or even the morning paper doesn’t? What are the complementary movements in the news business and in the culture of reporting that serve this format—for producers, and for other participants in the production process? One young scholar I know is looking at whether podcasting could disrupt long held journalistic conventions in interesting and possibly productive ways. Journalism teachers are using podcasts like The Daily or ABC’s Start Here as teaching materials, as they offer a view into the reporter’s process and the problems of newsgathering.

While some news podcasts mimic the rush of the daily news, in that they aim to substitute to some extent the conventional bulletin, most are in fact doing something a bit different—and maybe that is the appeal. They let us sit with the news, and think about it from different angles, and, because of the natural linearity of the medium, they force us to take in one word at a time, maybe even play it over and slow it down, as we digest its many possible meanings. Of course, podcasting—now that it is mainstream—is subject to the same political and ideological polarisations that we see in other media, but simply because of the relative simplicity of production, there are still many independent voices that one can find. And of course, it is important to note that news podcasts that truly draw on reportage, rather than only commentary, are in the minority. It’s the large media houses and a few intrepid independents that offer these. Most deliver commentary and explainers, akin to the editorial pages of a newspaper, often coloured by their alignments.

Indian news podcasts have yet to acquire the sheen of The Daily or Post Reports, possibly because Indian media houses are yet to invest significant resources into audio. Even as the BBC, New York Times or The Guardian have devoted money and talent to producing original content for their news podcasts, the programming is still (as The Daily puts it) largely “fueled” by their huge reporting machinery. As a promo for The Daily explains, The Times has hundreds of reporters on the ground, across the world, and they are able to fly out a podcast producer (for instance) to the Ukraine-Polish border to harvest special audio stories—thanks to the massive corporate resources. Independent organizations do not have the capability to do much original on-ground reporting for news programming, but it’s to their credit that platforms like Suno India or Newsreel Asia are instead focusing on stories that remain in the shadows, rather than competing with news-as-usual.

Postscript:

So, the BBC turns 100 this year. It’s hard to deny their huge influence on broadcasting and the culture of news. Here’s a piece that considers the future of the behemoth, about which Sam Knight in the New Yorker writes: “For a large, tax-funded body, heavy on ideals, its output has often been oddly agile and human.” Anyone who has followed the BBC’s coverage of Afghanistan last year, or now, Ukraine, would agree. I remember tuning into BBC on our big shortwave radio, holding the antenna wire just so, to ground the signal, and I for one am happy to have a selection of podcasts now that I can simply click on.

As for Akashvani? I have the app, and they’ve graduated to online transmission, but I’m still waiting on the podcasts.

You could go to the neighbourhood cassette store, give them a list of songs and a blank tape, and they would record your selection for a small fee that was no patch on the cost of the original. Often your list would be a curation that drew from multiple albums. No problem.

If you had a two-in-one with a dual deck, you would record songs off the radio, and even if the sound quality was not great, there was happiness in the thought that you could play them back any time you wanted. The dual deck also allowed us to copy tapes from friends who had access to the albums we had heard about—in magazines like JS or mentioned on Radio Ceylon (later Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation) which was so much cooler than our own English Yuva Vani on All India Radio, which, even in the late 1970s, filled its supposedly youthful airtime with Jim Reeves and Perry Como, pushing the envelope just a bit with The Carpenters. Sharing music had not been as easy with vinyl records—people guarded them jealously; they could be scratched or break. When a friend whose parents had bought her the Beatles’ Abbey Road, we all crowded into her house to listen to the new album in its entirety, a real treat after having heard a few of the songs on the radio.

But back to the wonders of the cassette tape and the even more miraculous twin deck player. My father returned from a trip to Canada with multicolored TDK blank cassettes that we used to colour code our music collection—purple for his Carnatic music, orange for my pop, and green for Hindi and Tamil film songs. I don’t remember too many “original” albums on that shelf; it was all shared music. That was just the way it was, words like piracy and “ripping” did not exist in our lexicon. Even years later, friends who lived abroad would bring tapes full of the latest music (or music that was hard to find in India) for us, the sleeves laboriously inked in with the names of songs. In my own 1980s collection, Side A might have squeezed in Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat while Side B might have a mix of Helen Reddy, Joan Baez and Carole King.

In the mid-1980s, T-series flooded the market with cheap prerecorded cassettes of Indian film music and devotionals, and the need to copy songs from each other, or rip them off the radio, decreased. But we would still go to the neighborhood music store with our specially curated lists, and a blank cassette, and we would have it, our own playlist. Add to this that portable marvel called the Walkman, and the consumption of music was transformed forever—cultural studies scholars Paul de Gay, Stuart Hall and others explain this brilliantly in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman.

But the cassette tape and the recorder—even the single deck instrument—allowed us to do much more than copy music and create our own playlists, or become a means of carrying music around for our personal, private listening pleasure. Even without a fancy mike, we could record, erase, and re-record ourselves, create a simple audio story, send voice notes across time and space, inexpensively and easily. True, spool tape decks had allowed us to do that for a few decades, but until magnetic tape was packaged into a light, secure plastic package, it did not become something that we could conveniently transport. Moreover, the large reel-to-reel players were bulky and expensive, hardly meant for mass consumption in a country like India. When we were separated from family by an ocean and many time zones in a pre-Internet era when international phone calls could stretch a graduate student’s budget, we mailed padded envelopes of cassette tapes with messages, everyday notes and songs from my daughters to their grandparents. When my cousin wanted to introduce the family to his fiancée, they sent us a tape that we all crowded around the player to listen to, marveling at her lovely voice, a little shy, a little expectant. Now, with the ease of VOIP and voice notes on messaging apps, all of this seems quaint and hardly worth noting.

The RadioLab series Mixtape places the humble cassette at the centre of a series of historical transformations, according to it a catalytic role in phenomena as far removed as Ayatollah Khomeni’s rise to power in Iran and the development of the Internet. As they note on the home page of the special series, produced by RadioLabber Simon Adler, “They were recordable, rewritable, spliceable, compact, mobile. For the first time they allowed you to move through the world and listen to a voice speaking only to you.” Adler raises the curtain on the five-part series in this YouTube video, crediting this invention with “[fracturing] the media landscape” and “[splicing] reality”—terms that we might today reserve for digital technology, primarily the Internet.

Mixtape, while offering a richly textured slice of media history that positions this technology within the social, cultural and political landscape of the various contexts it describes, is the kind of storytelling that one has come to expect from RadioLab. There are sharply drawn characters, nuggets of information that would be mined by any trivia enthusiast, and in each episode, narratives that prompt one to raid the history shelves for more.

It also made me want to examine the role of the cassette tape in my own personal history, the impulse for archiving that it generated, in a way that was significantly different from keeping a diary. It was personal, yet meant to be shared. It was the encapsulation of a moment in time and space, yet meant to gain some sort of permanence (even though a jab of the red button on the player would erase it all in a minute). For many of us, it was the first time we heard ourselves, the strangeness of our own voices relayed back to us through those tiny spools. It was the first time we thought about the possibility of recording the everyday in sound.

These histories are still accessible to us, they exist in living memory. As technologies race to one upgrade after another, it’s easy to forget the ways in which we wrote, spoke, shared and transmitted experience and thought. Media objects are, as Radiolab’s Mixtape suggests and as historian Lisa Gitelman emphasizes, both material and immaterial, and nested within the histories of other, older, technologies. As we understand the many routes to their development, deployment, and use, we can often discover new meanings and relationships about their relationship to our own individual and collective histories.