Radio Nation…

Last week, one of my friends here called me a weirdo when I proudly informed him I got myself a radio for 20$. That he called me names was due to the fact that he could have got me one for 2$ is a different issue altogether.  But it did set off a chain of thoughts within me – about how the humble radio has suffered such a huge decline in popularity from its heydays , the slide that began with the invention of the television and was further precipitated by the onslaught of the internet. And anyone listening to radio ends up being called a weirdo.

I grew up listening to the radio, right from the time when I and my dad used to sit outside our home with a portable radio of the early 90s and crank the tuner, trying to catch the Ceylon AM signal or the Vividh Bharathi commercial radio signal. And listen away till the broadcast ended or I fell asleep. The joy of listening to that the distorted radio signal during the night was something that has stayed with me for my life. And that justifies the 20$ bill I paid for the radio.

But why, you may ask, would someone even bother to listen to a radio in this age of podcasts and Slacker internet radio(TM), let alone buying one. The answers are many and varied.For one, you are not bombarded with a gazzilion options when you want to listen to some good music; the station chooses the song for you – if you don’t like it, meddle with the tuner. And you are done. The kind of music you get to listen to are varied on a radio when compared with a internet radio portal like Slacker or Pandora or while using the Radio Guide in your Media Player, where you are asked to choose the category of music you want to listen to (New or Old, Rock or Hip Hop, Blues or Electronica…). Your listening experience is narrowed down to one category of music. A good old radio, on the other hand, plays every kind of music – from the Beatles to the Black Eyed Peas (MS Viswanathan to Yuvan Shankar Raja for the “south Indian desis” reading my blog ), without you fretting over the options. And when the radio plays one of your favorite songs, old or new, there is this little spark of joy that surges in you – something which a digital online radio cannot recreate.

To many, listening to a radio is all about popping their earphones in and tuning their mobile phones to catch a station on their commute.  While this sounds promising, to know that radio stations are still finding listeners, the true delight in listening to a radio lies not in hearing it play within your ears while you are sitting in the middle of a traffic jam, but when you are working in the stillness of the night, with the radio playing those timeless classics, and all you can hear is that sinful voice singing in the distance (for those still having doubts, try listening to “It must have been love” by Roxette in the middle of the night on a plain old radio at a low volume. Trust me, there is nothing quite compared to this ! ) . What accentuates this listening experience is not the kind of songs being played, but the quality of the audio coming from the speakers. There has always been a distinctive charm to that archaic sound coming out from those dinghy speakers,  that many a time I am left wondering if the 5.1’s output can even be compared with that miniscule piece of magnet.

And you really have good company in the form of the RJ on the radio,  rather than just listening to song after song which brings in a monotony to the listening experience. This is more experienced when you listen to the radio in the middle of the night, when you are all alone and immersed in your work (Yazh Sudhagar’s show on Suryan FM after 2 AM is a classic). I still remember the times when Suryan FM was introduced in Chennai, and the difference it made to the monotonous work of drawing engineering charts through the night !

So why do I encourage you all to listen to a radio ? The reasons are myriad, and personal. The joy of discovering songs while listening to a radio is unsurpassed. Nothing helps you relax while dong a tedious job, like the radio does. Unlike an advanced speaker system with its booming sound and digital rendition, the output from a radio doesn’t overpower your senses. It’s gentle, it’s subtle, and you do not realise its presence until you really begin to concentrate on the radio. And the companionship it provides is unsurpassed.

Such is the magic that I may not be exagerrating if I compare this humble piece of equipment to the solitary reaper that William Wordsworth describes in his poem. But so caught up in our fast paced lives we are, hardly do we find any time to indulge in such simple pleasures that life has to offer. Such as the radio.

Pleasant. Distant. Soulful.