Nirantar radio: Audio Documentaries

My workplace is a prison. My client is the prisoner. Who am I? There are many kinds of social workers, but the kind that works in prisons is often asked, "Why would anyone work for prisoners?" "Is my son doing okay? Ask him to come meet me next week." "Madam, there is no vacancy in the shelter home, especially for a mentally disabled woman. Now what to do?" A social worker spends her days going in...

Savarnas don’t know caste—the same way a fish does not know water. When you breathe, see, feel, and thrive within a system, it is difficult to notice it, let alone know it. How does a fish then know water? By starting to know itself, of course. When Rohan chooses this way to learn about caste, he ends up learning a lot about himself. As Rohan and his friends open up about their experiences of cast...

As the outside slowly opens up to life after the deadly second wave of the pandemic, the inside is still grappling with absence, loss, death, fear and loneliness. In this episode, we meet people who navigated, and continue to navigate these feelings on their own. In ‘Living On Your Own In The Pandemic', five folx from rural and urban speak to The Third Eye about their experiences of solitude and c...

Kaam ya Aaraam? Is that a gendered question?   While the rest of us are watching #TheGreatIndianKitchen , we thought we will go to a real one. This audio story then, straight from ours to yours. The year is 2020. A mother and daughter meet again during lockdown. A pot of milk keeps boiling over. The kitchen becomes fraught, angry, memories are triggered. A mother and daughter meet again during loc...

In Episode III of Stay Home, Kitna Surakhsit? we explore the role of the bystander - yes, people like you and me - in situations of gender based violence. Why don’t we intervene? How do we justify walking on? What are we afraid of? Is there a way to protect the bystander? Madhuri speaks to people across cities, towns and villages to make sense of Bystander Syndrome and comes away with some psychol...

If more people are online, where does the violence go? Apparently, also online. In Episode 2 of Stay Home, Kitna Surakshit?, Madhuri meets Bishakha Datta of Point of View and Uttanshi Agarwal of One Future Collective, to try and make sense of our digital selves, transgressions of online identities, the public-private-corporate dance over our data. And they help us see that there is way more we can...

Stay Home, Kitna Surakshit? We have heard about the spike in violence at homes, during lockdown. In Ep. 01 of Stay Home, Kitna Surakshit? we meet Sangeeta Rege of CEHAT in Bombay and Rituparna Borah of Nazariya, as they take us through the response systems organizations have had to develop overnight, to help women and queer persons stuck at home with their oppressors. --- Send in a voice message:...

When Muskan said “Hamare yahaan yeh sab chalta hi nahi hai” (These things aren’t allowed in our areas), we couldn’t help but notice that she said it for feeling love as well as anger. Shubhangani who had joined the zoom call from Kekri, Rajasthan chimed in by saying that she feels pushed around, like a football, by elders. If there is no space to express and feel either love or anger, then what do...

Sahiba learns from Google, calls it her teacher and navigates her everyday—from getting things done to finding about her mental health—on Google. Her questions about the self and measures to take care of that self made everyone on the Zoom call think ‘Main kab badi huyi?’ (When did I grow up?). In this episode, meet Sahiba from Noida who speaks with the wisdom of an oak tree, at the age of 18. ‘Me...

In feminist organisations and within the academic discourse, we sit with the term ‘safe space’ quite often and roll it in our mouth to reiterate how multifarious and ever changing that term is. But when we asked Muskan and Shomya what it means to them and where they feel the most at home, they responded that these were spaces they have created away from home. 20-year-old Muskan from Samastipur, Bi...

Tumhari chahat kya hai? Tum kya chahti ho?” (What do you desire?) When was the last time we asked an adolescent what they think about their desires? How can we see their lives from their perspective? Like you, we didn’t know either. So, we decided to meet them online to listen to them with their starry, triangle and heart-shaped Chashma (glasses) on. When we started our zoom call with Muskan, Shom...

We have been meeting single women in small-town and rural India in our Ekal podcast series. In Episode 4, we meet a collective of single women in Marathwada, Maharashtra. What happens when the singular turns into a collective? The answers were manifold. Along with solidarity, sisterhood and revolution, the collective opened an ekal-hood that encompasses ideas of kaam (work), aaraam (rest), bandhut...

In this episode, Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own travels to the tehsil of Ajmer, Kekri in Rajasthan, and meets Annu, a 31-year-old woman who gives it her own meaning. What does this room look like today? Annu talks about being ekal (single) in her room on a terrace, where she embarks on building a relationship with herself and her small town, more romantic and introspective than any other rel...

What does it mean to be a single woman, when it’s not in a metropolis? What are the experiences of being single, without the romanticisation of the urban? What is the nature of singlehood that may not yet be defined, but may be as rich as life itself? How single women make their homes and live and love in smaller towns and villages, is what we set out to document in Ekal in the City. We explore di...

What does it mean to be a single woman, when it’s not in a metropolis? What are the experiences of being single, without the romanticisation of the urban? What is the nature of singlehood that may not yet be defined, but may be as rich as life itself? How single women make their homes and lives and loves in smaller towns and villages, is what we set out to document.  In the first episode of the se...

The recorder is not merely a tool of documentation, but rather a creative instrument that demands we rethink, re-listen, and reflect on our listening patterns. In asking who the recorder is placed in front of, what it catches that we miss, and what we weave together that it cannot pick up, our team at The Third Eye deepens its obsession with the recording of knowledge.   Our ‘Audio Documentaries’...