Our Entertainment-the Radio

When I think of my school days I remember them as a daily routine for ten months every year where I spent eight hours or so with persons other than our family and neighbours. Except for the three examinations that interrupted the routine, all the other days were filled with lessons taught during school hours, homework done in less than an hour and the rest of the time spent in eating, playing and sleeping. Then there were the quarterly, half-yearly and annual exams and the holidays that followed them. The routine was different, the one during the exams filled with hectic school work and the ones during the holidays filled with nothing but playing, listening to the radio and reading story books.

There were no televisions then, only radios. By the time I started school, transistor radios had become popular. Every house had a radio or transistor radio. I remember that some groups of gypsies too possessed transistor radios as they could be played on the move, with batteries! We could trust the AIR to play film songs some three or four times a day. We knew the time table by heart and used to wait eagerly for them. They were the only light music easy on the ears and easily available to us.

The rest of the time we used to fiddle the shortwave radios and listened to the Voice of America and the BBC and sometimes Moscow radio too (Moscow radio broadcast Tamil programmes every day for some half an hour or so.) We became familiar with the latest Beatles songs and groups like the Carpenters etc., thanks to the Voice of America. My father liked listening to English songs and so, we also developed a liking for them. (Of course, as he grew older he switched over to Carnatic music but he must have been in his late twenties and early thirties when we were small and had retained the influence of his hostel/college life in developing a taste for Western music and continued listening to them over the radio.)

Whenever we were in our native Thanjavur district we could listen to Radio Ceylon which broadcast Tamil film songs non-stop with commercials in-between, all through the day. So we used to look forward to the stay in our father's native village where my as-yet-not married teenage athai (the last daughter) lived with my paternal grandparents and who was an avid fan of Radio Ceylon. She kept the lyrics for all the songs, old and new, painstakingly hand-written in notebooks and we all used to sing along with her even as we were assisting her in the preparation of the breakfast, lunch, evening tiffin and supper for all of us.

When AIR introduced their commercial broadcasting for the first time, with the promise of non-stop broadcasting of film songs, we were all sitting in front of the radio in our house waiting for the first song of 'Then Kinnam', a program for popular film songs (It is being broadcast even now). The first song was, I remember, 'Pournami Nilavil' rendered by the still popular SPB. We were so delighted and thrilled to have our own commercial channel for film songs regardless of where my father had been posted, without depending on Radio Ceylon for our aural entertainment. This was actually during the time when man had landed on the moon and the Americans were watching this event live on their TVs! Anyway, economic 'Progress' had started to happen in our country too, I guess, with the first commercial ever broadcast by the state owned radio!