I'm Ray, and this is the sister show to my world geography podcast - except now I'm staying home. 28 states, 8 union territories, one episode each, working alphabetically from Andhra Pradesh onward. I grew up in India and I'm still learning how much of it I never really know - the history, the food, the languages, the people from each state who changed the country or the world. I research, write, record, and mix every episode myself, mistakes and all. New episode every Tuesday, 7pm. If you've ever wanted to actually know your own country properly, this one's for you.
Around India in Half an Hour
Claim This Podcastby Ray Z
10 episodes
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Podcast Overview
I'm Ray, and this is the sister show to my world geography podcast - except now I'm staying home. 28 states, 8 union territories, one episode each, working alphabetically from Andhra Pradesh onward. I grew up in India and I'm still learning how much of it I never really know - the history, the food, the languages, the people from each state who changed the country or the world. I research, write, record, and mix every episode myself, mistakes and all. New episode every Tuesday, 7pm. If you've ever wanted to actually know your own country properly, this one's for you.
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Publishing Since
5/25/2026
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Recent Episodes
July 28, 2026
Episode 9: Himachal Pradesh — The Land the British Never Wanted to Leave
<p>In March 1959, a young man crossed some of the highest mountain passes on Earth on foot, fleeing an army he had no way of fighting, and was eventually given shelter in a half-forgotten former British hill station in northern India. He's still there. This episode uses that story — the Dalai Lama's arrival in Dharamshala, and the Tibetan government-in-exile it produced — as one entry point into Himachal Pradesh, a state built almost entirely out of vertical terrain. We cover the Anglo-Gorkha War and the patchwork of princely hill kingdoms that came before it, the 1905 Kangra earthquake that killed over 20,000 people, Shimla's decades as the summer capital of the British Raj, and Dr. Y.S. Parmar's three-decade campaign for the 1971 statehood that finally united it all. We bring things up to the present with the catastrophic 2023 monsoon floods and what the government's own disaster report actually blamed them on, the state's ongoing fight with Delhi over apple import duties, dham feasts, Kangra tea, home-fermented rice beer, the Guinness World Record-holding Nati folk dance, and notable Himachalis from democracy pioneer Shyam Saran Negi to WWE's seven-foot-tall The Great Khali. Presented factually, including on the parts of this history that different governments still describe very differently.</p>
July 23, 2026
Episode 8: Haryana — Where the Gita Was Spoken and Medals Are Made
<p>Five thousand years ago, on a battlefield in northern India, a warrior lost his nerve and God explained why he must fight anyway. That conversation became the Bhagavad Gita. That battlefield is Kurukshetra. And Kurukshetra is in Haryana — forty minutes from Gurugram's glass towers, where employees close billion-dollar deals with Fortune 500 companies before driving home past village wrestling pits producing Olympic champions.</p><p>Haryana holds the largest Harappan site ever discovered — larger than Mohenjo-daro itself — and the ground where three empires rose or fell at the Battles of Panipat: Babur founding the Mughal Empire in 1526, Akbar defeating the last Hindu emperor of Delhi in 1556, and the Marathas suffering a catastrophic defeat in 1761 that reshaped the balance of power in the subcontinent.</p><p>Ray takes you through this dense, contradictory state — from Rakhigarhi's 4,500-year-old DNA discoveries to the Grand Trunk Road that determined who controlled North India for two millennia, from the 1966 split from Punjab to Gurugram's transformation from mustard fields into a corporate hub hosting 250 Fortune 500 companies. We meet Kapil Dev, who captained India to its first Cricket World Cup. We meet Neeraj Chopra, a farmer's son who ended India's hundred-year wait for individual Olympic athletics gold. We meet the wrestlers of Haryana's akhadas — Sakshi Malik, Bajrang Punia, the Phogat sisters — who turned village mud pits into an Olympic medal pipeline unmatched anywhere else in India.</p><p>We eat bajra khichdi and butter-laden parathas at the legendary Murthal dhabas. We stand at Jyotisar, where Krishna is said to have spoken the Gita. And we ask what it means for a state to be simultaneously India's breadbasket, its most aggressive new corporate frontier, and the birthplace of its most decorated Olympic wrestlers — all within the same afternoon's drive.</p><p>New episodes every Tuesday at 7pm. Next week — Himachal Pradesh.</p>
July 13, 2026
Episode 7: Gujarat — Where India Does Business with the World
<p>On a full moon night in winter, the Great Rann of Kutch turns the ground to silver. A flat white salt desert stretching 27,000 square kilometres, reflecting the moonlight so completely that sky and earth become one. Come monsoon, it floods. Come summer, it evaporates. Come winter — the flamingos arrive in their tens of thousands.</p><p>Gujarat is a state of extremes. The longest coastline of any Indian state. The only place on Earth where Asiatic lions still roam wild. Home to two of the most significant Harappan cities in existence — Lothal, with the world's oldest known dockyard, and Dholavira, a UNESCO World Heritage city that managed water in an arid desert 4,500 years ago. And the state that gave India Gandhi, Sardar Patel, and the Dandi March.</p><p>Ray takes you through the full sweep — from the Bronze Age port of Lothal to the golden age of the Solanki dynasty and the exquisite Rani ki Vav stepwell; from Champaner's pre-Mughal mosques to Surat's role as the Mughal empire's greatest port; from the Bhuj earthquake of 2001 to Gujarat's rapid reinvention as India's most industrialised state. We meet Vikram Sarabhai, who imagined India in space and made it happen. We meet Dhirubhai Ambani, who left Gujarat as a teenager and built one of Asia's largest conglomerates. We meet Narsinh Mehta, whose 550-year-old devotional poem was Gandhi's favourite song.</p><p>We eat dhokla, thepla, undhiyu, and fafda with jalebi. We watch Navratri Garba fill a stadium with thousands of dancers for nine straight nights. We stand at Somnath Temple above the Arabian Sea. And we learn that in Gujarat, commerce and culture have never been in conflict — they have always been the same impulse.</p><p>New episodes every Tuesday at 7pm. Next week — Haryana.</p>
10 total episodes available
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