3:00

Why 'three minutes, in the right hands, is powerful.'

In Julia Barton’s wonderful newsletter, Continuous Wave, about broadcast and media history, she writes about the duration of 3:00 in radio: “Three minutes, in the right hands, is powerful. But it also just works for so many kinds of stories. It’s a magical duration in which something can happen, but not too much”. Her essay is also an introduction to Audio Flux, a new home for short-form audio storytelling created by Julie Shapiro and John DeLore. All pieces submitted for this contest/community have to be 3:00 long. We were thrilled to have been selected for their 4^th circuit for a piece called “Hum Honge Kamyab”.

Author Jason Reynolds, Julie Shapiro and Joh DeLore announce the Circuit 4 fluxworks.

We’ve created many short pieces before, the first being a season of Minis for our show City of Women, having been big fans of BBC’s Short Cuts (RIP) and 99% Invisible’s mini stories, among others. However, our pieces never strictly had to adhere to the constraints of time. Often, a decision about the length of a piece depended on whether it needed to say more. We were also frequently experimenting with music and editing choices, or wanting to magnify small things about the many ways in which people speak and tell stories in India, such as turns of phrase, accents, and regional slang. At times, we just felt we wanted people to share in a small moment experienced by someone else. But our submission to Audio Flux was different. The prompt was “Firsts” and the rules were:

· Runs three minutes long

· References an object related to a “FIRST” (theirs or someone else’s)

· Includes the sound of time passing (forwards or backwards, no clocks please)

It began with a beautiful old recording that belonged to Radhika, of her parents, brother, and herself singing “Hum Honge Kamyab” together, which was her first time learning to sing the song.

There is a technicality to producing for a short format, and as Julia says 3:00 can feel like an eternity. We also knew that there were many things we wanted to say, especially about the profound importance of the song to our culture, despite borrowing it from another, how it is taught to children, and why it forms a deep part of our history. As we made it, we realized we were creating a tiny essay about something much larger.

We were asked to write a handwritten note as part of our submission. Here it is:

Audio Flux just announced that it is launching a podcast, which is very exciting news, and this past weekend they revealed their latest round of fluxworks. A standout for me is this piece, which is a list poem that vibrates deeply along an axis of banal and profound things.

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