Radio Eff 'Em

People in Bang-galore esp. the code monkeys who are found in company provided vehicles to commute would relate to my rants better. What can you do sitting in a closed vehicle with fellow passengers whose social life is as dead as yours? Only topic of discussion can be speculation on infrastructure projects in Bangalore and project details of the organization that you just left behind a while ago.

Yea get alive with Radio Eff 'Em. "Radio FM [frequency] [channel name] [catch line]" is the template for their introduction together with a jingle to jangle your nerves. The shock treatment , in pavlovian manner, will make you salivate every time the RJ spouts the station name: "Radio One whatte fun" "Sakkath Haut Maga" "Station for fat-a-fat generation"

The claim purported by these agencies is that its all about music whereas music is the last thing in their minds. Now all of them have random people calling them to answer quizzes, place a song request. The most irritating ones are when these radio jockeys call people on their relatives or friends behest to pull boring hoaxes and making us privy to dazzled recipient's ignominy. Stoned happy go lucky jockeys seem to possess a cloying aura touching every one's soul through ears in a singsong manner. RJ Vasanti Hariprakash seemed an exception with some grey cells between ears instead of reverberating vacuum.

The channels do increase non-Kannada speaker's Kannada diction by a few words: Swalpa, Sakkath, Maga, Hedi (Madi is already on their tongue) but the spectrum of music that they cover is narrow like Bangalore's by lanes ("Rafi. Whooz this gruffy ruffy doode? Listen to sakkath haut suckeera!!"). Channels give endless rehash of same 'latesht' songs which listener would encounter soon in another channel. Forget oldies of yonder age when things where black n white there are many classic and even catchy number of 70s, 80s, 90s. What happened to them?

The idea for the post came when last night in my own cab I was browsing radio channels which was more like monkey testing. Thats when I accidentally visited AIR and suddenly time slowed down, noise outside seemed irrelevant and I could feel cool, moist air billowing from coolers of my old home in hot loo-ridden North Indian summers as I would tune radio at my home waiting for dinner to be served shouting at the fan of the gigantic cooler with no aim at communication. For the uninitiated there are kool acoustic effects produced if you shout near different part of the coolers. Thats what they do not teach in your engineering schools.

"Is gaane ki farmaish ki hai jabalpur se humare nanhe sathiyon ne jinka naam hai chunnu, munnu, pappu, raju, pinki aur sunita" "Geet ke bol likhe hain anjaan ne, mukhya awaaz hai kishore kumar ki aur ........." Wow it was so soothing compared to blaring private channels competing with traffic noise. And AIR plays the latesht numbers dyoode.


PS: BTW I was mulling over the tagline : "Musth maja madi" and thought what piece of unimportant junk it is. Just claiming to have fun might not be the best tag lines in the world. Then the truth hidden in vocabulary crypts dawned on me. Musth (with the mandatory hech at the end) is actually a little known English word meaning:

An annual phase of heightened sexual excitement in the males of certain large mammals (especially elephants); is associated with discharge from a gland between the eye and ear

Now did you gather it is a hidden comment on mammal discharges and not just a soulless play of word for yuppy generation and people say we lack sex education.