Kriti Bajaj

A few months ago, I started a collaborative, conversational podcast with my friend Sara Walker. The Rewind: A Podcast for Nostalgic Millennials launched on 6 October 2024 (Spotify and Apple Podcasts), and has just wrapped up its first season of six episodes, totalling seven hours of us talking about things we like, dislike, find interesting, find annoying, find meaningful, and mostly just like to reminisce about.

As I listened back to the first season in its entirety, I began to notice something – podcasting can be a great way to share your life story. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to work on a family history project where stories had been documented on a series of cassette tapes, and it got me thinking about audio as a memory-keeping and storytelling medium. 

What is personal history?

When we document our lives, and edit it in the form of stories, it’s a way of recording our personal history. We can do it ourselves, writing autobiographies or memoirs, or we can have someone else write or tell our story for us. I’m starting to realise that our podcast is a form of personal history too. As we go along, it also feels a little bit like turning our lives into stories, clocking incidents or occurrences that would be fun to mention, or help the story progress, or are decidedly not fun but would still make for a solid tale. I even find myself noting down lines and quips sometimes “for the podcast”, and I feel like I’ve rediscovered my sense of humour.

All of these are good; research has shown that people who can frame their life as a narrative have a stronger sense of self and better mental health. I often ponder the challenge of documenting my life and family history, because it is never complete – no memory or story can ever really be complete, after all. There will always be more details you suddenly remember, or more perspectives from other people, or things you think you should have said on the podcast but didn’t. In finding a new medium to explore storytelling, I feel like I’m filling some of those gaps.

How it all began

I’ve wanted to do a chatty podcast for at least a couple of years. But even more than that, I’ve wanted to feel part of a community. I’ve intentionally set about building some around my interests, including genealogy, Korean and Taylor Swift. My Instagram, now two years old, did wonders, and this year I decided to do virtual cuppas with people I interact with on there (thank you to everyone who made time for me!), which has been lovely. One of them was Sara.

We had an ease of conversation during our three-hour call, so when she asked me a few days later if I’d be interested in doing a podcast, I didn’t need to blink before saying yes. I’d been putting off initiating something like this due to other commitments, but when the time is right, it’s right. We decided to do the world a favour and start a podcast of our own. 

The Story of Us (Episode 1)

In the inaugural episode, we shared a bit about our relatively recent friendship, which gives us an opportunity to learn about each other as the podcast progresses – in real time! We also talked blogging, journaling and documenting our lives, and discussed how we landed on family history as a focus of our businesses.

One common aspect was feeling out of place due to our interests and nostalgic leanings, and how the internet can help connect us with like-minded people. Online connections have been a big theme in my adult life, and I often think I have a far richer world online than I do offline. It makes sense, because without the limitations of geography and social circles, the net (!) we cast is so much wider. Even though I often wish I could bring all those people into one neighbourhood and hang out with them forevermore, I’m grateful for my virtual friendships – that sometimes do translate to IRL meetings. 

A Bookish Throwback (Episode 2)

A walk down a memory lane lined with books! This episode gave us an opportunity to reflect on how we got into reading – the first books that excited us, reading in our childhood, high school and college years, and the libraries and bookshops that played a pivotal role. There was romance and high school classics, Barbie magazines, Enid Blyton, mysteries, magical realism, and different experiences with Harry Potter and Anne Shirley, exploring how things we once loved can change as we navigate their complexities.

My reading life began at the age of nine with a bookshop in Chennai, and deepened through libraries in Delhi. I loved mysteries, and branched out into classics and fantasy in due course. In college, I ended up pursuing a literature degree by a series of strange coincidences – by which I mean it shouldn’t have happened but did. It took a while to read outside of the curriculum again, and while I’m no longer the voracious reader I once was, I still love to read. One of my big goals for next year is to read a lot, and develop a healthy reading habit again. Will I succeed?

What a Snack! (Episode 3)

Food is an important part of both our family history journeys, and we talked about my monthly Cooking from Memory project and Sara’s monthly Heirloom Club recipes. It led us on a journey of recalling foods and snacks we loved when we were kids, including what our parents made, fast food, toys that came free with meals, and how all of these differed in India and the US. I also shared the lifelong conspiracy that has followed my favourite meals, and we discovered how and why we learned how to cook.

One of the most significant aspects for me has been using food to spark connections across time, how oral history is as vital as making the dishes themselves, how dishes are forgotten if no one makes them for a while, how food enhances family history and also builds connections in the present. In my project, I tried to give representation to different people and types of dishes, and I was happy to eat some of the dishes together with them – something I used to feel pretty insecure about. It is nice when people enjoy something I’ve made!

Travelogues and Curses (Episode 4)

I’ve had the itch to travel for as long as I can remember, and after our recent travels, this episode seemed a good place to recount our recent and past travel stories. We discussed what made us want to travel; how my younger self, and in Sara’s case her dad, would be proud of the thoughtful travellers we’ve become. From my first travel file, trying to befriend foreigners and collecting travel newspaper supplements, to finally being able to take myself to places I’d dreamed of has been life-changing.

In addition to family trips, pet peeves and our worst travel experiences, we also noticed our overlapping interests in history and resilience vis-a-vis our own work. At this point in the podcast, we found ourselves creating our own lore and go-to phrases that tie the episodes together. (So, for example, to fully appreciate the alleged curse in this episode, you’d need to listen to episode 3.) Personal history is also documenting the present and the recent past, like journaling, but here through conversation. 

Six Things from the Ethers (Episode 5)

If you’re nostalgic about entertainment from the 90s and early 2000s, this is the episode to listen to. We brought in feedback on each other’s favourite books growing up, rated beloved movies and TV shows we watched during our middle and high school years, and discussed actresses that defined our teens. We swapped tales about our imaginary friends and I finally learned what a Polly Pocket is. 

I also delved into one of the biggest tragedies addressed in my first journal – the realisation that I needed glasses, and putting off the fateful day for as long as possible. Turns out that I was in the minority, and many others, Sara and our audience included, actually couldn’t wait to get glasses. Huh.

Christmas Tea and Firework Fiascos (Episode 6)

For the final episode of this season, I enjoyed sharing some of my London stories from over a decade ago, including watching Wicked at the West End and experiencing Christmas magic. We exchanged notes on how we celebrated Christmas growing up and the traditions we’ve started and continued and fine-tuned, as well as Diwali celebrations, and things the festivals have in common. 

We also talked about tea, reindeer, celebrities, ugly sweater parties and Christmas clothes, weird firework incidents (do we like fireworks and are they a good thing really?), and a fair amount of pop culture in the form of TV shows, movies and music.

Onward

In reflecting on our pasts – why we like or don’t like things, our similarities and differences, our unique worldviews, stories we haven’t thought about in a long time triggered by the other person’s memories – I think lies the true purpose of this podcast. Spotify Wrapped called it a “storytelling” podcast, and listeners throughout these three months have shared how they resonated with and remembered similar experiences, or were inspired to journal or tell their own stories. That, to me, is a successful season.

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