“Iyam aakashvani… Samprathi Vaarthaaha shruyantham….Pravachaka(ha) Baladevananda Sagaraha!”

These were the first lines I learnt by heart in Sanskrit other than the slokas I had learnt as a child. This was the beginning of the Sanskrit news bulletin on All India Radio. After this, for all I know, Baladevananda Sagara might have  been using Latin and Greek ….till he finished up with “Idi vaarthaaha!” Though I could not understand much of Sanskrit… this news session meant much to me!

There are some exquisite nostalgic memories of childhood nights when once we are all tucked in, the lights would be off and my grandfather would switch on the huge Murphy radio and a stylish voice would speak: This is All India Radio. The news read by Lathika Rathnam… ( I am not sure if she was Lathika, Lothika or Jothika…. But her surname was definitely Rathnam)… And listening to her clipped voice, I’d drift off to sleep, dreaming of my own voice replacing hers. There are other voices deeply embedded in my brain and heart. The debonair voice announcing, “the news read by Melville De Mello” or the desi touch in “Yeh Aakashvaani hai. Ab aap Deoki Nandan Pandey se samachar suniye!”

Once TVs invaded our homes, the Murphy and the Philips radios became show pieces and we started “watching” news. While listening to the radio news, the newsreader remained an enigma…an unseen presence giving us the good, bad and the ugly of the happenings around the world, but Doordarshan news gave us the visual angle to the whole thing. Often, there would be comments on the news readers’ looks, hair style and attire… But those readers are still very vivid in my memory. Who can forget the likes of Komal G. B. Singh and Salma Sultan! The very name Neethi Ravindran and Rini Khanna not only brings back their faces…but makes their voices echo inside the cockles of one’s heart. So many of them… with unforgettable faces and voices… Geethanjali Aiyer, Rama Pandey, Usha Albuquerque, Manjari Joshi, Sangeetha Bedi, Minu Talwar, Sukanya Balakrishnan, Avinash Kaur Sareen… all Doordarshan news’ femme fatales… While There were the dashing males ( some for looks…some for the timbre in their voice….) - Tejeshwar Sngh, J. V. Raman, Shammy Narang, Ramu Damodaran, Bhaskar Bhattacharya and the best of them all… Sunit Tandon! They had an aura about them… there was a dignity in the way they presented news.

Gone are the days of radio news. Very few people listen to the radio now a days. My father in law is one such person who cannot drift off to sleep without listening to the AIR news bulletin after lunch and late at night! I am sure there are millions of his ilk around India, where the addiction to TV hasn’t taken away the charm of the Radio shows. So we still listen to Yuva Vani, Subhashitham and carnatic music, thanks to Appa.

I remember with a fond heart, the static which gives way to “ Vande Maatharam” and then the Radio would be there at the background like the unseen presence of my mother, to comfort, console and generate a feeling of well being!