Creating Life

Last month, we attended Chennai's Pride Parade. We marched with the hundreds of people there, made feeble attempts at dancing, made plenty of conversation, took pictures and brought back a few stories that we'd like to share with you today. We went with Rasika Venkatesa (yes, she's Nikhil's sister), and after the parade, we caught up with Rasika in the studio to talk to her about living as a lesbian in urban India. She discusses challenges like coming out, family acceptance, finding a community, how she found support in online platforms, the difficulties of dating and navigating apps like Tinder as a queer person, and why she sometimes feels like she can't fully express her sexuality, living in Chennai.

Also, what does it mean to be an ally of the LGBTQ+ community, and how much support is enough support?

We also discuss this: 

Donna Minkowitz's apology from last year for how she covered the 1993 murder of 21-year-old trans man, Brandon Teena.

Music Credits:

All recorded interviews were obtained with the consent of the individuals interviewed. We're lucky to share their stories with you.

Logo by @aparna_ramanujam.

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After the hype of the Indian Premier League, cricketing nations are cheering on their teams at the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup in Wales and England. Then there’s the Women’s Soccer World Cup, Wimbledon...a lot to keep any sporting fan engaged right now.

But, the thing is, the hosts of this show aren’t really sports fans. We never really played much of it (except when Sindhu got to captain her school’s badminton team because there were only a handful of people in it), and don’t feel moved by any sporting team or individual to qualify as ‘real fans’. 

To help us understand the art of ‘hyper-fandom’, we speak with Ishaan Achanta, probably one of the most diehard Real Madrid fans we’ve ever met. He walks us through why the team is so important to him, and why its presence extends to other (non-sporting) parts of his life.

We also speak with Priyansh, a Delhi-based freelance writer who has written extensively about sports (he also covered the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia) about what why cricket reigns supreme in India, why women’s sports don’t command as much fandom, and more.

Podcast Highlight: NRI Woman 

Music Credits:

"Me In Your Life" 

Music By The Passion HiFi

www.thepassionhifi.com

Los Angeles by Kabbalistic Village | https://soundcloud.com/kabbalisticvillage

Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

"Chillbill" by maoen

Logo by @aparna_ramanujam.

IT IS JUNE ALREADY!?!?!?!?!?

Are you pinching yourself? Are you breaking down in panic as you try to remember your 2019 resolutions and whether you achieved them? So are we. 

We wanted to slow down a little this week and reflect on 2019 now that we're halfway done with the year. We thought it would be a good time to recap all the things that have inspired us in the last six months - books, movies, TV, music, podcasts - and maybe you can find some great stuff to check out. After all, thanks to all the streaming services around us, they're only a click away. We also talk about the impact of streaming on culture and the role of critics in a saturated landscape.

Join us for this freewheeling discussion around all things culture. And if you live in Chennai and can find a drop of water, too late, it just evaporated.

Things we discuss:

Music Credits:

"Me In Your Life"

Music By The Passion HiFi

"Solitude" by maoen

Sorrow by Sappheiros | https://soundcloud.com/sappheirosmusic

Our logo was designed by @aparna_ramanujam.

DISCLAIMER: This episode discusses some sensitive subjects and contains some explicit language.

In 2014, American writer Jessica Valenti wrote this in a column for The Guardian: "So what makes you a slut? It seems the the only hard and fast rule is that you have to be a woman." Five years later, that appears to still be very true, even if the term has also been extended to gender non-conforming people and members of the LGBTQ community. 

Either way, it's exhausting to be slut-shamed. In this episode, we speak with Priya Alika-Elias, author of the recently-published book Besharam, and a lawyer and feminist writer based in New Delhi. We discuss our experiences dealing with criticism about our dating lives, clothes we wear, beverages we drink, and how these remarks tend to come from different places: partners, ex-partners, family members, acquaintances offering unsolicited opinions.

As easy as it would be to stop caring about what other people say, the truth it, slut-shaming hurts. As Priya writes in her book, "And yet, no matter how many times we hear it, no matter how many casual comments we make about not caring what people think, we are not free of its tyranny."

