Monday, January 18, 2010

Podcasts - Or How I keep my sanity while driving...




Driving in India is, to put it mildly, stressful and chaotic (understatement) - more so in the city of Pune which is seeing unstructured unprecedented un-whatever growth (basically more of everything on the roads).

Although my commute to office is 20 minutes at most - I realized that I missed listening to the radio while driving in the US (the local Pune FM radio stations are not per my listening tastes, basically making me feel OLD). I primarily listened to NPR in the US.  So that got me on a quest to see if I could start listening to some of the shows that I enjoyed there. I pulled out my old iPod mini (1st generation) plugged it into iTunes and set about subscribing to podcasts (iTunes + iPod is the easiest way to go about this).

Here's what's on my podcast subscription list:

- Wait wait don't tell me! - A really amazing radio show that is an "informative news quiz" show with some great news & media personalities at their humourous best! There hasn't been a single podcast that hasn't got me chuckling... A tip though - Keeping current with what's happening in the US helps in "getting the jokes".

- WNYC's Radio Lab - Another great show - on very insightful topics  - ranging from Animal minds to great things about Numbers. I've recently started listening to this based on Seth Godin's recommendation. In his own words "The content of each show is a unique mix of science, pop culture and relevance. I guarantee that they will make you smarter. That's a lot to promise for a radio show, but I think it's true."

- NPR Technology podcast - Allows me to listen to interesting things happening on the tech side (that's what this blog is supposed to be anyway about). If you've listened to NPR before - this is basically "All Tech Considered" from the "All Things Considered". Good weekly snapshot on happenings in the tech world.

- CarTalk - If you are a car buff - you will enjoy the lively "Click and Clack" brothers dishing out advice on cars, car repairs and troubleshooting! Guaranteed to put you in a lighter mood!

Other subscriptions including WSJ's daily tech briefing and the occasional NPR's fresh air!

My driving has definitely gotten better! Try it - you wouldn't be disappointed, it will, at the least, make you smarter!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Big NPR fan here. I would also recommend On Science, All Songs Considered and Fresh Air

Kiran Nataraj said...

@vistify: I do listen to All Songs Considered and Fresh Air. However Fresh Air just does not seem to groove in here as it did in the US (it's just me ;-).

Will try out All Science though - thanks for that.