Ep 455: Puliyabaazi and the Fine Art of Hindi Podcasting

Amit Varma (0:05)

It is the nature of the world that we live in a bubble. In fact, we live in many bubbles, like circles in a Venn diagram gone crazy, and we are the solitary meeting point of all these circles. Our bubbles could be our social class, or our interest group, or our ideological echo chamber, or our kitty party, or, in the case of even the most multilingual person in India, a bubble of language. You might even say we are floundering inside a speech bubble.

I have certainly realized that for a fair part of my life, I was blinded inside the bubble of the English speaker in India. Sure, I would chat with family and friends in Hindi or Bengali, irritate my Marathi friends by mutilating their language, but I think and write and podcast in English, and that limits the difference I can make in this country. I am aware of this, so aware, that whenever someone asks me for advice on podcasting, I tell them to do it in any Indian language but English, if they can. English is saturated with ideas, but there are huge holes in the discourse in all our other languages. I am told that I gave exactly this advice around 2017 to my guests on the show today. That must surely be one of the few good things I have done in my life.

Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural science. Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.

Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen. My guests today are the hosts of the great Hindi podcast, Puliyabaazi. Pranay Kotasthane and Saurabh Chandra started this many years ago. Khyati Pathak joined them along the way, and I believe their work to be absolutely pioneering. They talk about economics and policy and philosophy and politics and science and a lot else, in a language where such conversations are often either uncommon or hard, to the point that they sometimes even have to invent the vocabulary for these discussions. Pranay, Khyati and Saurabh joined me today to talk about their journeys, the challenges of taking these subjects to a Hindi audience, and what drives them to keep improving the discourse. These are remarkable people working hard week after week for this labor of love, which they have now also expanded into a Substack and a print magazine in Hindi. I want all of you to listen to this episode, be inspired and make the difference you can. The first hour of the show is me getting to know more about Saurabh and Khyati's lives, as they aren't regulars on the show as Pranay is. We shift to talking about Hindi podcasting after about the first hour, and we do some of this in Hindi, but I'm sure those of my listeners who don't know the language will excuse me this one time. Now, before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.

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Uplevel yourself.

Saurabh, Khyati and Pranay, welcome to the Unseen.

Pranay Kotasthane (4:15)

Thank you very much.

Saurabh Chandra (4:18)

Thank you very much, Amit.

Khyati Pathak (4:20)

Happy to be here again.

Amit Varma (4:22)

So I am, you know, tempted to actually do the episode in Hindi because why not. I have done one Hindi episode. Khyati, you claim that you have listened to all my episodes. So which episode have I done in pure Hindi?