We also discuss:

Season 1, Episode 4 of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's show, Fleabag, where she stumbles upon a centre that teaches men how to be less misogynistic. Here's an interesting interview with her from 2017. 

Music Credits:

"Me In Your Life"

Music By The Passion HiFi

Summer Coffee by Barradeen | https://soundcloud.com/barradeen

India's month-long Lok Sabha elections come to an end on May 23, when the winners will be announced. This election season hasn't been without its share of drama and mayhem. BJP candidate Pragya Singh Thakur, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, recently called Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, a patriot. Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the first press conference of his premiership, but chose to defer all questions to his party leader, Amit Shah. But in a 'non-political' conversation with actor Akshay Kumar, he talked about his love for mangoes, among other things.

Not to forget the social media storm caused by the PM's "Main bhi Chowkidar" campaign ("I am a watchman"), positioning himself as a guardian and protector of the country. We speak with Prathap Nair, a Germany-based freelance writer and the son of a former chowkidar about his Huffington Post essay where he calls the campaign a misappropriation that pays little heed to the real experience of chowkidars across India.

Then there are all the controversies surrounding the Election Commission and its role as guarantor of free and fair elections in India. We chip away at the complex topic with the help of Sushovan Sircar, Senior Correspondent at The Quint, who has written about the topic extensively in his work.

And finally, what are people looking for in these elections, and how can we look past our own echochambers of ideology? And can we look at a framework of discussion that looks beyond the legacy family Congress party vs right-leaning BJP split?

Music Credits:

Music from https://filmmusic.io:

"Whimsy Groove" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) "Silver Frame" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

"Me In Your Life" Music By The Passion HiFi www.thepassionhifi.com

"The Great Battle" by Alexander Nakarada | https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com; "Sparking Eyes" by Glitch | https://soundcloud.com/glitch; "Banjos, Unite!" by Alexander Nakarada | https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com; "The Impossible" by Savfk | https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusic; "Stories" by INOSSI | https://soundcloud.com/inossi. 

Promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com. Attribution: 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

Our logo is designed by @aparna_ramanujam.

Languages are such an important part of our identities, and they resonate with us on a personal and cultural level. As we move to a more globalized society, language is a thread that links us back through space and time to where we come from. Sharanya Deepak's piece "Coming Home, One Word At A Time" reminded us of this when we read it. In it, she explores her personal relationship with Urdu after she starts taking classes to formally learn it, and Urdu's relationship with her hometown Delhi. We spoke to her about how she came to write the piece, her unique family mosaic and how she straddles different identities based on each language that she speaks, and how Urdu interprets the world in its unique way.

After talking to Sharanya, we talk about a number of language-related trends that are happening around us - the rise of both a larger English-speaking class and the vernacular Internet in India, how languages carry much more in them than we generally think, and which Indian languages are dying out and what responsibility we have as a culture to preserve them.  

We also discuss:

Music Credits:

Music from https://filmmusic.io:

"Dhaka" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

"Me In Your Life"

Sorrow by Sappheiros | https://soundcloud.com/sappheirosmusic

Our logo is designed by @aparna_ramanujam.

Few film franchises have transformed pop culture worldwide as much as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is 22 films in, and it shows no signs of slowing down. With the biggest film in the franchise, Avengers: Endgame, releasing this week, Nikhil and Sindhu explore the relevance of the MCU as a global phenomenon, how it has become a box-office juggernaut even in markets like China and India (where it had an unprecedented local publicity strategy on multiple fronts), and where it is headed as a global platform for diversity and representation. Joining them for the discussion are guests Siddhant Adlakha, freelance film critic for publications like The Village Voice, Polygon, and /Film, who did a deep dive of all the MCU films leading up to Endgame for /Film in a series called 'Road to Endgame', and Vedang Patel, co-founder of the online merchandise company The Souled Store, an official Marvel merchandiser. 

After talking to Siddhant and Vedang, Nikhil and Sindhu get into a spoiler-filled conversation around Endgame to discuss how carefully designed it is to ensure maximum emotional and narrative satisfaction, the constraints that the MCU faces with the stories it tells, both from a production and a box-office standpoint, and what we're all trying to get out of the MCU, and whether we're actually at the end of a particular era. 

And how cool is the logo for this episode? @aparna_ramanujam kills it every time.

Music Credits:

"Me In Your Life"

Music from https://filmmusic.io:

Sorrow by Sappheiros | https://soundcloud.com/sappheirosmusic

Incredibly Close by Savfk | https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusic

After seeing the news about Lilly Singh getting her own NBC late night show and Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra working together on a new film in the same week, we thought we would dig into how South Asian representation has evolved over the years, how much race and ethnicity should factor into a conversation about representation, whether South Asians in their home countries should care about how they are represented in Hollywood, and more! This is by no means the definitive conversation on the subject - but we think it's a good start.

Things we discuss:

Music Credits:

Flying High by jantrax | https://soundcloud.com/jantr4x

"Me In Your Life"

Music By The Passion HiFi

Music from https://filmmusic.io:

"Jalandhar" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Our show logo and the logo for this episode was designed by @aparna_ramanujam.

The Tamil film industry, commonly referred to as Kollywood, is a difficult place to break into and navigate as an artist. Nepotism is a mainstay, misinformation and competing interests regularly run amok, and projects can get stalled at every step of production. How does an actor stay sane in this crazy place? How can he chart a career when so many factors influencing it are out of his control? And how can he maintain a healthy balance between his public image and his personal life? 

These are the questions we discuss with actor Ashwin Kakumanu today. Ashwin has been working in Kollywood since 2011, when he acted in Nadunisi Naaygal (trans: Midnight Dogs, 2011). He then went on to work with established stars like Ajith (Mankatha) and Surya (7aum Arivu, trans: Seventh Sense), after which he branched out into leading projects himself in films like Megha (2014) and Zero (2016). He recently starred in one of the first Tamil webseries in the industry - Nila Nila Odi Vaa (2018) - available for viewing on the streaming platform Viu. 

Our discussion with Ashwin is a deep dive into Ashwin's journey in cinema, from starting out  a huge Star Wars buff to short filmmaker to actor, and it's also an honest discussion of the challenges he has faced in the industry. He also discusses his move into the digital space - he's working on another webseries - and how he's building his brand outside the multiplex. It's a candid look at Kollywood from someone who has made a career in it over the last eight years. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we did. 

Subscribe to Creating Life on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or whichever platform works for you!

Music Credits:

save my life again by Barradeen | https://soundcloud.com/barradeen

"Me In Your Life" 

Music By The Passion HiFi

"Spanish Winter"

Music By The Passion HiFi

Oceans by IvPem | https://soundcloud.com/ivpemofficial

Our logo was designed by @aparna_ramanujam.

What role should fitness play in our lives?

How do we move past clichéd tropes like crash diets and whey protein and have a more balanced relationship with our journey towards physical wellbeing? 

How do we overcome crises of motivation in our fitness journey? 

Is it possible to get addicted to activities like Soul Cycle and CrossFit, and what are the economic privileges associated with most forms of fitness-based activities today?

 Is it fair to judge people who don't work out? 

These are some of the questions that we dig into in this episode, and to help us make sense of it all, we're joined by Prashanti Ganesh and Sandeep Achanta, co-owners of Strength System, a fitness center and gym in Chennai. Sandeep and Prashanti's fitness journey is as interesting as their expertise (in their 'past' lives, they worked as a journalist and graphic designer, respectively), and their  philosophy is less about six-pack abs and more about being comfortable with your body, wherever that comfort comes from. They're also young entrepreneurs running a profitable business: they launched Strength System when they were only 25! We love how honest and intimate this conversation is, and we hope you think so too. 

Subscribe to Creating Life on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or whichever platform works for you! Find out more about the show at creatinglifepodcast.com, and you can email us at [email protected].

Music Credits:

Summer Coffee by Barradeen | https://soundcloud.com/barradeen

"Me In Your Life" 

Music By The Passion HiFi

Our logo was designed by the amazing @aparna_ramanujam.