Podcasts, Polymathy, and the Many Paths to Knowing Life
I have been listening to podcasts regularly for the past four or five years. Somewhere along the way, listening moved beyond being a way to consume information. It became part of how I travel through life.
I listen while commuting to work, walking, sitting in the car, waiting for someone at reception, or simply moving through my daily routine. These moments might otherwise have been treated as gaps between more important things. Listening has made me realise that there may be no such thing as an unimportant moment.
A commute can become a conversation with a philosopher. A wait at reception can introduce me to a musician’s inner world. A walk can carry me into Indian history, psychology, economics, spirituality, sport, science, or an entirely unfamiliar way of seeing life.
The world enters through the ears.
The Moments Between Things
Listening has changed my relationship with time.
It has not necessarily made every moment productive, nor do I want to measure life only through productivity. It has simply made many ordinary moments more alive.
Sometimes I listen with complete attention. At other times, the conversation accompanies me while I walk, travel, or wait. A phrase suddenly reaches me. A question stays behind. An unfamiliar idea enters my mind and continues to move there long after the podcast has ended.
What appeared to be an empty interval becomes an encounter.
I may be physically sitting in a car in Bengaluru, but my attention may be travelling with a thinker somewhere else in the world. I may be walking through a familiar street while hearing someone describe an experience that I have never had.
Listening allows the ordinary and the extraordinary to occupy the same moment.
A Curriculum Without a Map
People may ask how I choose what to listen to.
I do not have a precise answer.
My choice often depends on the questions moving through my life at a particular time. However, life rarely presents just one question. There are usually many purposes, interests, tensions, and curiosities unfolding together.
That is perhaps why my listening is nonlinear.
One day I may be listening to a conversation about spirituality. The next day, I may move towards geopolitics, mathematics, physics, music, economics, psychology, Indian scriptures, philosophy, sport, performance coaching, art, travel, or something I had never previously considered.
From one perspective, this may appear scattered. From another, it may simply reflect how my mind naturally moves.
I am a polymath in spirit. My interests do not stay comfortably inside one field of knowledge.
I have a grounding in engineering, science, and technology. Management studies introduced me to business and economics. My professional life has taken me through digitalisation, sustainability, energy efficiency, analytics, and leadership. Yoga opened an entirely different field of inquiry by turning my attention towards the nature of the self.
Travel, art, music, dance, coaching, meditation, and the people I have met have expanded that landscape further.
Perhaps my real classroom has always been life itself.
Many Subjects, One Question
Although the subjects keep changing, the question underneath them is often the same:
What is a human being?
What is the mind?
How does a person think, feel, choose, and act?
What causes someone to perform with extraordinary focus on one day and struggle with the simplest task on another?
What shapes our decisions?
How much of our behaviour comes from biology, upbringing, society, culture, memory, fear, desire, habit, faith, ambition, or grace?
These questions can be explored through science, psychology, philosophy, economics, history, spirituality, literature, music, sport, or the arts. Every field seems to hold one part of the human story.
For me, the topic is often only the doorway.
The deeper fascination is with life itself and with the human being who is attempting to understand, express, and live it.
Listening for the Life Behind the Idea
When I listen to someone speaking, I am interested not only in what that person knows but also in how that person has lived.
What experiences lie behind the conclusions?
What struggles sit behind the confidence?
What questions remain unanswered?
What has the person seen, lost, created, overcome, or understood that allows them to speak in this particular way?
I am equally interested in the person conducting the conversation.
What kind of question are they asking?
Why are they asking it in that particular way?
What assumptions are hidden within the question?
Are they genuinely listening, or merely waiting to ask the next question?
How does one answer influence the direction of the conversation?
Sometimes a person is brilliant at articulating an idea. Someone else may be brilliant at living or doing something but unable to express it with the same clarity.
Listening to both can be valuable.
Knowledge does not always arrive in perfectly structured sentences. Sometimes it appears through a pause, a hesitation, an unfinished answer, or a story that the speaker may not even recognise as wisdom.
The Known, the Knower, and the Experience
Gradually, my listening has moved towards three interconnected directions of inquiry.
The first concerns what is known and how we come to know it. This belongs to the territory of epistemology.
The second concerns the nature of being and existence. This belongs to ontology.
The third concerns how life is experienced from within. This belongs to phenomenology.
There is the world being observed, and there is the one from whom the observation is happening.
There is also the experience of observing.
All three matter.
We can keep expanding our knowledge of objects, events, systems, cultures, ideas, and people. Yet, at some point, another question appears:
Who is the one knowing all this?
Phenomenology introduces another dimension by bringing attention to lived experience. It asks us to notice how life actually appears and feels before it is completely arranged into concepts and explanations.
Perhaps this is what connects my varied interests.
Science studies the observed world. Psychology studies aspects of behaviour and mind. Art gives form to experience. Philosophy examines the structure of thought. Spirituality turns towards the observer. Yoga asks whether the observer can be encountered directly.
The subjects may look different, but they are not always separate.
Answering Before the Guest Does
I rarely listen to a podcast entirely passively.
When the host asks a question, I sometimes pause inwardly and attempt to answer it myself before hearing the guest’s response.
