Okay, so I read this, went for a shower, then read it again, here are my thoughts.

To treat this as fairly as possibly I considered it like any other book. If it was a sample I had just download on my Kindle, would I buy the rest of the book and read on? The answer was no. Here's why:

1. Too much meaningless content.

The snippets of the film podcast do absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. They're written well enough and sound legitimate, but I can't seem to figure out any relevance from them. Ashwin even just nonchalantly throws it out his mind after it's done. No thoughts, no meaning. I get that you're trying to set an atmosphere but to me this seemed too invasive.

That kind of thing might work in a screenplay, where the podcast dialogue can be the background, perhaps even muffled, whilst the main actions appear on screen. However, in writing whatever you present to reader, even if it's a background detail, is placed in the forefront of attention for however long you talk about it. You spent about two hundred words essentially telling us that Ashwin is listening to a film podcast.

When it moves on to the news about the artificial lake and the deserted village it's fine because it seems important and relevant to the character. This is chiefly because you then build upon it and relate it to Ashwin, even offering some of his thoughts/experience on it.

If you read something in your story that can be completely removed without any meaning really being lost, greatly consider whether it should there at all.

2. Poor formatting.

The formatting of the speech is really not good. You start speech in the middle of a descriptive paragraph, using no quotation marks. You have two different characters dialogue mixed up in the same paragraph, again not differentiated with any of the appropriate punctuation. This means that as a reader I have to spend extra time and attention to deciphering what is speech, who's saying it and whether it's speech at all. This takes me completely out the story.

Read up about formatting speech: http://theeditorsblog.net/2010/12/08/punctuation-in-dialogue/

Those are pretty much the two biggest barriers I can spot. To end it on a positive note I can confirm that you managed to build up some pictures in my mind and you managed to get me to read to the end, which is no mean feat. Keep it up!