Some of you would have heard of my new project with fellow comedian Tanmay Bhat called All India Bakchod. I’ve been pimping it furiously on my Twitter page over the last few weeks and the response has been incredibly heartening. Some of you have loved it, some of you have hated it and some of you are still complaining about our girly giggles – but even if you gave us two minutes of your time and listening to it we’re both very grateful.

What I would like to do in this post however is talk about the podcast – where it came from and what we might do with it because I feel its important for me to put it out there. Some of you who have been regular visitors to the blog would remember me trying the podcast medium to conduct interviews with Rahul Roushan of Faking News and Saad from Fly You Fools. After those two episodes I asked for sponsorship and a lot of folks came forward willing to invest in a venture whose only goal was to bring out voices you otherwise don’t really get to hear. I decided not to and stopped recording because I felt I wasn’t ready – and that there needed to be another individual to add something to it. Enter All India Bakchod – and though it might not be the most complete product – I feel its time had come. With Tanmay, a comic I respect and admire and someone I get along with – I feel if there’s ever a chance to give a full-blown comedy podcast a shot in India – this is it.

The show is entirely unscripted – mostly because both of us don’t have enough time in a day to sit and plan out the subtle nuances. It literally is deciding a time to sit in one room, turn the mic on, discuss which were the stories we found absurd during the last week and start talking. As much as it is an exercise in making all of you laugh, on some level it is also something we do for ourselves. We’ve gotten many messages over the last few episodes about how even if a certain segment wasn’t very funny –  but that they were glad somebody said it. It’s not exactly something we’re very conscious of, but I’m glad we’re being able to do that. The internet is perhaps the last refuge of any notion of free speech we have left in this country and on some level I feel even if each of our episodes is absolutely shit, as long as it can be a tool for subversion against the despotic regulations being brought forth by the powers to be – it will have done its job.

That said, the agenda isn’t one to fight the power. The agenda is to make you laugh and to try and give a medium that is so successful abroad some presence within India. We’re not pros at how to do this so there will be a lot of experimentation. Some episodes will be great, some will be rubbish and I hope you all can stand through that. Like with stand up (and again a big thanks to whoever has come out to see us perform over the last few years) we feel this can be a mode of artistic expression that we can perhaps build with the audience in tow. We still get nervous including a few minutes of just us talking about something without jokes – given how through Twitter we’re used to punch lines every few seconds; but we’re hoping that in the long run, we will build enough of a rapport for that to be interesting enough and acceptable.

This has potential to become big – as a tool of laughter, subversion, saying things you wouldn’t say otherwise and if nothing else – time pass for five minutes while you jump from one gadget to another looking for your fix.

Thank you for tuning in to All India Bakchod. We promise to keep making it better, and to some day be able to pay our editor.