A Thirsty Mind - A Podcast by Abhiram

Meet Professor Raghuram Iyengar, he teaches and researches marketing and customer analytics at Wharton school.  We talk about his experience of being an advisor to the Tamil Nadu government, what should children do if they want to get into Wharton, what customer analytics are and much more.

On the occasion of Porsche Design’s 50th anniversary and to kickstart season 3 of A Thirsty Mind, we have Robert Ader, the CMO of Porsche AG. We talk about how cars are sold, his favourite countries to visit, Porsche’s history and its future. 

This episode of A Thirsty Mind is very cute. It was hosted by my brother Abhinav, we had a younger guest Aaradhya Chakravartula, my cousin, and a budding Carnatic singer. They talk about their life in the US, her family and of course some great singing. So tune in and enjoy the cuteness.

One morning, I noticed a woman handing over a pamphlet outside my school. When I checked the photo on the pamphlet, it dawned on me that it was my area's MPP herself handing it over to people and informing us how she can help people in her constituency. I walked to her and asked her if she would like to be a guest on my podcast, voila, she agreed. Meet Dr Jill Andrew, MPP of St Paul's constituency in Toronto, Ontario. We talk about how MPPs help people, diversity in leadership, and how to overcome body image issues. 

Meet my podcast's senior most guest, Varatha Shanmugathan, Toronto's York University's newest graduate. She is 87 and graduated as York U class of 2021. She is oldest person to receive the master's degree from the university. We talk about her plans to write a book, how the Srilankan civil war impacted her, difference between Tamil in India and Srilanka and the impact Gandhi has had on her.

I just love trains. I love traveling in them, I love talking about them, I love studying transit maps. Meet Anne Marie Aikins, former nurse, current spokesperson of Metrolinx, I couldn't have found anybody else who could match my passion for trains other than her.  We talk about ever expanding plans of Go Transit lines, impact of Presto cards, Covid measures in trains, using Morse code to prevent birds from crashing into glass and the upcoming green measures for transit services.

Meet Pranay Manjari Samal, CSR head of Edifice Foundation. She has been running a campaign highlighting the cultural issue where married daughters are not allowed to take care of their parents. We talk about this campaign, about helping the continuity of education of construction workers' children, her efforts to increase participation of women in politics and much more. 

Meet Jayasimha Nuggehalli, co-founder of Global Food Partners, an organization that helps farmers to produce cage free eggs. He is my uncle and we talk about animal rights, future of meat, alternates for animal testing in clinical trials and so much more.

In this episode we have Dr Latha Jagannathan, medical director of BMST Blood Bank in Bangalore, as our guest. We speak about types of blood group, why it is important to donate blood, how it is healthy for donors, different types of blood cells, impact of Covid on blood banks, bone marrow, stem cell registry and importance grabbing opportunities that come our way.

Meet Aparajit Sridharan, a variant scientist based in Halifax. We talk about genes, DNA, RNA, gene editing, ethics around it and how much fun studying science can be.