Radio activity

Early childhood memories bring back images of my late father tuning and retuning his radio set to catch news bulletins from various renowned news stations. Radio Pakistan was one among many. Those were the simple days without much ado about today’s breaking news culture. Our village was without electricity. Whenever we went there, the radio was the only thing we had apart from books.

Radio stations had a bouquet of entertaining programmes also. We had radio plays, music segments and even timeslots available for children. Perhaps, Pakistani content was not as strong as that we could get from foreign stations, but it was there. And while the times have changed, the significance of radio broadcasts has not. For the poor it can be the best source of information, for the rich, the best driving pastime. And yet, like everything else, the growth in this vital sector is like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, lopsided and unfinished.

Radio is, perhaps, the most visual medium and yet, we have squandered this resource heartlessly. Privatisation in this sector has led to a deluge of FM stations mindlessly replicating the same hollow formula over and over again. The best known qualification for radio jockeys (RJ) is how fast they can speak, which granted might be an important need, but shouldn’t be the only criterion. Most of these RJs come on air without much preparation and one has to endure an endless torrent of meaningless babble. Each sentence has no connection with the previous one and some are mind-bogglingly stupid.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there are no good RJs around. There is one very fine RJ from Karachi who hosts a morning show that I listen to with great interest while driving my children off to school. But this is seriously an endangered species. And apart from the philosophies of RJs, the rest of the content usually is music heavy. Music is not a bad option I tell you. But why is it that after criticising India for all its evils, we are inundated by Bollywood music when we switch on our radios? When our musicians win awards and recognition in India, one would think we can produce music in ample quantity to entertain our listeners. Here is a niche for an industry that could never find enough appreciation through music CDs and cassettes owing to piracy and limited reach. But over past decade, with changing mores, our music has taken a morose turn and become depressive, lacklustre and often boring. The reason was explained to me by a music star at a dinner table one day. “Music production is essentially a sin,” said the gentleman with a straight face. So while we cannot control our appetite we have outsourced this sin to our good neighbours, right?

Well, now back to the matters of annoying RJs and broadcast content. Some of our friends in the radio business think they are doing us a great service by sharing B-town gossip with us. Excuse me, do we have our own entertainment industry or not? If it is not enough, I would rather hear more about Hollywood than the copycats in Bollywood. Another genius, a TV celebrity and brother of a TV morning show host, is so seriously in love with himself that he has to stop every good music number in the middle and shout out some meaningless gibberish.

But that’s only music and RJs for you. Radio transmissions can be put to much constructive use. You can have informative content like NPR and BBC. You can have quality entertainment. And you can have very useful social service and community-based messages. You can even have radio stations dedicated to children’s content. Cassette Kahani (children’s audiobooks) once were quite successful in this country. Sadly, R&D is another serious area where our radio stations have hardly worked at all. Perhaps, they have a genuine excuse. Most are very small in size and have very little funds available. But here Pemra should have played its role. It has kept big investors out of the competition, not spared much thought for ensuring a variety of content, refused to sell licences for AM stations, and is overly obsessed with television channels. Meanwhile, people like Mullah Fazlullah have exploited the medium to their great advantage.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 24^th, 2014.

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