What do I think?
What has my own experience shown me?
Where might my understanding be incomplete?
Then I listen.
The purpose is not to determine whether the guest agrees with me. I am not listening to confirm that my answer is correct.
The difference between the two answers is often where the learning begins.
Sometimes the guest expresses something that I have felt but could never articulate. At other times, the answer challenges an assumption I did not know I was carrying. Occasionally, I disagree completely, but even that disagreement reveals something about my own thinking.
Listening in this way becomes a form of participation.
I am not physically present in the conversation, but inwardly, I have entered it.
One Door Opens Another
At other times, I hear an unfamiliar word, theory, person, book, or field of knowledge.
I note it mentally or write it in a notebook. Later, I research it.
That research may lead to an article, a book, another podcast, or an entirely different subject.
One conversation opens a door. Behind that door is a corridor. The corridor contains several more doors.
Curiosity keeps walking.
This is probably why I cannot clearly explain how I choose the next topic. One question leaves behind another question. A passing reference becomes a new path. Something I heard weeks ago suddenly connects with something I am experiencing today.
The journey creates its own direction.
There is no fixed syllabus and no final examination. There is only the quiet excitement of discovering that something I did not understand yesterday has become slightly clearer today.
And that clarity usually reveals how much more remains unknown.
Hearing the Mind Behind the Voice
Audio offers something that text alone cannot always provide.
A voice carries more than information.
It carries hesitation, certainty, excitement, restraint, vulnerability, fatigue, pride, openness, and silence. One can sometimes sense when a person is speaking from lived experience and when they are repeating an idea that has not yet become their own.
The tone changes when someone is clear.
It changes when someone is searching.
It changes again when a question touches something personal.
Listening has therefore made me attentive not only to answers but also to states of mind.
How does the host create trust?
How does the guest respond when challenged?
Does the conversation remain open, or does it become defensive?
Can disagreement deepen a conversation without damaging it?
Can silence be allowed to remain?
There is an art to asking, an art to answering, and an art to staying present while another human being attempts to find words for something that may not yet be fully understood.
A good conversation is not simply an exchange of information. It is something being created between two people in real time.
When the Screen Disappears
I increasingly enjoy listening more than watching.
Video gives us expressions, gestures, surroundings, clothes, and visual context. All of that can enrich an experience, but it can also occupy our attention.
Audio removes much of that visual distraction.
There is only the voice, the silence around it, and the space within which I receive it.
When I listen through earphones while walking or travelling, the conversation can feel unexpectedly intimate. A thinker from another part of the world seems to be speaking nearby. Their voice becomes part of the immediate environment, alongside traffic, footsteps, rain, and my own thoughts.
With video, I often remain aware that I am watching someone at a distance. With audio, that distance sometimes disappears.
Of course, audio and video can complement each other. But listening by itself has a closeness that I have come to value.
It allows imagination to remain active.
It also allows me to notice the voice without being influenced by appearances. For a while, what remains is simply one human consciousness attempting to communicate something to another.
Many Ways of Being Human
Listening has certainly expanded my knowledge and helped me use moments that might otherwise have passed unnoticed.
But its deeper gift may be different.
It has allowed me to encounter many ways of being human.
I have listened to thinkers, spiritual seekers, scientists, musicians, athletes, artists, travellers, economists, psychologists, coaches, and people whose lives do not fit easily into any one description.
Through them, I have encountered different forms of intelligence.
Some understand through analysis.
Some through action.
Some through the body.
Some through suffering.
Some through devotion.
Some through beauty.
Some through silence.
Listening has also reminded me that articulation and wisdom are not always the same. A person may speak beautifully without having lived what they describe. Another may struggle to find the right words but carry an understanding shaped by years of direct experience.
Both the words and the life behind them matter.
Listening has not given me one final worldview. It has made my view of the world wider.
Perhaps that is enough.
The Grace That Keeps Curiosity Alive
When I look at this journey, what finally arises is gratitude.
I am grateful to Krishna for keeping curiosity alive within me.
Life has brought obstacles. Some have been overcome. Some are still being lived through. Yet, amid everything, there has remained the possibility of exploring this extraordinary life that He has created and gifted.
To have time to listen, question, learn, meditate, meet people, and remain fascinated by existence is itself a form of grace.
I have been reading the story of Prahlada in theYoga Vasistha. It has brought me again to the presence of Lord Vishnu and to Krishna as the Poorna Avatar of Vishnu.
For me, Krishna is the Lord of the universe, but He is also deeply personal.
He is my father.
And somewhere within all my learning, travelling, working, listening, questioning, and exploring, there remains one intimate aspiration:
I want to live in such a way that He is proud of me.
Perhaps even my curiosity belongs to Him.
Perhaps every question, every chance encounter, every unfamiliar idea, and every voice that reaches me is part of the life through which He continues to guide me.
I do not always know where my curiosity will take me next.
But I am grateful that it continues to move.
Perhaps, One Day, My Own Voice
At some point, I may begin sharing voice notes of my own.
Perhaps people will listen to these reflections rather than only read them. There is something appropriate about a reflection on listening eventually finding its own voice.
For now, I am happy turning these thoughts into blogs.
The listening continues.