When Vishnu Padmanabhan and Shankar Padmanabhan were having conversations on random topics in their living room, the duo decided that they must document these conversations and share it with the world. Among the many forms of media out there, they found podcasting the most interesting and that's how Writer & Geek was born in 2018. While Vishnu is a software engineer, Shankar is a writer who works for a production house. However, the duo make it a point to sit down, research and record their podcasts. What do they talk about? Vishnu says, "Who would seriously sit and research on the internet about a simple toothbrush? That's where we come into picture. We aim to empower people by making them knowledgeable about simple things that they would not research or know about."
Excerpts from a chat:
When and how did this idea of starting Writer & Geek come up?
Vishnu: While searching for a solution to a problem in software programming, I came across this podcast where two developers from America spoke about technology, and coding. I fell in love with the medium. In 2018, Shankar and I decided to start our own show and a channel called Writer & Geek. Since, we have conversations at home about history, technology or even the current affairs, we thought that we must record and put them out on the internet.
What were the initial topics or subjects that you spoke about?
Shankar: If you check our initial episodes, we have spoken on random subjects like Does formal education do justice?, the Phantom Time Hypothesis that questions the existence of the early middle ages, losing weight, social media wings, going to the moon and so on. After a few episodes, we sorted it out and thought that we must speak on a particular subject or the current scenario in the country. We have uploaded 95 episodes so far and we record it religiously every week.
Who is the writer and who is the geek?
Vishnu: I think we are both writers and geeks because we both write and geek our over stuff.
Where exactly do you source the material from?
Shankar: Unlike other podcasters, we don't have a particular resource or authentic website that we pay for and get the information from. We mostly source it from the internet and a lot of things are from different books that we have read so far. We make sure that we verify the facts. One must understand that a lot of information that we speak on our show is out there on the internet but many people don't take the interest to read it. Aside from this, if we get our facts wrong, we start our episode by saying that we had got it wrong and we put the right fact across.
Who is your actual audience and where are they usually from?
Vishnu: We have listeners across six continents except Antarctica. We are not so concerned about the analytics of the number of listeners but what matters to us is the genuine messages from people who usually complement or even criticise us for the quality of content and the way we put it out. The best reaction that we got was when people who were not interested in history took an interest and started listening to our episodes.
Both of you are into different professions and you say that you take time to upload these episodes every week. Where do you find the time?
Shankar: We choose topics individually and also based on the feedback we get from people. The research that we do is also independent and over the week and we make notes about the subject or topic. Every Sunday morning, we sit in the small studio and record it. In fact, we tell our mother not to make noise by speaking over the phone or make cooking sounds in the kitchen and she is equally happy to cooperate and remain silent.
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What are your future plans for the podcast channel, Writer and Geek?
Vishnu: This is just the beginning for us and we are trying to bring fun and creativity into our shows. Podcasts have great potential and during this pandemic, we both figured that we could turn this into a video podcast, make the topics and content both interesting and useful to people.
Edex and The New Indian Express have been curating the 40 Under Forty list since 2017. We featured collections of impactful grassroots teachers in 2017, innovative start-ups in 2018 and environmental impact-makers in 2019. All the people selected have been chosen after a careful process of editorial selection and nomination. Reach out to us at edexlive@gmail.com
