It's Day 144 since musician and raconteur Raman Iyer's Instagram page came into its own. Once a picture log of everything from the gigs and travels of his folk-fusion band Kabir Café to his experiments with cooking and lazy mornings spent with pets Pari and Kitappa, Iyer's page is now bursting with stories that the voracious reader grew up on. Every night, a little before the clock strikes 12, Iyer goes live to share these vignettes, accompanied by the sweet stringing of a mandolin. He has an ammo of stories—there are nights dedicated to horror, whodunits, others to the Jataka tales and Indian mythology. His show, aptly titled Midnight Musings and the Mandolin, is a podcast, and yet not. For starters, it's streaming on a platform that relies heavily on images, both still and moving. But, the only visual on this show is the black screen and likes, and emojis from people, joining his Insta Live.

A couple of weeks into the lockdown, when Mumbai was getting excited about Zoom calls and Google meetings, Iyer says he got a sense that this was going to be a way of life for a while, if not forever. "Because of this, digital fatigue would creep in very soon. The last thing one would want to do [after putting in a hard day's work], is look at the screen again," he says: That's how the idea of a podcast struck him.

While platforms like Anchor.fm, launched by Spotify, have made podcasting available and accessible to all—you can publish your own show by simply downloading the app—Iyer wanted to test new ground. "I am a live musician. I enjoy making listeners part of my story and music, and feeding off their energies. It's why I decided to convert an intensely visual medium like Instagram, where mindless scrolling has become the norm, into a space where you listen," he shares, adding that what makes the experience of not having to pre-record different, is that the live audience is generally forgiving of blunders. Over the last five months, he's had at least 30 people join him daily. This doesn't account for those who listen to his show later on IGTV, the video arm of the photo-sharing app.