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Audio candy treat that comes pre-loaded with 5,000 songs

I rubbed my hands in glee and started listening, tuning in to snatches of music I never thought I'd hear again

Sushmita Bose

Published: Thu 24 Aug 2017, 8:31 PM

Last updated: Thu 24 Aug 2017, 10:33 PM

Last week, someone, on a whistle-stop visit from India, presented me a Carvaan. No, not the circus one - which is the caravan, and, yes, I know carvaan in Hindi is the same as caravan in English; this one's a radio, an old-fashioned-looking radio at that. And Carvaan's a proper noun. This radio (or transistor, as many of us have called it from time to time) - manufactured by Saregama (formerly HMV, and if you're not acquainted with Indian musical notes, then the amalgamation Saregama is derived from Sa-Re-Ga-Ma, the desi counterpart of the Western solmisation Do-Re-Mi-Fa) - has a rechargeable battery and, more importantly, digitally archived music: 5,000 Hindi songs, culled from across all sectors (but mostly Bollywood), spanning decades (going all the way back to the Forties - Barsaat, anyone?) boasting a range of my fave artistes (Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Mohd. Rafi, Asha Bhosle), lyricists, composers, and a special drop down on Binaca Geetmala (later Cibaca Geetmala).

Yeh carvaan chalta rahe (the tagline of Carvaan) - let this caravan keep ? going - how great is that to sum up a musical journey?

I rubbed my hands in glee and started listening, tuning in to snatches of music I never thought I'd hear again. They brought back a rush of memories. I remembered those afternoons spent lying between my grandparents on their bed, while they listened to Bengali songs by Tagore on the radio, and I tried to get up to speed with my cultural roots. I remembered my father listening to the 10-minute morning news in a way he never hears/watches 24x7 television: unwaveringly. I remembered meticulously saving pocket money to buy (non-rechargeable) Eveready batteries for a pocket transistor I was gifted on my birthday.

But alongside, I readied myself for rolling of eyes; most of my friends don't even understand why I have a music system that uses CDs, and doesn't stream music at the click of a button or tap of a touch-screen like the rest of 'em. Heck, I even get hell for having my iPod on display; apparently, that's way too antiquated. "Let me Bluetooth you a Justin Bieber song on your phone," someone offered the other day, and I had to pass.

Now imagine what they'll say when they find out I'm listening to the radio (remember Don Williams' Listen To ?The Radio?).

Back in the day, for a long time, my family didn't have a music system. It was considered a luxury and, therefore, not very important; only savants possessed such niceties, I was told. But what we did have, was a radio, one that resembled my new Carvaan. Big buttons. Clear display. Solid. No hi-tech veiled intricacies that are bound to short-change you.

On the airwaves, there used to be different musical sessions: Hindi songs on Chhayageet, English ones on Musical Bandbox (that aired every Sunday, ? between 1pm and 2pm), classical ?Western at11pm in the night. For ?Musical Bandbox, I'd "book" the family radio - unless, God forbid, there was a game of a cricket being played somewhere in the world, in which ?case my father or brother (the sporty gents) would have hogging rights on the precious box.

There were also the audio stories on radio. The first time I "heard" Roald Dahl's delectably wicked Lamb to the Slaughter was its Bengali re-interpretation on a Saturday afternoon. a programme "sponsored" by an antiseptic cream called Boroline. I "heard" WW Jacobs' crazy scary The Monkey's Paw in the same slot (much later, when I "read" Dahl and Jacobs, I, of course, silently cursed the radio for having let the cat out of the bag already).

With the introduction of FM channels in car audio sets - that little token of love traffic jams gave us as we staggered on the highway - we all started talking about the revival of the radio. But, honestly, I never had the heart to call those uniformly coded digital numbers staring at me from a slab of frontage, a "radio".

A radio is something far grander, far more meaningful, more gregarious, something people huddled around together much before the soccer huddle was invented - you know, like in The King's Speech, where airwaves came to life when the King of England gave his coronation speech. There were no gifs or memes or extrapolations - only stuff that really mattered.

With my new radio, I have a feeling I'm going to be able to relive a little part of those old days gone by when I'd pour my entire heart into what I listened to.
sushmita@khaleejtimes.com

Sushmita is Editor, Wknd. She has a penchant for analysing human foibles