Pilot - Hopes & Intentions

Shreya - the host - explore the intentions for starting the podcast and who this conversation is open to. She invites anyone who feels "At Odds" against society to come and have a conversation, or give this podcast a listen. 

Transcript

Hi I am Shreya and welcome to At Odds, the podcast. I'm a queer, neurodivergent human who lives in India. I used to work full time as a digital marketer in agencies and corporates for about a decade till I decided to take a break last year. I was incredibly burnt out and during the break was also when I was diagnosed as being autistic. Reading about autism and finding community online has been and is a big factor of my life for the past year. This podcast is a continued effort to find community for myself and hopefully through my conversations for others. 

I have found that living a slightly divergent life to the ordinary, socially accepted norms can be very alienating. And what has helped is to read the works of others, slide into DMs on social media, and to make friends with those who are slightly weird but obviously very amazing. 

I'm new to podcasting, as I'm sure you can tell, so I'm hoping I can create something fun and meaningful for others out of this. So what is At Odds and what is this podcast about? It's a conversation with those who come up against the edges and stand out in society as it is. The intention is to explore conversations about resistance that is inherent in a life that is lived at odds and how this manifests in the doing or not doing of the daily tiny, tiny tasks that constitute a well-lived, life. I find that this leads to the discovery very often of personal and societal eureka moments. So now if you ask me what's a personal societal eureka moment is, simple thing for me. Once I got hold of noise-canceling earphones, the whole act of sitting in my parent's home and trying to work changed because I could completely tune out the world. My family lives in Mumbai and there's constant construction outside. The fact that I could tune out was a very, very big hooray moment for me. This sounds like a small thing, but I mean, for a neurodivergent like me, being able to shut out sound was one of the biggest productivity factors of work. 

So coming back to what the podcast is about, the invitation for this conversation is open to queers, neurodivergents, bahujan and disabled members of society. There are many ways to feel at Odds that may not be defined yet or I may be unaware of, I invite you as well to a conversation. 

So there were a few things that I wanted to keep as guiding posts for this podcast. First is I wanted to make it accessible. For me, this means two main things. 
One is to have a dictionary section at the start of every episode which will explain any words that seem jargony or academic in nature. I want to also ensure that there is a transcript available either on the website of this podcast whenever that becomes a reality, or it will be made available as Google Drive links. 
The second is I am very open to feedback and conversation about mistakes and oversights that I may have made. Please feel free to write in DM voice note email me about anything I may have said that seems not intersectional or not inclusive. I am constantly learning and I'm very well aware that my privileges very often may ensure that I may disregard the lived realities of a lot of people. 

I am recording this pilot episode after having recorded five conversations with people and one thing this has been the whole scheduling writing to people, scheduling time in there and my calendars and actually making time to record is that this whole thing is an exercise in patience. There have been lots of rescheduling often on my part because I haven't been able to make time or just have not had the energy . People I have invited haven't had the resources all the time, all the energy to be available, and work and life have gotten in the way of all of this. 

This is a slow podcast in the making and time is something that I'm slowly learning to allow for myself. This past year for me has been a reintroduction to my brain and body and trying to listen and understand what it is trying to say to me. Very, very often my body is just asking me to rest and I tend to not listen to it well as we all live in a hyperproductive capitalist society and the result of it is often very tired people. After recording every conversation, I have felt deeply exhausted. For my autistic brain, long conversations are exhausting. This has also been echoed by the people with whom I have recorded. So when I thank them for their time and effort and energy, I truly do mean it, because sometimes I know I have at least scraped at the bottom of the barrel of my energy to ensure that I could give them the kind of attention they deserved. 

All the music on the podcast is brought to you by Ziv Grinberg. I found them on Artlist.io. This podcast would not have been possible without the help of my sister Roshni and her partner Rahul. Thank you for being better at editing than I am and for knowing things like Logic and GarageBand.Thank you to my mother, Mythreyee, for helping transcribe and edit all the visual repository that you see of the podcast. If you would like to follow the podcast and see what else I'm going to be up to, please follow me at Podcast at Odds. That is Podcast at Odds on  Instagram. That is currently our only social location. Thank you and I hope you keep listening.