The Hindu Business Line : Podcasting and the making of a sandwich

OH GOD, I hated airports. They have always been cold, sterile places, but things have gone from bad to horrible. In the post 9/11 era, we have all had to drink the security Koolaide. You could be three hours early and still be late for the flight. And then get the attitude. "Stand in this line. No, not that one. This one. And take off your shoes, your cell phone, put your bag here, your laptop there, raise your left toe, and wiggle your tush."

It is enough to drive a Madrassi to the mind-numbing safety and security of a madrassa.

So how does one cope? Moping is one solution, but that only gets us that far. Moaning and groaning are not great salve either and are depressing medicine. Complaining is a bad idea in this paranoid "big brother" era. People with white uniforms are waiting to whisk you away to the dark interiors of their minds.

You may have to undergo "retraining" on how to arrive at an airport, preferably three hours before your aeroplane has left its prior port of call. So what is left? Food, of course! The right attitude and the right kind of food can get one a lot further in life. You are thinking chocolate, French fries, ice cream? Sorry. We are talking about food for the heart and the soul. I am thinking of making a sandwich.

Preparing a sandwich is a delicate business. First you must choose the bread, soft enough to munch through, but firm enough to hold the content. Some flavour but not too much to overwhelm the proceedings. Character without being obdurate.

Next comes the spread with two important considerations. This should be a softening agent, to detract from the firmness of the outer layer. At the same it provides an opportunity to introduce character.

The English may go for butter, a relatively bland approach, when there is so much more opportunity. An American touch may be mayonnaise, but this is often a mushy characterless mess. Si vous soyez francais, you must perforce go for le moutard, a hard-hitting yellow sizzler that travels up the cortex and delivers a wake-up call to the sleepy taste synapses in the left brain.

Ah, my mistake. Here is some tissue. You have started drooling, thinking of lunch. Me, I am waxing lyrical. The sandwich that I am talking about is only aural. Unless you have been out to lunch for the last five years, the MP3 age has arrived with new and amazing possibilities.

Imagine waiting for yet another bus, a delayed flight or the interminable waiting between events such as picking up a child from practice or a spouse from work. In the good old days, macho men would while away their time, chewing on the cancer stick. The hip generation of yesteryear would swing to the beat of the Walkman. Nowyou have got to get into the MP3 groove.

Whether you are all of 10 years or a sprightly eighty-one, you can do MP3. For a relative pittance or a princely sum, you can get the MP3 player of your choice. Be hip with an iPod or flip with a Creative. I went to town with a Pic N Roll from Truly. For those cell phone addicts, yes, you can have MP3 in that one too. Blackberry users should, however, continue to twiddle their thumbs for some time to come.

Everyone has a system. Some go for the fat client approach, 1GB or higher and they want their Tower Records collection in their library. Some others have a web services approach.

Beg, borrow or steal from the Internet when one wants a track. Pour Moi, it's the three-tier approach: A moderate-size client to hold about 4 CDs; my laptop as the middle tier holding my personal library and as a staging place for daily updates and, of course, the vast Internet database to access upon need.

Thus, with one simple daily synchronisation, I have new content on my thin MP3 player, which works well for any excursions, where I am not tethered to my laptop.

So how much music can one listen to? Does this not get awfully boring after a while? But wait, there is more...

The real story behind this tale is not just about music, but about a new revolution sweeping the globe. This is about podcasting and the dynamic changes it is bringing in its wake. At an elemental level, podcasting is about exchange of content for users to download into their iPod or MP3 players.

But the real revolution is hidden, for podcasting is an asynchronous communications medium. Its initial impact is on radio, a medium that most of us associate with the past. Podcasting does to radio what TiVo did to the TV and cable industry — it allows for the time-shifting of content from being real-time to delayed-time. Thus a radio broadcast is no longer a fleeting electromagnetic pulse, beaming through space and forever lost to those who did not tune in. Instead, it now powers itself into the Internet, stored in myriads of servers.

The astute listener does not now need to be serendipitous. All that one has to do, is to `search and subscribe' to that radio podcast and voila, it comes, packet by packet, day-on-day, on schedule or on demand, into one's greedy clutches.

Radio is alive again, on the Internet, in flavours ad infinitum. TV is coming too...

The sandwich now gets decidedly more interesting, with manifold layers of innocence, reproach and love. A Semmangudi sonorous start of `O Rangasayi... ' in Khamboji sets the ball rolling like Kalyanasundaram coming in with the new ball from the boundary, a racy new Hindi song taunts spinning in mid-air, a well chosen Bilahari may take an outside edge to the boundary while, a slice of commentary from the Financial Times provides for intellectual nourishment.

Soon a soothing violin concerto permits some much needed somnolence like the stage from lunch to tea, allowing one to wake up with agility for the Morning Edition from NPR followed by a googly from Chandra with an old love song from Tere Mere Sapne.

As the shadows lengthen, things get intellectual again with a World of Possibilities before the draw of stumps and the closure of one's innings in the magical embrace of Tyagaraja's "Evarura... " in Mohanam by Nityashree.

These days, I I love airports. For as soon as I enter, I start thinking of my sandwich, carefully prepared the night before. With boarding pass in hand, it is time to get the sandwich out as one heads to the security line.

Sometimes, the line is annoyingly small but most times, it is a satisfactory half-an-hour till one gets to the white-gloved manic-depressives wanting to pat you down. I force myself to wait, toying with the thought of mentally munching into my sandwich and savouring the treats to follow. I look up at the terminal screen, hoping against hope to see that my flight has been delayed indefinitely...

(The author is a technology executive and entrepreneur.)

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