Samyuktha Varma

Samyuktha, left, with co-founder of Vaaka Media, Radhika Viswanathan, right.

Samyuktha Varma is one of the hosts and creators of City of Women and In the Field. She is also the co-founder of Vaaka Media, a small podcast production company based in Bangalore, India.

How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
I got into audio mostly because Radhika Viswanathan, my co-founder, asked me if I would be interested in making a podcast. At the time I was consulting for non-profit organizations, doing a mixture of research and communications work, and had dabbled with publishing. I was very interested in finding a way to talk about NGOs and development work in India more broadly because it was/is such an inspiring, dynamic world with incredible personalities that people outside rarely get a real glimpse into. We kind of reverse-engineered our first show, In the Field, which is an essay-style show about development and progress in India. We had no experience working in audio. We did, however, have years of experience writing, researching, publishing academically… and we both loved podcasts. So that’s how it all began.

I don't know many podcasts from India. What is the podcast space like for Indian hosts and producers?
Podcasting in India is rapidly growing. And this might be the year when it really takes off because we’ve been primed for it for a while - we have a hugely developed film and television industry, people consume a lot of digital media, and data is extremely cheap. Right now, there are a fair number of chat shows, news shows, and interview shows, mostly dominated by hobbyists, and independent producers, and not very many production studios like ours focusing only on podcasts. But at the rate that things change in India, this information could be irrelevant by the time this is published! There is huge potential for interesting narrative shows that tell stories about India’s vast cultural diversity. As a listener, that’s what I’m waiting for.

Can you describe your fans? Are most of them women?
Yes, they are mostly women, but we have fans who are not. A lovely man called Justin recently called City of Women “gleeful” and “complex” and we were thrilled by that description. We think of our fans as people who love books by women writers, tell hilarious stories about themselves, and are slightly angry at the world (in a good way!). I think the show appeals to not just women because the scenarios we talk about are so familiar, so normalized, only really talked about in small private settings, if ever, but presented in a way that’s joyful even when the subject matter is hard. 

The stories on City of Women are so different but they all hit me in the same way. They seem to illustrate unique feelings that I think are universal to women. What do all the episodes have in common?
Most women have experienced years of conditioning about how to conduct themselves in public life. And yet there’s so little we’re in control of when we do go out in public especially in big crazy Indian cities. These learned and received ideas frequently collide with our reactions in the moment, especially when we are strategizing for survival or pleasure. That’s where we believe the story is. And we bank on the idea that everyone is either eager to learn what someone else’s strategy for breaking the rules looks like, or to have their strategies be seen.

Are there too many podcasts?
Nope, no way!

Thanks, Samyuktha!