While clairvoyance has been there, and done that in all forms of literary and entertainment media, clairaudient is a fairly new one set of powers then. How apposite then, sound even, that Detective Priyamvada, played by actor Aahana Kumra, has clairaudience in the new Spotify Original podcast, I Hear You.
While people may hear things which are not there while recovering from traumatic accidents, our heroine, Delhi Special Bureau detective Priyamvada Parmar, begins to hear people who are not there any more after recovering from a traumatic accident that left her fiancé dead, which she puts to good use in solving whodunits, in the new podcast by Bhaskar Bose creator Mantra Mugdh.
After that first series, featuring accountant-turned-detective Bose and his police sidekick, proved to be one of Spotify India’s biggest hits, Mugdh, a theatre and radio actor and director, is dipping back into the seamy world of crime, this time with the help of his old theatre colleague, Kumra. In the new supernatural crime thriller series, which launched earlier this week, the detective is left with the task of dealing with the voices of the dead, while also solving crimes, as well as finding unnerving truths about her very own life.
“My partnership with Spotify has been amazing given the kind of success and love we have received for Bhaskar Bose. Spotify is a great platform to work with and the fact that its listeners have warmed up to audio fiction and thriller podcasts, we want to give them what they like. People used to say ‘web-series ka zamaana hai, do something in that space.
But the success of podcasts like Bhaskar Bose proves that people will consume content in whatever form, as long as it’s good,” says Mugdh, whose Bose series is nearing its 50th episode mark, after an initial plan of a five episode run.
For Kumra, a stage and screen actor, podcasts were an entirely new medium, but she was encouraged to “just come for a reading” by Mugdh, an old theatre collaborator. “You are there in a recording room, and you are facing one of those fancy microphones and holding the script in your hand, and it is very different from acting with people, where you are reacting to them and getting what you need from them for a scene,” explains the Lipstick Under My Burkha actor, adding,
“But when I read Mantra’s first script and went through it a couple of times, I found Priyamvada’s voice, and the kind of a person she was, and since then I have become completely immersed in that world, and keep bugging Mantra about future episodes.” I Hear You releases two episodes, 15 minutes each, every Wednesday on Spotify.