RADIO REWIND

The bulky radios of the 1960s that came with valves, aerial wiring and earthing and took long minutes to warm up before the first cackle came through are now the stuff of reminiscences. 8220;Our Murphy occupied a shelf in the dining room and family time-table revolved around it. My husband left home for office just as the Rabindrasangeet on Akashvani Kolkata ended. I had lunch with the Mahila Mandal programme on the same station and served dinner in time for the evening news on AIR. We didn8217;t have to check the clock. We knew the hour of the day from the programme being aired,8221; says Savita Mitra, 60, a political activist in Durgapur, West Bengal.
Her husband had bought the radio when she arrived as a young bride from Kolkata, too new to mingle with anybody, too shy to talk to the neighbours. She wanted a Murphy, because she, like all her friends, loved the brand8217;s mascot8212;the cute Murphy baby. 8220;It cost more than a thousand rupees,8221; she says. Expensive, but essential. Every day, after her husband left for work, she filled her empty house with AIR. 8220;Neighbourhood women began to drop in and we8217;d listen to the programmes together. Slowly, the new town became familiar territory.8221;
Today, the modern radio is sharp, smart and digital; cigarette case-shaped devices priced at a few hundred and aimed at a crowd for whom short and medium waves do not exist. These are the digital FM radios that, industry experts promise, will shrink further in size.

Sudheer S, senior manager with Philips, says changing values have determined the new shapes. 8220;The radio, at one time, was the family entertainer. Now, families no longer listen to the radio together. The teenager of today certainly doesn8217;t want to share his entertainment with his parents or siblings. It8217;s his own thing, so the FM radio with its attachable ear plugs is a big hit,8221; he says.
His colleague Rajesh Bansal from the marketing division adds: 8220;The radio market, including the unorganised sector, is worth Rs 170 crore and divided unevenly between the standalone radio and the digital FM radio that we launched in the late 1990s when FM was taking off.8221; The sales graphs of the two types reflects the demography of India8212;the standalones and two-in-ones 8220;do well8221; in the non-metros, especially the rural belts of the Bimaru region, while the latter is flooding markets everywhere else.
8220;In recent years, we8217;ve seen the digital FM sets sweep into villages and small towns earmarked for the traditional radio sets,8221; says Sudheer, adding that the typical standalone radio buyer is 8220;a farmer between the ages of 20 and 508221;.

Look a little deeper and you8217;d notice that the farmer is also a man caught in a cusp, a custodian of the old-fashioned values urban India once boasted and now despises8212;thrift, utilitarianism and community feeling. For him, the radio-sum-cassette/CD player is value for money. Not for him the iPod that can do only so much.
Somali Pant, a 24-year-old civil engineer, explains her own fixation with the radio: 8220;It was a part of my growing-up years. I remember the late-night plays that my parents would listen to. It8217;s amazing how 8216;visual8217; they were; we could almost see the villain creaking the door open, the rain pattering down the roof in a stream,8221; she says. Then, there were those humid summer evenings of long power cuts 8220;when there was no TV and people gathered on terraces with their radios.8221;

In industry parlance, she fits into the customer profile that seeks out radios to preserve continuity. Yet, Pant realised she was a rare case when she went shopping for a radio after moving to IIT Delhi from Bareilly for her post-graduation. 8220;It became almost like a quest because nobody stocked it. Brands such as Sony offer CD players fitted with radios and I seemed to be the only one demanding a standalone. My friends told me to get a cellphone radio instead,8221; she recalls. 8220;I finally picked up an unbranded Chinese standalone from the grey market. My room-mates nicknamed it the tuntuna because it was always playing.8221;
She prefers the short-wave programmes from all corners of the world8212;Voice of America and BBC being her favourites. 8220;Never mind, where I am in the house, I can hear my radio. There are no hassles of ear-plugs and I never lose track of the time,8221; she says. Yet, it8217;s a sign of the times that only one store in Delhi8212;in the old quarters of the city8212;stocks standalone Philips radios.
Shweta S, a 30-something publishing professional based in Delhi, blames bad reception of SW and MW for the death of the radio. At one time, Radio Ceylon was hot with music lovers. This was where Ameen Sayani hosted Cibaca Geetmala, and this was also where one listened to the latest Western music, still alien to the Akashvani fans. On Sunday evenings, the 1970s youth who loved Beatles and Abba tuned in. 8220;I am so tired of the frequent ad breaks and incessant banter of FM RJs that I would really like to tune into SW and MW but all I get are garbled sounds,8221; she says.
Sukant Gupta, an advocate at the Punjab and Haryana High Court, refuses to give in. He makes it a point never to miss the BBC news on the Murphy he bought on a visit to London. And he listens to it with a pencil and paper ready. Ever since 1990, he has been assiduously writing down the news as it was being read. Last year, with several thousand sheets of papers filled with the news broadcasts, he found a place in the Limca Book of Records.

8220;It was habit that started while I was still in college. We8217;d listen to the news and note it down so that we didn8217;t lose the important facts, names and figures. Now, of course, there8217;s the BBC website on which to read the news, but I still can8217;t get through the day without listening in. My radio even travels with me,8221; he says. Unlike TV with its moving tickers and stress on visuals, radio news is free of distractions 8220;and more wholesome8221;. 8220;Devoid of images, radio news relies only on detailed coverage, so there are more facts than on TV,8221; says Gupta, who bought his first transistor, a National Panasonic, as a teenager, 8220;with pocket money saved over 10 years.8221; His friends are pressing him to bring home WorldSpace, but the old radio is a friend he cannot let go of.
With WorldSpace, iPods and Mp3 players around, nobody packs in a radio as a daughter8217;s wedding trousseau. Today8217;s India doesn8217;t stop for anything, certainly not for a game, and in stride with the times, even the radio has become mobile, packed into cellphones, CD players and cars.8220;However, in the villages of UP and Bihar, we8217;ve seen sales rise during the wedding season. Somewhere, it seems, the radio still has aspirational value,8221; says Bansal. Cashing in on the trend, Philips organises a roadshow every spring through the villages of north India to retail its radios to people who have been saving up for the sets.
Tomorrow8217;s radio, say techno buffs, won8217;t be a radio at all. 8220;It is more likely to be an integrated device with multiple functions, an all-in-one entertainment gadget with which one can watch movies, record a video and well, even tune into a radio station,8221; says Sudheer.