The Voice

The man who tried his best to reinvigorate the medium all the four decades of his air life, Sayani is coping well with the so-called oblivion that television has brought his way. Running a course in radio training, he operates from his Colaba office, next to Regal building. "I want to put to use my varied experience at the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, BBC’s ethic radio, AIR, Radio Asia and Saudi Arabian station Umm-al-Quwain. Last month, Sayani also tried organising a 15-day course in public service programming. "I had K. Nalinakshan, Roger Pereira, former police commissioner Satish Sahni and Gerson da Cunha lined up to speak on public services and awareness, butsomehow the subject has not caught up with the people," he talks of the course that fizzled out because there were not enough people interested.

"This is where AIR’s primary channels are strong. They reach the interiors with some good public service programmes, in a slightly traditonal fashion though," says Sayani, switching on to his grudge against the AIR, which, he says, felt pride in not publicing the exemplary. "AIR FM came in 14 years prior to licenced FM. But no one knew about it. In fact, till the Fifties we were on par with the BBC. And then the medium stifled itself. It was not allowed to grow," says Sayani unhesitantly, giving his vote to propaganda, his each word calculated; the way he prepared for his programmes. "In the early Eighties, sponsored programmes made Vividh Bharti a livewire programme. This was when TV was also attracting sponsorship. But our good old AIR increased the rates by 500 per cent. This is not the way one works," says the man who made listening to music fun with the firstever countdown show — Binaca Geet Mala, the only hit after its English version Binaca Hit Parade.

"In 1952, Radio Ceylon took cue from Binaca Hit Parade and started Geet Mala, a selection Hindi songs with a contest," says Sayani, remembering why he agreed to anchor it — he had learnt Indian classical music and used to sing till his voice cracked. "And when the letters for the contest became too much to handle (the number rose from 6,000 to 90,000), we cut out the mail part and decided to make it a countdown hour," he talks of how staid he found the idea of the same songs going up and down. And then Sayani created the sangeet seedhi with pehli, doosri paydaan (first, second.. rung). "Majrooh Sultanpuri one day pointed out that paydaan is a masculine word and it should be pehla, doosra… paydaan. And my repartee was `how can we have a big female and a small male’," he says chuckling at his own politically incorrect words.

Ghalatul aam wasi(the Urdu phrase means: `if the wrong thing becomes popular, it becomes sophisticated’. And the popular has become faddish these days. "Today countdowns have lost their meaning. Which one’s correct? And then there seems to be a slight influence from the music companies on what goes on air," he ridicules the drift where the numbers are not the ones in the films. "They are trailers, interspersed with asinine or inane talk. And how they feign popularity!" he jibes, recalling how for 35 years he, with B R Chopra and G P Sippy, saw that Binaca… was not manipulated. "All this will be left behind when web radio takes over," Sayani takes a leap into the future with yet another interesting phenomenon. "It will soon catch on. The only glitch is it takes irritatingly long to download a song in India. It has to be a little more sophisticated to be liked." And though Sayani will soon get involved in Web radio in his own singular way, he feels radio will always give TV a run for its money with its commuter andmorning time advantage.

And if privatisation works (350 people have already bid), Sayani will be proved right with every city having 10-12 stations to begin with. "I don’t know how many years I will live, but I wish I live to see 20,000 channels in the country." So a shift to TV is ruled out? "I will not shift. I will take the radio to TV, to the web."