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Friday, June 4, 2010

The best Indian podcasts

I follow Rajdeep Sardesai on Twitter. One of his recent tweets led to my discovering Indicast, in my opinion the best Indian website for podcasts. Media students will love Indicast and our audiovisual communication students who need to produce a radio feature in the third semster will get some good ideas  check it out here.

And listen to one of my favourites (descriptions from the site):
In this podcast, Rajdeep Sardesai takes us back to his school days and talks passionately about his cricket, table tennis, and quizzing before drifting into journalism after studying law at Oxford University. His dad, Dilip Sardesai, comes to life in the conversation when Rajdeep talks fondly about the values that he grew up on.

Rajdeep started his career at a time when television was yet to make its debut and in his words, "Journalism wasn't as glamorous as it is today. There was a lot of drudgery involved." Rajdeep reasons out why the quality of modern journalism has been in decadence. Yet he is hopeful that this only presents an opportunity for some interesting stories to be told. He believes that news channels will soon be judged on their credibility and integrity and not on how much noise they  can make. He also uses strong words against the "quick fix" journalism that Indian media indulges in under the veil of "investigative journalism".

Like an experienced Test match opening batsman, Rajdeep Sardesai plays it safe in the "V" until the 9th minute and then cuts loose without mincing words in the slog overs right until the last minute.

(About seven minutes into the interview, Rajdeep talks fondly for some time about his "educational visits" to the newsroom of The Afternoon, the newspaper I helped to launch in Mumbai in 1985.)

1 comment:

  1. HI Ramesh,

    Thank you for writing about two of our podcasts. Keep listening

    Regards

    Aditya Mhtare
    Co-founder, Indicast

    ReplyDelete