There is serendipity in everything that playwright-director-actor Girish Karnad does. If you’ve read his memoir, This Life At Play, you’d probably know what we are talking about. It’s not then just pure coincidence that he reached out to translator-author Arshia Sattar—she had been pursuing him for years together for an interview—in the early part of 2019, agreeing to speak with her, finally. She suggested May 1 of that year. He insisted June 1. The interviews he did with Sattar and filmmaker-educator Anmol Tikoo, just days before his death (June 10), was recently released by Bangalore International Centre as a nine-part podcast series titled, The River Has No Fear of Memories.

The title for the series has been taken from a song in Karnad’s two-act play Hayavadana. “...we found it to be particularly evocative as we remember a man who profoundly impacted India’s cultural arena in the last half of the 20th century,” the hosts shared. In each episode, which is about 40 minutes, we are introduced to Karnad, the artist, his insecurities and strengths, and his struggle as a playwright, who was a champion of the polyphonic Kannada language, and a gifted Konkani storyteller, who also wrote in English.