Although tiny boxes with familiar names on a laptop or mobile screen do have nostalgia potential, nothing can bring back memories of the institute like an event starting several minutes after the scheduled time with the audience trickling in a solid five minutes later. The newly-formed Alumni Relations Team has begun the AlumTalks series to provide a platform for current students and alumni to interact with one another. The series kicked off on 12th August with Arya Prakash of the HS11 batch. Arya worked in digital marketing and content writing before beginning her own media start-up, PopCult Media, which has made its mark on online conversations in Kerala. The Instagram page provides a refreshingly funny and feminist take on Malayalam popular culture, and has gathered a loyal following in a short time.
Arya began the talk by addressing the elephant of the HS Department—the placement question. While agreeing that the MA program is geared towards preparing students for a life in academia, she held that the course structure does impart critical research and writing skills and a worldview that enables us to bring in a unique perspective to any table we sit at. She pointed to her own career, which she began as a digital marketer for start-ups, learning much of the basics on the go. However, after several months on the job, she realised that she felt indifferent towards her job that felt like a dead end. In a flurry of passion, she sought to go back to her roots—film studies and Malayalam cinema. The consequent blog, Silma Reviews, became a passion project where she inspects iconic Malayalam films through a feminist lens. The blog garnered an immense and unanticipated following, and paved the path for PopCult Media. Arya says that the idea for the start-up sprouted during a casual conversation with Charles Andrews, who became its co-founder. They have not looked back since. Drawing on her experiences from her institute days and the time spent building her start-up, Arya emphasizes on the need for action. Censuring idleness and passivity, she asks students to identify potential within themselves and in their surroundings and to “do something.” This could be a YouTube channel, a podcast, or you could “pick up a hammer and break the K Gate wall.”
Much of Arya’s work is centered around gender, as is evident from her work at PopCult Media and her manifesto for the post of Students’ General Secretary. PopCult Media is a grander version of the gender sensitisation program that she had planned to implement in the institute. When asked about this, she credits the department for equipping her with the tools to understand and resist the gender inequality that she saw before her eyes. PopCult Media is also an attempt to carve out a digital space for content that does not come from the west or India’s Tier-1 cities. Arya found that the content produced by mainstream Instagram pages is often borne out of a male perspective and intended for male consumption. There is a shortage of digital spaces for women, including for Malayali women. Her particular battle is against Malayalam cinema, owing to its powerful influence on the social psyche (seen, for instance, in the adoption of the black shirt and mundu by young Malayali men after the release of the movie Premam) and the long way the industry has to go to correct its systemic biases. PopCult Media’s projects—be it redefining sexist slang words or writing Tinder bios for repulsively masculine heroes—are attempts to free up breathing space for women, to rewrite the narrative around Malayalam cinema, and to negotiate Malayali culture as it consolidates itself. Its success is evident in the responses it has prompted from ordinary women—some of whom said that its redefinition of terms like vedi has healed them—and, more quantitatively, from the brand placements it has achieved.
After taking us through her many worlds, Arya returns home when she emphasizes that the MA program has a lot of potential and asks her juniors to take brave plunges instead of depending on fruitless planning (sigh, Corona). Take initiative, take risks, tread forbidden paths and question the administration. With much reminiscing, forbidden stories that shall remain confidential and a lot of wisdom (sometimes borrowed from BoJack Horseman), the first session of AlumTalks came to an end, making us look forward to more stories our alumni have in store.
The wonderful PopCult Media can be found on Instagram and Facebook.
Edited by Swathi C S
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