Audible Desi Crime EXCLUSIVE! Aishwarya Singh Reveals USP In All-New Audio Format: There Are Cases You...

Audible Desi Crime: As a journalist, it's always refreshing to know and research about stories that are not run-of-the-mill concepts, but offer meaningful content. As Audible announced the release of its audiobook 'Desi Crime', I interacted with Aishwarta, the host, to know about the new format and how it will take the audience on a roller coaster ride.

Audio and Aishwarya Singh promised to share 20 bone-chilling true crime stories across the Indian subcontinent, stating that the viewers will stay hooked till the last minute.

Here are excerpts from the interview.

1. What excites you most about partnering with Audible and bringing Desi Crime to listeners in this new audiobook format?

I think for starters, Audible is the front runner of audiobooks across the world. The catalogue of books they have, the catalogue of authors they have, the way they've structured the app, the way they structure each chapter. To me, it's always been an incredible experience listening to a book on Audible, so that is incredibly exciting.

To be among a lineup of so many fantastic authors from across the world is an incredible opportunity. To have our book narrated in our own voice, which is an opportunity given to us by Audible, is again, I feel like, to me, my most favourite books on Audible have been all the ones that have been narrated by the author themselves because they're so personal. Absolutely love that.

The team is fantastic to help us convert podcast material and then a written book into an audio format to bring it to a larger audience, a very different audience as well. Like, podcasting and audiobooks are two very different audiences in India and across the world, so to bring it to a new group of people, it's all very exciting.

2. How different was the process of reimagining cases for a long-form, chapter-style audiobook compared to podcast?

I think we were working with very emotionally-charged stories to begin with, and we were working with what we thought and think are very well-written episodes, podcast episodes to begin with, so the starting point, I think, was very solid with the cases that we picked, the material that was available for them, the way we had written those stories for the podcast. I think we were working with emotionally-charged, strong, deep material. The process is different in the sense that you change the grammar of the way a book is written.

You change prose, you change tense, you make it less conversational. The point of the podcast is for people to feel like they're having a conversation with me and Aryaan. The purpose of a book is a little different. It's to transport the listener, the reader, to a scene in the story's setting. So we've changed the way those sentences are structured, we've changed in some instances how we've begun and how we've ended, but mostly it's grammatical changes, the structure of sentences. Aryan and I, in our writing, for example, this is kind of funny and maybe not grammatically correct, but we change between tenses based on impact of the moment, and maybe listeners don't realize that, but for the book we've converted all of that to similar tense across chapters. So things like that have had to change, but we were working with great material to begin with.

3. True crime has become a global phenomenon in audio. Why do you think listeners are so drawn to these kinds of stories, particularly in South Asia?

I get asked this question sometimes, and I think I disagree with the premise that true crime has recently blown up. I think we've been a country, a world fascinated by true crime, by horror, by local lore, by folktales. We always have been. It feels like we're now more invested in it because we have so much access to be able to express that interest online. We have more Reddit threads than ever before. We have more YouTube channels with so easy access to comment on them than ever before. We have reels and we have shorts.

We have so much more content available, so it feels like we're engaging with it a lot more. But we're a country that's been obsessed with 'Crime Patrol' and 'Saavdhan India' and Suhaib Ilyasi's 'India's Most Wanted' and books like John Grisham's 'The Firm.' I think this has always been a fascinating point. Just things like podcasts and audiobooks bring to you just a whole new way of experiencing them.

4. Can you tell us more about some of the most interesting cases you're exploring in this audiobook?

I think to me and to the listeners what's going to be most interesting are the two cases that they cannot find anywhere else - the two stories, one from Aryaan, one from me, that aren't available on our podcast or our YouTube channel. Those are exclusive to the book. One is the story of a kidnapping gone wrong, a very tragic tale of a young boy. The other is the story of a very convoluted murder by two men of the same name. And the setting is India's cricket grounds in South India. So a very fascinating case and again a very tragic story.

Those are very interesting to me. There are stories in here that have struck a chord with me and Aryaan and with our listeners ever since we've put them out. These are stories like Sneha Philip's story or the Kohistan murders, the honour killings of those women for a video of them dancing. These are stories with details that are so harrowing and give us so much insight into the systemic problems of our countries. The way we look at women, the way we look at honour, the way we think of money. They really target those core concepts. So, these are all stories I think that will really grip people.

5. What do you think makes audio such a perfect medium for true crime storytelling compared to visual or written formats?

I've personally always only consumed true crime on audio. What does it for me is the fact that it's my imagination. Each story has different points in it which click to different people, and what point makes you click is very deeply rooted in your own personal life story. It's the story of your family. It's the story of what you've experienced as a child. It's the story of your school years. It's the story of whether or not you have a sibling, and a story of a young child makes you tick because of that, whether or not you're a mother. All of those details that make you tick are so deeply rooted in your own personal life story that video cannot do justice to it.

