RJing from home must be quite a feat… what exactly does it ensue?
Yes of course.Working from home, especially as an RJ is quite a task I must say. I get asked this question a lot of times about how I’m doing my radio show from home, or whether it is not happening anymore etc. So yes, my show goes on air as usual, every Monday- Friday, 9-12 in the night. There’s a huge team that works on making sure the show is up and running on time. My producer makes sure we brainstorm ideas every day and keep the content ready before the show starts. My sound engineer produces my links, and after that my tech team places my links on time. So yeah it takes a whole village!

Beyond and above doing your show, you also make it a point to interact with listeners on your social media… what exactly do you do to keep listeners hooked?
Yes that’s true. It’s very important to keep in touch and keep interacting with the listeners. Especially during times like this, when people are actually dealing with a lot of negativity with regards to the pandemic and the anxiety that’s slowly kicking in. It’s only fair to make sure you don’t induce more of that. So I connect my radio persona and my social media. My listeners can always directly message me on Instagram and I take them on air and I also have these interactive live sessions where I’ve been featuring people and artistes from various fields – right from a counsellor to a dermatologist to musicians, actors etc. People seem to quite enjoy these sessions. I always make sure I let my instafam know about the person I’m going to be featuring a day prior so that they can send in the questions that they have and they get answered during the live sessions. It’s pretty interactive and fun.

You are also a singer and voice-over artiste – tell us a little about these other passions?
Yes. So my whole voice over and dubbing journey started only after radio. My first ever dubbing project was the Amazon Prime series called Mirzapur; I was the voice of the leading lady in Tamil. After that I got some offers in feature films as well as a dubbing artiste. So far I’ve dubbed two Tamil films. The first one was Dhanusu Rasi Neyargale directed by Sanjay Bharathi and the recent one was the movie Gypsy directed by Raju Murugan. Right before the lockdown, I dubbed for a small part in the movie 83 (Tamil). I am looking forward to the release of the film. And when it comes to my singing, I’ve been doing covers for a while now and my first official project is yet to be out. I’ve sung in a film that stars Vijay Sethupathy.

In times of isolation, what are the responsibilities of media people/entertainers like you?
Honestly, I feel as an entertainer and a media person, the sole responsibility is to make people see the brighter things in life. During times like these, we tend to pull ourselves down and we get consumed with all the negativity that’s going around. So, the only thing that I’m trying to do right now is to inform them but at the same time not scare them. It’s time we see and value the smallest things in life like a hug, good food, spending time with friends and I must say we should all be grateful for the things that we have in life and I always encourage my listeners to write a gratification journal so that they are well aware of the things that we are grateful for. This really helps.
Tried and tested.

FM listenership is now at an all-time high… did you expect this?
Oh yes! 82% of the research population have been tuning into radio for credible information. We’re pretty pumped about it. We had our doubts initially when the lockdown started. But the research has proved otherwise. As a radio jockey, I have a huge responsibility in making sure I give out only credible information to my listeners. There’s a lot of fake news that goes around. I always make sure before I give any information out on air, I double check sometimes even triple check.