The first big present my parents gave me as a child was a transistor – a little rectangular box that went by the name of Philips Tiger. It was bought only after Baba and Ma were entirely convinced that giving me such a gift won’t amount to pampering.
One Sunday evening father drove us in his old station wagon and pulled up in front of the only shop in our little town that sold radios, transistors, fans and lights. India wasn’t hooked to the TV set those days. Radio was the big thing.
Baba told Lalji, a man with a bulbous nose, a massive belly and a broken voice what he wanted to buy his younger son. “Iskey liye Tiger-hi theek hoga, (Tiger will be fine for him),” Lalji decided as he dexterously slipped his thick, hairy hand into a showcase window. His fleshy, round fingers curled around the delicate, grey rectangle and plucked it out of a maze of wires, plugs and lights of all sizes and shapes.
In our days gifts were seldom expensive. Books were common. A football or a cricket bat was the outer limit. But a transistor? Unimaginable! My gift was as valuable as an iPod or a laptop. I was possessive about my Tiger. I slept with it under my pillow, had it on the dining table when I ate breakfast, dinner and lunch and even took it to the loo. Tiger and I were inseparable.
The wonderful thing about Tiger was that it was ever ready to talk and sing to me. Box its ear and the chatter box would come alive. At home, though, they encouraged, goaded and coaxed me to listen to BBC or the news bulletin in English over All India Radio. The idea was for me to pick up a clipped English accent. But my interest was in Vividh Bharati, a station that played Hindi film songs and hosted sponsored radio shows.
My parents hated Vividh Bharati. It was filmi, “non-serious” and “non-intellectual”. Binaca Geemala, OK for brainless wonders, was certainly not meant for me. “Amin Sayani is a great charmer, no doubt, but how does he add to a kid’s knowledge base,” father argued. Nobody told him Sayani’s mission in life was not to impart wisdom to Indian kids. He was an entertainer.
But beyond Sayani’s fantastic sing-song baritone, the very fact that Radio Ceylone broadcast Binaca Geetmala was absolutely fascinating. I knew Ceylone as an island nation where they didn’t speak Hindi. Why would a radio station there broadcast the country’s hottest Bollywood music show? Defied logic. Secretly, I asked my peers about it but none of them had an answer. Asking a senior the question would be sacrilege. After all, only paka bachchas (precocious kids) were hooked to Vividh Bharati.
Elders did not seem to have a problem with one other channel called Yuvavani. Unlike Vividh Bharati, this wasn’t a “dumbed down”, adults-only channel because it played western pop songs. It had that English flavour. The anchors were good. They spoke decent, grammatically-correct English. You could learn a thing or two from them. As long as entertainment had some value – it did not matter even if the connection was remote – nobody would complain.
But Vividh Bharati programmes had the reputation of being a tad silly and some of them did sound like modern-day Kyunki… tearjerkers that play on TV channels. Still, if you wanted nonsensical fun there was no option but to tune into this taboo channel.
Every night, I smuggled Tiger into my bed, covered it with my big white pillow and tuned in to Vividh Bharati after the lights were turned off. Saturday afternoons were booked for Shonibarer Barbela. The compere added a seductive, orgasmic drag to the name — baarbelaaaaah she would trail off. A gong would sound immediately thereafter. Despite the announcer’s Don’s-moll flourish, the programme sponsor was one big dampener. It was a phenyl-maker. Worse, its offices were at the smelly, god-only-knows-where Chidam Mudi Lane. What a colossal letdown!
If memory serves me right, the promo of a new play in town called shanai (shehnai in Hindi) followed immediately after Barbelaaaah. It had a strange hyperbolic punch line, which roughly translated said shanai in reality means she nai (he isn’t there). The show host never tried to be creative. She played the same tapes over and over again and the dialogues were mostly the same as the previous week. After a while, you could rattle it off backwards.
Legitimately and in full public view, I tuned into Vividh Bharati only on Sunday afternoons when the same Amin Sayani of Binaca fame hosted the Bournvita Quiz Contest. It was one cracker of a show and the contest traveled from town to town. Even though it was a radio show, we always awaited its arrival in Kolkata. This quiz, perhaps India’s first, was a brainteaser and I sat down with pen and paper jotting down the questions and answers. If I had the answer to a question, a particularly tricky one, it won an immediate parental approval. Often, by the end of show time, I had the entire thing on my notebook, quips, questions, jibes and jabs included.
The 7 o’clock khel samachar on Vividh Bharati was a must-listen. It was a 15-minute bulletin and an addiction. The newsreader lingered, ambled and delayed announcing the result if India had performed badly in hockey or cricket. But her tenor would be a dead giveaway. Tiger got me hooked to cricket as well. It was on this transistor that I heard of Kapil Dev scoring 175 against Zimbabwe, Gavaskar and Vishwanath scoring their many centuries, Chetan Chauhan’s disappointment at never getting to reach triple figures.
Once in a while, I felt the urge to tune into BBC. But Tiger seldom managed to connect. Even if it did, the reception was bad and the announcer seemed to be in a studio bang in the middle of a war zone.
Tiger remained a friend for years. One day the voice died.
