Expressive Leader and guest blogger Siddarth Maddhula aims to educate others about important issues that are often overlooked in the classroom in his podcast, Demyst. Siddarth was inspired by his experiences in school, including his desire to dissect complex global topics and the feeling that his education was lacking in certain life skills. He hopes that Demyst will help illuminate some of these gaps in our understanding and motivate us to become more engaged with our world!
Hello everyone. This is Siddarth Maddhula and I am part of The Expressive Leaders Program at The Practice Space. This post is about my project, which is a podcast called Demyst. I hope that after you read this you can look forward to the first episode’s release.
I currently live in Sunnyvale and am in 11th grade. As an Expressive Leader, I am committed to continually learn about our community and raise issues up when I can. I really want to take the proper time and respect necessary when talking about people’s stories. Through this project, I want to explain the context, details, and different viewpoints regarding issues so people can be more informed and feel encouraged to do more research of their own.
Demyst is basically a series of explainers that take place over the course of 5-10 minutes. I chose this project because of my own past unfamiliarity with current events. While taking a government class, we were encouraged to keep up with day-to-day news through projects and other reports, but I fell off considerably later, and the events of the last year were often confounding in a way that I didn’t expect.
In addition, education often doesn’t really take the time to inform us on subjects that we actually encounter in our day-to-day lives, like government or economics. That in turn makes it harder to navigate in the real world. Additionally, when things do go wrong in these areas, people find it easier to shrug things off or ignore them, even when we all need to be actively engaged to improve something.
As part of my project, I have to figure out applicable topics, and create scripts to go along with them. Each of these takes a lot of fine-tuning to both sound natural and get information across in a meaningful way. One challenge I have had is with editing. When I initially recorded audio for two of my episodes I noticed that flow in writing is overall easier to create than a good flow in speaking. Writing and speaking come across very different – if I read this post out aloud, I’d probably seem really weird – so recording feeds back into the scripts. After the editing process is complete, I’ll be able to upload the finished episodes onto Anchor, from which they’ll be distributed.
As a result of this project, I hope people are more convinced to look out in the world for new things and become less afraid overall of expressing their opinions. Stay tuned for the official release of the podcast on Anchor, which will hopefully be sent out within the next month or two. For more information about the Expressive Leaders program, check out The Practice Space’s official website (https://www.practice-space.org/expressive-leaders/).
Click here to access the first episode of Demyst!