From Bethesda Magazine: A Rockville resident’s podcast explores storytelling around the world

Ohh Folk!! has shared stories from Nepal, China and more

By Olivia Yasharoff

June 16, 2026 11:31 a.m.

Shilpa Das Gupta wanted to be a political journalist. But when she turned in a radio documentary for her first master’s degree in India in 2010, her teacher told her that she was “meant for radio.” Nobody had said that to her before. “They tell you to become engineers and doctors and lawyers. Radio jockey? Not really a very regular thing,” says Das Gupta, who went on to work in radio for a few years.

Das Gupta, 38, migrated to the U.S. in 2014 and has lived in Rockville for the past seven years. She’s the e-learning support services manager at American University in Washington, D.C. During the pandemic, Das Gupta says she needed something that would “make her feel alive again.” Enter the idea of spotlighting lesser-known folktales through a podcast titled Ohh Folk!!, a name inspired by using the f-word in a more constructive way. The podcast debuted in 2021, and as of mid-March she had posted 27 episodes. In each, Das Gupta introduces an ancient story by starting with contextual information about the country it comes from. Then she narrates the story in its entirety, sometimes adding short dialogues in along the way to make the tale more interactive.

In one episode, she shares the story of a man-eating demon from Nepal, a legend that still holds significant cultural importance today. In another, she celebrates Lunar New Year with a Chinese story about a silkworm mother. She has standards, or “rules,” for the tales she researches, prioritizing stories that center on marginalized people and do not promote oppression or abuse.

Storytelling is important to Das Gupta. She believes oral storytelling, in particular, plays a vital role in reconstructing the way we think. “I feel it’s an antidote to this visual bombardment that’s happening, because when we see something, we are made to believe that it can only happen in one certain way. … But when we hear something, we can design it in our own way,” she says.

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Das Gupta plans to continue releasing episodes every month or two, and would love to see Ohh Folk!! become part of education systems around the world in order to create a cycle of storytelling.

This appears in the May/June 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine