Radio jockeys are turning mischief mongers and playing pranks on people. FM stations and their listeners are loving it.
As a student of Jamia Milia (incidentally, his father taught there) in Delhi some years ago, Naved and his friends decided to rag some new students even though it was banned. Having sung and danced for their seniors, a handful of juniors were asked to become murgas (a pose in which you squat while holding your ears) in a deserted classroom.
However, Naved spotted the principal walking towards them. The quick-thinking RJ promptly joined the bunch being ragged and became a murga himself. “The principal walked in and told those posing as murgas to leave the classroom. I walked out with them, leaving my friends at his mercy,” he recounts, laughing at the memory of the incident.
Today Naved regales his radio listeners by making murgas out of others by making crank calls — all on-air — and impersonating various characters for the humour segment, Mirchi Murga. He’s been a rickshaw-wallah, a drycleaner, shopkeeper, car servicing agent, matrimonial bureau owner and much else. However popular Mirchi Murga may be, Naved is not the only prankster on private FM radio. Ghanta Singh alias Prince on Radio One is hugely popular, too, claims Vineet Singh Hukmani, CEO, Radio One.
Ghanta Singh makes calls — mostly to small-scale enterprises, shopkeepers and small-time service providers — and asks inane questions to elicit laughter. “Ghanta Singh is a class apart,” remarks Prince, the Mumbai-based jockey who hosts it. Incidentally, Prince is not the real name of the jockey either, who wishes to keep his identity under wraps to maintain the mystique of Ghanta Singh. Radio One’s Hukmani says that Ghanta Singh’s capsule is played across all its seven FM stations.
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Needless to say, each crank call segment and prankster has a distinct style and personality, drawing its own listenership. The purpose behind such capsules is to generate a few laughs — at the expense of others, of course. Radio stations or jockeyeys do not see anything wrong in playing such mischief, as it is an accepted programming format worldwide.
“It’s a very old radio technique. It’s time-tested,” says Radio One’s Hukmani. Agrees Tapas Sen, chief programming officer, Radio Mirchi: “Phone pranks are played on air across the world especially on mainstream channels. Niche stations, say, jazz channels for instance, may not use the format.”
To be sure, pulling a fast one on somebody on air is a “painstaking process” according to Malishka, who trained Vidya Balan for her role as an RJ in the Sanjay Dutt-starrer Lage Raho Munnabhai. Naved agrees and says that it often takes him two hours to do one murga. “People disconnect the phone or shout, but I keep trying,” says the host of Radio Mirchi’s evening prime-time show Sunset Samosa.
Among Malishka’s shendis that her station uses as a sample is the one she played on a woman residing in Khar. Malishka pretended to be an activist from an organisation called the “Poor Nari Mukti Morcha” and complained that thanks to her diamonds, divorce rates in Khar were increasing. “Wives are fighting with their husbands on the issue, I told her. She was enraged and threatened to call the police,” says Malishka with a chuckle.
But how does she calm an infuriated victim? “The person who suggests the name is always on the other line with me to pacify if the situation heats up,” she says. “But we do not overstep the limit in any case,” she says. However, she thoroughly enjoys seeing “calm CEOs going nuts, or a very sweet guy getting very rough”.
Even Naved of Mirchi Murga is quite comfortable making somebody else a bit uncomfortable for a laugh. So much so that he does not mind all the abuses that he suffers when people who are called get really angry. So do such jockeys require special skills? Presence of mind and mimicking skills, for sure, says Naved. “They have to be excellent voice artistes, too,” says Prince aka Ghanta Singh.
Malishka says that the trick to carrying off a prank lies in “seizing the moment.” For someone who is hosting a show on Bindaas, her mission is now to get into films. “Why not, I’ve already played a eunuch, a cop, a boy, a nurse and much else on radio,” she says.
Ghanta Singh is different from RED FM Shendi and Mirchi Murga as there is no third party involved here. “We choose numbers randomly from classifieds but now it’s becoming so popular that listeners are sending in their personal requests,” says Prince, a consummate voice artiste who mimics Amitabh Bachchan and Sanjay Dutt for commercials.
Surprisingly, there is no dearth of people who want to furnish radio stations with telephone numbers of people they want to play pranks on. “It’s all sorts — daughters for fathers, executives for bosses and even films stars for co-stars,” confides Malishka.
However, unlike radio stations abroad, Indian FM stations follow a code and work within restrictions. Sexual innuendos are a strict no-no. Malishka says that some Australian stations are enjoyable as they have an edginess that comes with talking about sex openly. Naved’s biggest regret, however, is that he needs the approval of the victim to play the prank on air. “To get him to agree is the most difficult part of my job,” he says.
Radio Mirchi also avoids calling celebrities or politicians. Sen says that RJs are not allowed to give out information about the person they call. “We work within a framework,” says Malishka.
Stations, meanwhile, are happy with their pranksters. “Naved is one of the reasons why we have so much of a lead over rivals in Delhi,” says Sen. Hukmani showers similar praise on Ghanta Singh. “He drives the brand recall for the station. On newly launched stations like Pune and Kolkata, he’s become popular,” he says. “Telecom companies are asking us to allow them access to his content for downloads,” he adds.