On All India Radio’s 80th B’day, Revisiting its Iconic Presence
On All India Radio’s 80th birthday, here’s a throwback to its iconic stature in the country.
All India Radio has a special place in my parents’ hearts, especially my mother’s. She is a connoisseur of old hindi music and her choice of music matched with that of AIR’s perfectly.
Reminiscing the days when radio and books were her modes of entertainment, she told me how she would longingly wait for Ameen Sayani’s ‘Binaca Geet Mala’ every Wednesday, despite my grandfather’s protests. It was unsavoury for children to pollute their minds with filmi music, he would say. Paying little heed to his tall claims, mother would hide her pocket-sized transistor in her warm blanket and hum the tunes of Shankar Jaykishan, RD Burman, Kishore Kumar, and Lakshmikant-Pyarelal along with the actors.
With the advent of television, she graduated to watching the songs on screen but harboured a desire to listen to each song first before watching it.
“My imagination of a song was almost always better than what the directors had portrayed. The excessive glitter and dance would rob the sanctity of the song.,” she says.
For my father on the other hand, cricket was best understood when heard on radio.
“Painting Kapil Dev hold the World Cup trophy in my imagination was more evocative than watching the same on television,” he opines.
My father remembers how he had painted the Lords’ stature more magnificently in his imagination than what it turned out to be in reality,
It was a game that we played among friends too – whose imagination was the closest to reality – it was a wonderful exercise.
The evening bulletin was like a household ceremony. After dinner, both my parents’ families would sit down around the TV-like transistor to listen to the headlines. It was like a holy re-communion for the family after which the lights would go off compulsorily.
Out of the blue radio broadcasts were the stressful, recounts my father. If there was an early broadcast on a given day, it smelt trouble.
He vividly remembers Indira Gandhi’s assassination announcement.
“AIR had withheld the announcement for the longest time. BBC announced it, but we were yet to confirm,” he recalls.
AIR was reflective of the collective consciousness of a generation. As a Happy Birthday present to our archaic broadcaster, here’s a collection of some of its iconic announcements.
Nehru’s speech after Mahatma Gandhi’s sad demise
Mohammad Ali Jinnah announcing the partition of India and Pakistan
Subhash Chandra Bose’s inspirational speech before India gained independence
India’s last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten’s address on August 15, 1947