Role Over

Purab Kohli,the loquacious Channel [V VJ who has now moved on to films,couldn’t agree more. “The word VJ has lost all meaning. We used to play our choice of contemporary music and talk about it. Now the focus has totally changed,” he rues.

If video jockeys are losing their cool factor,radio jockeys are equally handicapped. “People used to tune in because they wanted to listen to what we had to say. Today,they just flip stations to listen to a song. There’s barely any interesting conversation anymore,” laments RJ Tarana Raja Kapoor,who is now a television host. She also feels that while her generation of RJs had the liberty to be themselves,the newer lot are not given the chance to flaunt their individuality anymore.

Former RJ Anirudh Chawla agrees. “There’s too much marketing on radio now. This doesn’t give the jockey to set his own pace and take it off from there. I would be talking about how to deal with a two-timing boyfriend when suddenly I would have to change track and talk about how amazing a certain jewellery shop is,” he complains. The earlier tradition of long interviews with famous personalities too has gone out of vogue. “I remember doing a four-hour long inteview with Lata Mangeshkar. It used to be fascinating. Now a two minute byte is enough to carry a whole show,” he says.

But Channel [V VJ,Juhi Pande begs to differ. “So what if the content is different? One has to change with time. If this is what people want to watch,that’s what we are giving them. The main job is to connect with the audience,” she shrugs. There are several others who support Pande and don’t believe that the role of the jockey is redundant. “The age bracket that watches these channels has come down,” says Kohli. “The adulation level might have changed from what it used to be,but it’s still there.”