Positive podcasts fever sweeping India

During the past year of the Covid-19 pandemic national lockdown, a growing number of adolescents tuned into podcasts for information and opinions and/or to speak their hearts out on a number of issues including the new normal of online schooling, utility of lockdown and social distancing – Dainty Wellington, Aurelin Ruth J. & Mini P. For a rising swell of Gen Z — defined as children born in the new millennium — popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are fast becoming passé. The increasingly popular medium for Gen Z is podcasts — episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that users can download from the Internet and hear — 99 percent of them free-of-charge — on personal digital devices such as smartphones, iPods, computer tablets among others. According to Media and Entertainment Outlook 2020 — a report published by the UK-based transnational audit and management consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) — currently an estimated 43 million podcast episodes are readily available on an expansive range of subjects including mental health, careers, food, books, movies and holidays. Nor is this newly popular global communication medium unknown in India. The PWC report says that India with 57.6 million downloads per month is the third-largest podcasts market in the world after China and the US. In particular, during the past year of the Covid-19 pandemic national lockdown, a multiplying number of adolescents are tuning in to podcasts for information and opinions and/or to speak their hearts out on a number of issues including the new normal of online schooling, utility of lockdown and social distancing. Through their mics and headphones, they are tuning in to audio stream their frustration, anguish, and hope to peers around the world. According to US-based Edison Research, currently adolescents above 13 years of age spend 6 percent of their time on podcasts, up from 2 percent in 2014. “Adolescence is a critical transition from childhood to adulthood phase. It’s the time when children start becoming independent and develop their own identities. Therefore they need to publicly voice their opinions to share with peers,” says Aarti C. Rajaratnam, a Salem-based child and adolescent psychologist and author of Parenting: Innocence to Inner Sense. The pandemic lockdown and related restrictions have mandated unprecedented restrictions on teens’ interaction and socialisation, and during this difficult era many teenagers are taking to podcasting to articulate and share their views and opinions on a diverse range of issues with larger audiences Over the past nine months, Nishad Suthar, a third year student of Mumbai University, has been podcasting on subjects from poetry to mental health on his Hindi language podcast Nishad Speaks. “Podcast is the new YouTube of my generation. I recorded my first podcast after discovering this communication medium at an event in Mumbai. As soon as I got home, I audio recorded my very first episode, uploaded it on the Internet and shared it with family and friends. These days I ruminate on a range of everyday issues in…