Mango Bites: On Radio, Desi Music, and the Art of Just Talking

In high school, I competed in radio as part of debate, and people responded to my voice — to the cadence of it, the control, the fact that I apparently knew what to do with a microphone without being told. I filed that away and mostly forgot about it, the way you do with things that come naturally enough that they don't feel like skills.

Then the pandemic happened, and the campus radio station was looking for hosts, and I ended up with a Friday night slot and a show called Mango Bites (real witty, I know).

The premise was simple: a little kick of flavor. Desi music, diaspora culture, movie opinions, whatever was happening on campus or in the news or in my house that week. No strict format, no producer, no one telling me what to talk about. Just a microphone, a playlist, and whatever was on my mind — which ranged, depending on the episode, from UCSD's pandemic tuition policies to rum cake mishaps to the case for Kishore Kumar to imposter syndrome to masala film as a uniquely Indian narrative form. Sometimes all in the same episode.

That freedom was the thing I loved most, and still miss. Radio — real radio, not scripted content — requires you to be present in a way that most performance doesn't. You can't hide behind a prepared text. You can't pause and reconsider. The audience is there in real time, sending song requests and topics, and you have to receive what they give you and respond to it and keep moving. It's the most honest form of communication I've found, partly because there's no visual to hide behind and partly because silence is actually your enemy (or is it?) in a way it isn't in most other mediums.

The music was as important to me as the talking — maybe more. I grew up on old Indian music: Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, Asha Bhosle, AR Rahman, Sonu Nigam, the composers of the 1970s and 80s who understood that a song could carry the entire emotional weight of a film if you let it. Ok, old Indian cinema spans languages and is basically anything between 1950-2000 if you take into consideration my own age. Mango Bites was partly an excuse to introduce those songs and ideas to listeners who had never heard them — to play Dil Cheez Kya Hai from Umrao Jaan on a college radio station at midnight and say, simply, here, listen to this. And then to play something by Amy Winehouse right after, because why not.

The pandemic made the show stranger and also more necessary. I did the whole thing remotely from home— the campus was largely empty, students were scattered, time had that quality of simultaneously standing still and moving too fast. I talked about COVID case counts and vaccine superstations and what it felt like to have paid sixty thousand dollars in tuition to sit in a childhood bedroom. People responded. Not in huge numbers — remember, it was a college radio station during a pandemic — but enough that I knew someone was listening, and that what I was doing was landing somewhere.

I don't have plans to go back to radio imminently. But I know it's something I'm good at (I've ventured into voiceover acting in recent times), in the way that certain things reveal themselves as genuinely yours rather than performed. The voice, the timing, the comfort with digression, the instinct for when to be funny and when to let something breathe — those aren't things I had to learn. They were already there. Mango Bites just gave them a place to go for two years.

When the time is right, I'll find another microphone. The playlist is already built... 5k songs and counting.