Desi Academia Podcast

About Desi Academia Podcast

A space for discussing the trials and tribulations that make research and academic life interesting. This podcast offers the perspective of early-career Desi researchers navigating their futures both in India and abroad. Episodes include our insights on critical thinking, scientific temper, new scientific developments, research funding policies, and a lot more.

Publisher

Desi Academia Podcast

Category

science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

20 Aug 2022

Latest episode

27 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

61 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Sept 2026

   Supplementary Materials 9: Marginalised faculty and the performance of excellence

   Megh is joined by Professor Rituparna Patgiri to talk about the challenges of creating an academic brand, the public scrutiny of marginalised faculty, the neoliberal university, and the tragedy of Professor Jason Arday. Sources: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db3YLAlNpXw/?igsh=NWo4ZmI1M2Yzd2hr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdvnhmeMHBU Original blog: https://ncofnas.com/p/dei-fraud-and-cover-up-at-cambridge Retraction watch: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/books/review/jason-arday-memoir-takeaways.html https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/06/rise-and-fall-of-jason-arday https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/books/review/cambridge-jason-arday-resignation-investigation.html https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e146jw618o https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/jason-arday-cambridge-academic-memoir-resignation/688206/ Articles by Rituparna: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/four-year-undergraduate-course-delhi-university-faculty-nep-2020-10146873/ https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/social-sciences-sociology-relevance-of-social-sciences-iits-10279804/ https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/tezpur-university-assam-accord-student-portest-public-university-10402123/

2. 

   17 Sept 2026

   S13E3: Phonology and Linguistics with Dr. Shakuntala Mahanta

   In this episode of DAP, Megh, Vatsal and Indranil are joined by Dr. Shakuntala Mahanta to continue our discussions around linguistics. Dr. Mahanta is a professor at IIT Guwahati. An expert in phonology, her research interests involve documentation and phonetic/ phonological analysis of tone, intonation and other phonological and computational learnability phenomena in (mostly, but not restricted to) South Asian languages and the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Northeast India. We talk about Dr. Mahanta’s academic journey, her research and how it evolved into phonology, what it takes to do field work for phonology and how she formulates her research hypothesis. We also discuss some basics of phonology like the importance of stress in languages, ambiguity, tonal languages, vowel harmony. We also discuss careers in speech technology, field linguistics versus lab linguistics and the roles and responsibilities of language scientists in the North East. Recommendations: Sound Patterns of English, by Noam Chomsky The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony, edited by Harry van der Hulst and  Nancy A. Ritter. Indranil How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention (confirm) Shakuntala The discovery of spoken language, by Peter W. Jusczyk A Manual of Linguistic Field Work and Structures of Indian Languages (https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Manual_of_Linguistic_Field_Work_and_St.html?id=0HJiAAAAMAAJ) by Anvita Abbi Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork by Shobhana L. Chelliah and Willem J. de Reuse Megh Haasil Fractured Communities by Umar Khalid The new Spiderman movie “Divine Female”, standup comedy special Prashasti Singh Anirban Dasgupta https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark (https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark) The Odyssey movie “An Uncomplicated Man” (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man), essay by Emily Wilson Vatsal Drishayam 3

3. 

   30 Aug 2026

   S13E2: Linguistics by way of India with Indranil, Charlie, and Remo

   In this episode, we continue our deep dive into language science. We are joined by a fantastic panel of linguists to unpack the foundational debates shaping modern linguistics and cognitive science. We explore how studying human and animal communication helps define the boundaries of Language, why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis continues to spark debates over language as a universal human trait versus a product of culture, and how phenomena like the Bouba/Kiki effect fuel the controversy over whether language is innate or acquired. The conversation also tackles the socio-political aspects of defining of languages and dialects, the field's complex ties to colonialism, nationalism, and racism, and the founder effect on linguistics by controversial figures like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Professor Indranil Dutta serves as the Dean of the School of Languages and Linguistics, Jadavpur University. He is a computational linguist by training with interests in speech acoustics, motor control, and automatic methods of grammar induction. His research spans areas within acoustic phonetics, computational phonology, and natural language processing. Dr Remo Nitschke is A postdoctoral researcher in the Distributional Linguistics Lab at the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich. His research interests include the intersection of machine learning and linguistic theory, animal communication, and emergent sign languages. Dr. Charles Redmon is a Lecturer at the School of Language, Literature, and Media (SLLaM), University of Essex. He is a phonologist by training and his research aims to understand the structure and evolution of speech systems, linking the low-level articulatory, acoustic and auditory structures in speech with the higher-level word structures the system must encode. Recommendations: Remo Linguistics Wars Calvin and hobbs comics Soviet bus stops - book Charlie Rana Dasgupta, "After nations" Murder mystery novels Indranil Ira Mukhoti Orbital -samantha harvey La conquête de la Terre par les chats by by Alberto Montt Vatsal “I No Longer Think GLP-1s Are the Answer” https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/114009 (https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/114009) Megh The Boys - Amazon Prime The Awful German Language by Mark Twain Biswa Kalyan Rath’s stand up clips Indranil’s past podcast episodes: https://open.spotify.com/episode/44KV59s9wlQhWIxDdoUvdb (https://open.spotify.com/episode/44KV59s9wlQhWIxDdoUvdb) “S4E3- Mandal, Mandir and the 90s with Sunil Menon and Indranil Dutta” https://open.spotify.com/episode/19VqPH5LbJdq9B2TOy9vsp (https://open.spotify.com/episode/19VqPH5LbJdq9B2TOy9vsp) “S10E2: "Dissertation Research is a Team Sport"- Megh's Defense Experience”

Who has been a guest on Desi Academia Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Deepak Modi
• Dr Shannon Philip
• Dr Ketaki Chowkhani

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

31 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 33 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

39

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

71

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.