Before they became friends, Shilpa Phadke and Nithila Kanagasabai shared a “working relationship”. The two met over a decade ago, “sitting across a desk in an academic office, where one of us was the interviewer and prospective teacher and the other the interviewee and potential student”.

Phadke, dean of School of Media and Cultural Studies at TISS, who co-authored the critically-acclaimed and revelatory non-fiction, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, was Kanagasabai’s supervisor for her Master’s dissertation. But the relationship evolved quickly, from talking about the MA dissertation “to my chasing her after she was done to publish [the dissertation], as she increasingly avoided me for that very reason, to being colleagues and friends,” shares Phadke, over an email interview. The duo first started collaborating on a research paper on feminist community media in 2019. “…friendship emerged as a major theme when we were looking at feminists indulging in activism online,” says Kanagasabai, currently assistant professor at TISS. “In many ways, pedagogic spaces are the kind of spaces where one has time. Time to chat. Time to just be. Time to drink endless cups of tea,” adds Phadke.