A video that I produce will do justice to maybe my life story more than anyone else's because I've highlighted the pinpoints that make me tick or my editor tick. But audio lets your imagination take these details to places that I cannot for you. It'll make you visualise each scene in a way that's pertinent to you. That's exactly why people will love a book, but then a movie gets made on that book and they'll hate the book. This happened to me with, I remember I was young and 'The Fault in Our Stars,' the book had released. I read the book and then I watched the movie and something about that main female lead in the story just did not stick with me in the movie when she was such a different character to me in the book. Because that's my imagination doing its job by creating a character that fits my life story. So, I think audio is just unparalleled for these stories.

6. Do you have a personal anecdote of when you realised just how powerful audio storytelling can be, either as a creator or as a listener?

There's no one single moment after covering 200 episodes and watching other people's content on those episodes. For our research sometimes, we'll go ahead and see what other people have produced on this. And a lot of those will be YouTube videos and we'll watch those YouTube videos. But it's our own engagement with that content that makes us realize that what moves us the most isn't the visual someone found on YouTube. We do the same thing. We'll find an asset available online, a video available, b-roll and help stitch that narrative. But what's moving us isn't that visual.

When audio is such an intimate experience because it travels with you where you are, you can listen to it as you fall asleep, you can listen to it in the gym, you can listen to it in the car while you commute to work. It's your personal time with your own imagination. Video is a little more distinct where it cannot be consumed in that same really deep, personal, intimate way. It's during our own research, just realising that what's making us think the most about these stories are the books written about it, are the other podcasts that we're hearing for research. It's not the visuals that are interlaced in a video that just doesn't do it. All right.

7. Narrating true crime requires balancing facts with emotion. How did you approach giving weight to silences, pauses, and the emotional intensity of these cases? How do you ensure your research and narration go beyond the crime itself, to also reflect on society, justice, and human behaviour?

Yeah, I think there are two pieces to every story. At least at Desi Crime, this is how we kind of view it in our writing. And this, what you're talking about, it needs to be infused while we write. It cannot necessarily be infused in that moment while we're narrating. It needs to be thought out as we're writing and researching.

There are two pieces to this. One is the factual details (the names of the people, the ages, the years, the locations, the autopsy reports, the police investigation findings, the court verdicts) which cannot be messed around with, minced words with, those need to remain accurate. And those are the bits of the story that become a little bit journalistic. Sometimes people will skip those parts because it's like, okay, I've heard a lot about the court case. This is a lot of the court case jargon. But then there are the emotional scenes (the moment a child found the bodies in the house, the moment the investigator saw the 10 Burari bodies hanging from the ceiling, the moment you called your mother for the 10th time and she didn't pick up, or the moment you saw something wrong with your backyard and it seemed like there was something buried in the ground). These are moments that are less about the factual details. And they're more about the emotion that someone must have felt in that moment. And most of us are likely to have the same kind of reaction to that.

Those are not necessarily details we can find online, no one can tell us those. That is where Aryaan and I's narrative job exists, is to set that scene for you. Because that is where the emotion lies. The emotion doesn't lie in the findings of the autopsy report. It lies in what happens when you read the autopsy report. What is that feeling? It's a tricky balance between those two things and we think we've tried to do that.

8. How do you imagine people will consume Desi Crime? In long listening sessions, on commutes, or in more personal reflective moments?

I think we're all so busy. What we hear from our listeners is that they tend to consume them in the middle of their day. So, even if it's reflective moments, it's in the middle of things like home chores, or while someone's making their baby sleep, they'll have like headphones in their ears and listen to this while they're doing their dishes in the house, they're doing it on their commutes. And those can still turn into deep reflective moments because audio is so intimate, like I said, those can still become deep reflective moments, but it's just the way we live our lives.

9. What do you hope listeners will take away from Desi Crime beyond the chills and suspense of the stories themselves?

I think they'll take away the fact that as a society, there are issues. There are issues in our perception of love, our perception of women, our perception of familial obligations, our perception of money. And these are not unique to the subcontinent. They're almost universal across the world. But our society exacerbates them or helps solve them to a greater degree based on how our systems function. So, there is need for change in mindsets and attitudes. And I hope through the telling of these really tragic tales, we'll see what happens when you take these emotions, emotions like honour, emotions like protection to the extreme of human behaviour, when you take them to mean something they weren't necessarily meant to mean. When you test the boundaries of human emotion, you end up with really, really tragic tales of what happens when we go wrong.