Saying it out loud for women to hear

Garima Surana

On March 25, 2020, Garima Surana started her audio show, Popkast with Garima. She wasn't working at the time. Having moved to France after getting married, she was seeing the country freshly in the midst of the Coronavirus induced lockdown pandemic. With nothing else to do as she says, Surana started the show as a channel to express her thoughts and question years of conditioning that Indian women like her encounter. "It started for me as a coping mechanism or like therapy, where what mattered was what I said and not how I looked," she says in a telephonic conversation with mid-day.

"Anything to do with the mic has always thrilled me," adds Surana, whose previous stints were as a radio jockey at IIS university's Radio 7 among others, and then at an entertainment daily, where she monetised the music vertical. Popkast with Garima, which has seen its audience base grow from just six listeners to 2,80,000 in a year, is a pop culture podcast that reflects on our society and questions its taboos. Since this is one of the few mediums that hasn't faced censorship yet, Surana says that it allowed for uncomfortable questions around topics like female pleasure, male hygiene, online hate, cancel culture, accountability and inclusiveness to be raised. She feels that with platforms like Instagram or YouTube that are dominated by beauty, fashion and lifestyle content, it was important that another platform was explored to voice opinions on diverse subjects. Her subjects, she says, have, surprisingly, given her women-centred discussions, found popularity with men.

In her show, Surana aims to create immersive episodes where a variety of elements from real-life recordings to references from Hindi films are melded together to give the listener an experience that makes the show stand out in an increasingly saturated marketplace. "I put in a lot of effort. It takes me eight hours to edit my podcasts," she explains. "I run the entire show - from booking my guest to conceptualising, editing, publishing and marketing the podcast. I don't think anybody can edit my podcast better than me. There is a certain soul that I fill in," she says, speaking of listeners who have come back to tell her that they binge-heard the entire season, a concept not typically associated with the audio space.

Surana was also able to monetise her podcast within four months of starting it, her first campaign being with IMbesharam, India's top shop for adult products. "Creation is what fills our hearts and not our pockets," she states, recalling how questions around approaching brands came up constantly in the workshops she held for potential podcasters last year. She believes that the podcast medium is exactly where YouTube or Instagram were five years ago, ripe for change. "Nobody knew influencer culture would erupt, nobody knew YouTube could become a legit profession," she states. These thoughts also led her and husband Ronit Roy to start Podcash, a marketplace that aims to connect podcasters to their potential advertisers. The company has been recently acquired by an audio platform called Sochcast, for which they will now function as an extended sales arm.

Podcast is an imported term which many may not relate to especially outside of an urban experience, but Surana believes that with the emphasis on an individual's thoughts, Sochcast, will stand apart. It hopes to bring together a variety of processes includingcreation, hosting, publishing and monetising on one platform, which means it could have the potential to empower the creator community.

To listen: Popkast with Garima, on Spotify, Hubhopper and Apple Podcasts