Ritwij Shandilya’s ‘The Prode’ takes over the YouTube Podcast with Intellectual Content

The advent of digital media has allowed people to connect in ways that were unimaginable even a few decades earlier. Media platforms give socially secluded or distanced people a chance to stay in tune with the community activities. As a matter of fact, they help in facilitating conversations around many social, political, cultural, economic, and religious issues to provide the general mass a better understanding of those issues. In a way, digital media platforms serve as a means to support the intellectual development of people. Considering the power, they hold, many young minds are using platforms like YouTube to make people aware of social issues of importance. Such an enthusiastic young star is author turned journalist Ritwij Shandilya.

Ritwij Raj, better known by pen name, Ritwij Shandilya, an Indian author and journalist, created his YouTube channel ‘The Prode’ in 2020 aiming at bringing some of the significant national and international issues to the forefront. Having a diploma in Journalism from the London School of Journalism, Ritwij has always been attentive to the emerging issues in our society. At the same time, he felt an urgency to make people aware of those issues to enhance intellectual literacy and critical thinking. So, he started to formulate the idea of taking the help of a medium like a podcast to achieve his means and the result was ‘The Prode’.

The history of podcasts is older than we might think. Initially known as audio blogging, they offered the early bloggers a way to share their experiences and opinions using audio clips. However, this form of communication started to gain popularity in the early 2000s. The introduction of portable audio devices like iPod and MP3 during this time contributed to its growing popularity. As the world is getting busier, the format of podcasts is also getting more popular due to the unique opportunity of multitasking it provides. An intellectual mind like Ritwij identified the potential of podcasts in influencing minds and decided to exploit that by presenting intellectual content on contemporary issues of economy, defence, foreign affairs, law, society, literature and public policies.

‘The Prode’ is a digital media portal that features renowned personalities from all around the globe to discuss issues of national and international importance in an interview format. The usage of a platform like YouTube helps the channel to reach a large number of target audiences and maximize the impact of the content simultaneously. Ritwij has interviewed renowned figures like Ex-Railway Minister of India, Suresh Prabhu, Ex-Finance Minister of India, Yashwant Sinha, Ex-Director General of Military Operations, General Vinod Bhatia, Ex-Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Dr Viral Acharya and others on his media portal, The Prode.

The 20-year-old editor-in-chief Ritwij is leading the channel to its success quite confidently. He has also taken part in the world's largest free literature festival, Zee Jaipur Literature Festival 2019 as a speaker and has also written an English fiction novel named ‘The Rise of Queen Revathi’. With his exposure and venture into the literary world, it is expected that he will take ‘The Prode’ to its culmination.      

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