The radios, too, were temperamental contraptions. They had to be plugged in, and needed antennae (called aerials then). We had to wait until the diode valves were warm and their coils were glowing. The set was to be placed correctly to receive transmissions and we prayed that the whirring fan overhead or the neighbour's electric stove would not cause static.
It was wondrous when the dial lit up. Unknown places with unpronounceable names, such as Schenectady, Poughkeepsie and Valparaiso (not in Chile but Indiana), appeared in the drawing room, and we scurried to our school atlases only to find that they were too small to be found in it. Father's date with the 9 p m news was sacrosanct, a practice he continued all his life. Mother knew better than to announce dinner and we sat dozing until it was over. It wasn't news unless Melville de Mellow or Roshan Seth pronounced it so.
An uncle introduced me to the national programme of music on Saturday nights at 9.30 p m and the Akashvani Sangit Sammelan at Diwali. The music of Bhimsen Joshi, Gangubai Hangal, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan, Nikhil Bannerjee, Sharan Rani Mathur, Lalgudi Jayaram Aiyer and M L Vasanthakumari cast an enchanting spell from which I have not emerged yet, even though I had no technical understanding.
The radio also opened up the other two Indian passions besides politics (covered in the news) - cricket and films. Dicky Rutnagur, Pearson Surita and even the stodgy old Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram brought home the exploits of Vinoo Mankad and Vijay Manjarekar, Chandu Borde and Subhash Gupte, and put us to sleep with Bapu Nadkarni's skein of maidens. Even the great Indian victory in the 1983 World Cup final came to us from the radio. And no spider cam, stump-vision or any of the myriad gizmos now in use can cause the palpitation of the heart that Sushil Jhaveri's marvellous voice modulations did during the Oval test of 1979, with Sunil Gavaskar taking India needing 438 in the final innings to the verge of victory, but not quite.
Film music was anathema to B V Keskar, the information and broadcasting minister in the 1950s, and so was banished from All India Radio. That was a godsend for Radio Ceylon, which promptly filled the gap. On Wednesday nights, India came to a standstill, when Ameen Sayani brought us the weekly hit parade, Binaca Geetmala. We passionately kept track of what song was up, which music director had how many "sartaj geets" - hit songs that no longer participated in the competition. And wrote to him and other radio personalities from boondocks towns with improbable names, such as Jhoomri Talaiya and Warasiwani.
Small transistor radios from Japan enhanced the pleasure of listening to the radio in the early 1960s. One Saturday night, while I was discovering Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire as a book, I accidentally tuned in to the Jazz Hour on the Voice of America and heard Dave Brubeck's Take Five. That serendipity turned into a lifelong affair with jazz and its inseparable association with New Orleans. Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson and Paul Robeson, first heard here, continue to cast their spell a half-century later.
Even in the United States, the radio opened up the cultural cornucopia for a graduate student too poor to pay the admission for concerts and plays. The Public Broadcasting System and WQXR, then owned by The New York Times, brought live concert performances to my cramped living spaces. I heard the great symphonies and operas of Mozart and Beethoven, ballets of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and knew their scores by memory before ever seeing their live performances. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones changed forever the easy listening top 40 format and along with it, the thinking of an entire generation. Woody Guthrie, Peter, Paul, and Mary and Bob Dylan provided the tonal background to angry protests. And Woodstock would not have happened if the entire informal network of local FM stations had not raised everyone's awareness.
Saluto, Guglielmo Marconi, for being a great civilisational influence, second only to Johannes Gutenberg!
The writer taught at Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad and helped set up the Institute of Rural Management, Anand