Voices from Maximum City: on Raghu Karnad’s latest podcast, ‘Marine Lines’

With his 10-episode podcast, Marine Lines, journalist-writer Raghu Karnad aims to build a connect with urban dwellers and the environment, and hopes to scale up to other cities

Raghu Karnad fondly recalls how, out of the blue, he and a friend chanced upon dolphins off the Bandra Bandstand rocks. “It struck me suddenly that we in Mumbai see the sea as scenery, as a backdrop, and not as a living world filled with creatures that are our neighbours,” says the writer-journalist, adding, “We can’t look too deep, but it’s amazing how much life is ready to meet us on the coastline.” This sense of wonder was one of the starting points of Marine Lines, a 10-part podcast that Karnad (who won the 2019 Windham-Campbell Prize in the non-fiction category) is hosting. Produced by Ministry of Mumbai’s Magic and DeadAnt Studios, it explores “Mumbai’s hidden worlds, from the suburbs to the sea”. The conversations cover specific spaces (like the Sanjay Gandhi National Park), the creatures that inhabit them (everything from leopards to sea slugs), as well as broader topics like urban consumption patterns and sustainability. They seek to introduce listeners to ecosystems they may not have given a second thought to. “The podcast was pitched to me by the producers who wanted to explore Mumbai’s natural spaces and ecosystems, and I leapt at the idea,” says Karnad over the phone, adding that they recorded most of the episodes during the second wave, in April. “One of the things that I felt deprived of during that time, psychologically, was access to public, shared spaces. So the opportunity to have these conversations, to imagine I’m there with experts who’ve spent a lot of time documenting these areas, appealed to me,” he says.