LURU Hangs w/ Vaaka

There are many tiny tweaks between articulation and audio.

“Yeah, you should talk about how knitting is like making audio,” says Samyuktha Varma nudging Radhika Vishwanathan, her partner at Vaaka, the duo’s Bengaluru-based full stack podcast production house that makes ‘compelling, immersive audio-first narratives’.

We, the LURU newsletter team, have dropped into Radhika’s home-studio – cosy, quiet, and stacked with knit items in all shapes and sizes – before heading off to explore Kammanahalli with these two plucky podcasters. “It takes a long time,” she says, plotting the parallel between her preoccupation with knitting during the making of their podcasts. “You’ve got to be very methodical about it. You’ve got to think a lot about the presentation and the colours. And similarly, when you’re doing it, you don’t really know what’s going to come of it. But, by the end, you get this beautiful design,” she adds, proudly holding up one of her vibrant, knitted creations to admiring gasps.

Mic Lane

Quite quickly, our party of four marched through the scutter of Kammanahalli to the starting point of Vaaka’s first show – In The Field. “So in our very first episode of the first show we made, we came to see what it’s like inside of an anganwadi,” says Samyuktha, in front of an overgrown, abandoned plot of this former mother-and-child care centre. “We found this on Google Maps, and just walked in there,” she adds. They knew that every ward – an electoral sub-division within a city – is supposed to have one by law. In that first episode, ‘If you eat egg, you’re child will be bald’, they focused on malnutrition and stunting in India.

Presently, the anganwadi for this ward has moved five kilometres away but the duo paint a picture of its former glory. “It used to have a big, open area. It was built like those classic little schools, you know, with painted walls of alphabets, the habits of sanskari boys and girls posters, and such,” Radhika recalls. “This was a distribution centre, it was always very busy – it didn’t have these big walls, it had one of those metal jali fences – made it easier to locate. It was so much more inviting, and very sweet,” she adds. “And when we got here,” Samyuktha remembers, “there was a woman who had come with her empty bags, and an anganwadi worker was measuring out the dal and pouring it into the bags.” They remember getting audio of this exchange, and using it in their first episode. “We were trying to see what the government’s programmes looked like at this level,” she says, speaking to the episode that covered everyone from “policy people to doctors working in community medicine.”

For Vaaka’s first show In The Field, they wanted to tell “the story of development in India through the lens of the people actually working in the sector,” says Radhika. After having worked for “many years” in the development sector, they “found a lot of conversations on the side of all the official stuff was really interesting,” she tells us. “And everyone working in the field always had a good take, lots of debates, and it was fun to talk about the work,” they remember. It was important for them to go beyond “the sense of abstraction” with regards to development in the nation and get down to the brasstacks by understanding “what it means while working in this sector.”

Show notes

They built on their training as social scientists and “reverse engineered and learned the skills, and everything else about podcasting.” In the early years, they were just making shows for “ourselves” before they started making “sort of audio documentary style shows about society and big questions in the world for serious organisations that were often quite academic,” Samyuktha explains. And they wanted to do a show “that would be a bit more of a reflection of our style, our interests, that allow for experimentation with audio, allowed for interviewing people the way we wanted to, use the parts of the interview we wanted to use,” she adds, describing the push behind the making of City of Women, their second show, around seven years ago.

In 2019, through incubation at the Google Podcasts Creator Program, a partnership between Google and PRX, the public media company, the Vaaka duo got to begin making audio that was “story first.” They knew they wanted to “tell the stories of women” but they got “to define the idea, prototype different versions of the show, try out things and get comfortable with walking on the street and recording; things we hadn’t done before,” Radhika says.

Walking and talking, we arrive at our second location in Kammanahalli; a busy bus stand beside a girls’ school. This was the spot where they “summoned the courage to go say hi” to a woman waiting for her bus to prototype an episode for City of Women. They recall this interview as being important because it helped them “test out [their] own questions,” says Samyuktha. “Like how do you ask women to talk about their lives? This was before the days of your average influencer in the wild doing street interviews,” she remembers. “Like now, if you approach somebody with a microphone, they know what you’re trying to do. At that time, she was a little bit reticent at first but she didn’t want to be rude,” she adds. “You can hear her on our very first trailer for City of Women.”

With City of Women, “we’re not necessarily looking for a story that’s like: I’m a woman. These are my problems,” Samyuktha clarifies. “But there are things that will show you what is distinctive about a woman’s experience or the feminine experience of being in a city. We knew it was there but were trying to find it,” she adds. “We’re looking for those moments of reflection, of poignancy, that even maybe the speaker doesn’t necessarily consider very profound,” underscores Radhika. But to excavate that “kind of depth, there’s something very beautiful to it, even if it’s very momentary,” she adds, assuring us, “that comes only from re-listening endlessly to the audio; shaving off a sliver at a time, it’s almost like sculpting.”

Clipped tones

This sculpting or editing is done with “a kind of writing.” They ask themselves: “What it is that we’re trying to say using the recordings and that has many iterations because there’s a craft to this thing,” Samyuktha states.

“It’s storytelling, it’s how nice words sound when you hear them out loud which is different from when they’re on a page. Then, we work with the music to bring in a mood because there’s usually one we’re trying to evoke through each episode,” she says. “It isn’t just about the recordings, it’s a full package, it’s a full piece,” she adds, pulling back some of the layers of their intensive process of podcast production. “It’s a feeling, it all starts with a feeling,” Radhika echoes.

Follow Vaaka’s work here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly LURU Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.