BENGALURU: It begins with eerie background music, instantly giving the feeling of being stuck in the middle of nowhere at midnight with the wind caressing your hair. As you find something near your feet and reach for it, a deep feminine voice says, “Ellathukum oru mudhal irukum” (Everything has a start). Human Podium’s Section 302: A Tamil True Crime Podcast is not one for the faint hearts. The podcast documents the crime scenes that spread fear in Madras. Partnering for the podcast are friends and business partners Dipika A Khaitan, who runs a publishing house and belongs to the family that runs legacy restaurant MTR, and Ramesh Jayakumar Chetty, who is the director of Human Xpert India, a medical billing company in Chennai.
Past crimes
With authentication and sources to back, the first case explored is the historical case of Aalavandhar, the first murder mystery in Chennai after the implementation of the Indian Penal Code. The episode cites the triviality of the city – the sound of temple bells in Thiruvallikeni, the slurps of hot coffee, and the giant fast-paced steps of a policeman. “This was one of the most heinous crimes with a lot of twists and turns and a famous murder investigation as historians are concerned. We wanted to pay homage to that,” says Chetty.
The Aalavandhar case took place in the early 1950s. Though a lot of articles were available online and offline, the team researched the whole case to make sure that the data was verified before reporting them in their podcast. “We made sure to go back to the story. Narasimhan, the scriptwriter, went back to his sources to verify the facts reported. His father was an eminent historian and a scriptwriter of Tamil cinema. That was a great source material,” adds Chetty.
The team wanted to set the story and the platform right from their first case. Though the motive is to make money, the brand holds a strong sense of responsibility towards the audience – to make them well-informed. “We want to do it right by making people wiser, smarter, and also entertaining. Information is knowledge and power, we wanted to give that to them,” says Khaitan while Chetty adds, “We wanted to educate the people on how 1952 Madras was. We have given a lot of historical anecdotes making it a point to sprinkle it throughout the story to make sure it educates the public.”
Live the stories
The team is 13 members strong, including proficient voice-over artistes, Deepika Arun and Bharat Raj. For every episode, the recording sessions go on for two days and the other two days are for post-production works. While Khaitan handles the financial aspects of the company, Chetty is in charge of production.
True Crime is one of the top genres consumed in podcasting medium. The partners feel that true crime is “not explored properly” in any Indian language. So being a startup, the brand wanted to make a wise and economically sound decision by centering on the crime classification. They plan to bring out discussions on real-life crime cases. “We are going to stick to the parts, facts, and how the story developed, stick to the names even if it is going to create controversy and we want to be true to the story and deliver it to the audience properly, that’s the responsibility of a producer,” says Chetty, adding, “We want to give people a choice to listen to new things, new areas to explore, learn new things and that’s why we chose podcasts. Other platforms are quite saturated.”
The medium has the power to improve lifestyle, and knowledge gaining and could be listened to while performing other works as well. And Tamil is one of the biggest diasporas around. “And based out of Chennai, I had a vested interest to start in a comfortable space. It is always good to start from your home ground,” shares Chetty.
As far as regional space and language are concerned, there is a big quality gap in the production. Hence, the company is coming out with one episode a week on Fridays. “What we are going to do as a network is we are looking at different kinds of stories, we are exploring pilots, and a few other areas where we could do a few more shows. Those will come out on a different day,” says Khaitan. With many plans envisioned, the partners are getting ready for a new episode release this week.
Section 302: A Tamil True Crime Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.