Radio nights : Shreekant Sambrani

Many other changes Narendra Modi may bring about as prime minister, but
for the moment, we oldies past the biblical allocation of
three-score-and-ten owe a debt of gratitude to him for reviving
everyone's interest in that taken-for-granted chambermaid of the
communication age, the radio. Back in the Jurassic Age of the 1950s and
1960s, when we were growing up, it was our sole window to the world.
There was no social media then (gasp!), no internet, no television, no
cellphones (even their sturdy ancestors, the rotary dial phones were
exceptions). Most of us made do with day-old dak editions of newspapers
that had little news of the outside world anyway.

The radios, too, were temperamental contraptions. They had to be plugged
in, and needed antennae (called aerials then). We had to wait until the
diode valves were warm and their coils were glowing. The set was to be
placed correctly to receive transmissions and we prayed that the
whirring fan overhead or the neighbour's electric stove would not cause
static.

It was wondrous when the dial lit up. Unknown places with
unpronounceable names, such as Schenectady, Poughkeepsie and Valparaiso
(not in Chile but Indiana), appeared in the drawing room, and we
scurried to our school atlases only to find that they were too small to
be found in it. Father's date with the 9 p m news was sacrosanct, a
practice he continued all his life. Mother knew better than to announce
dinner and we sat dozing until it was over. It wasn't news unless
Melville de Mellow or Roshan Seth pronounced it so.

An uncle introduced me to the national programme of music on Saturday
nights at 9.30 p m and the Akashvani Sangit Sammelan at Diwali. The
music of Bhimsen Joshi, Gangubai Hangal, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Bismillah
Khan, Nikhil Bannerjee, Sharan Rani Mathur, Lalgudi Jayaram Aiyer and M
L Vasanthakumari cast an enchanting spell from which I have not emerged
yet, even though I had no technical understanding.

The radio also opened up the other two Indian passions besides politics
(covered in the news) - cricket and films. Dicky Rutnagur, Pearson
Surita and even the stodgy old Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram brought home
the exploits of Vinoo Mankad and Vijay Manjarekar, Chandu Borde and
Subhash Gupte, and put us to sleep with Bapu Nadkarni's skein of
maidens. Even the great Indian victory in the 1983 World Cup final came
to us from the radio. And no spider cam, stump-vision or any of the
myriad gizmos now in use can cause the palpitation of the heart that
Sushil Jhaveri's marvellous voice modulations did during the Oval test
of 1979, with Sunil Gavaskar taking India needing 438 in the final
innings to the verge of victory, but not quite.

Film music was anathema to B V Keskar, the information and broadcasting
minister in the 1950s, and so was banished from All India Radio. That
was a godsend for Radio Ceylon, which promptly filled the gap. On
Wednesday nights, India came to a standstill, when Ameen Sayani brought
us the weekly hit parade, Binaca Geetmala. We passionately kept track of
what song was up, which music director had how many "sartaj geets" - hit
songs that no longer participated in the competition. And wrote to him
and other radio personalities from boondocks towns with improbable
names, such as Jhoomri Talaiya and Warasiwani.

Small transistor radios from Japan enhanced the pleasure of listening to
the radio in the early 1960s. One Saturday night, while I was
discovering Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire as a book, I
accidentally tuned in to the Jazz Hour on the Voice of America and heard
Dave Brubeck's Take Five. That serendipity turned into a lifelong affair
with jazz and its inseparable association with New Orleans. Louis
Armstrong, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Duke Ellington, Ella
Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson and Paul Robeson, first heard here, continue
to cast their spell a half-century later.

Even in the United States, the radio opened up the cultural cornucopia
for a graduate student too poor to pay the admission for concerts and
plays. The Public Broadcasting System and WQXR, then owned by The New
York Times, brought live concert performances to my cramped living
spaces. I heard the great symphonies and operas of Mozart and Beethoven,
ballets of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and knew their scores by memory
before ever seeing their live performances. The Beatles and The Rolling
Stones changed forever the easy listening top 40 format and along with
it, the thinking of an entire generation. Woody Guthrie, Peter, Paul,
and Mary and Bob Dylan provided the tonal background to angry protests.
And Woodstock would not have happened if the entire informal network of
local FM stations had not raised everyone's awareness.

Saluto, Guglielmo Marconi, for being a great civilisational influence,
second only to Johannes Gutenberg!

The writer taught at Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad and helped
set up the Institute of Rural Management, Anand

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