On March 25, 2020, Garima Surana started her audio show, Popkast with Garima. She wasn’t working at the time. Having moved to France after getting married, she was seeing the country freshly in the midst of the Coronavirus induced lockdown pandemic. With nothing else to do as she says, Surana started the show as a channel to express her thoughts and question years of conditioning that Indian women like her encounter. “It started for me as a coping mechanism or like therapy, where what mattered was what I said and not how I looked,” she says in a telephonic conversation with mid-day.

“Anything to do with the mic has always thrilled me,” adds Surana, whose previous stints were as a radio jockey at IIS university’s Radio 7 among others, and then at an entertainment daily, where she monetised the music vertical. Popkast with Garima, which has seen its audience base grow from just six listeners to 2,80,000 in a year, is a pop culture podcast that reflects on our society and questions its taboos. Since this is one of the few mediums that hasn’t faced censorship yet, Surana says that it allowed for uncomfortable questions around topics like female pleasure, male hygiene, online hate, cancel culture, accountability and inclusiveness to be raised. She feels that with platforms like Instagram or YouTube that are dominated by beauty, fashion and lifestyle content, it was important that another platform was explored to voice opinions on diverse subjects. Her subjects, she says, have, surprisingly, given her women-centred discussions, found popularity with men.