Radio

Today, I bought a Radio for the house. It’s a tiny piece of machinery that plays music, but to me, it means so much more today. The reason I got it in the first place is my father, who now has to spend his days alone at home after Mom left us a few months ago. Although there is FM available on his phone as well, it’s slightly complicated for him to play it. Besides, I wanted to bring back to this house something that once used to be an integral part of the household.

Several years ago, when we didn’t have phones with FM, we used to have those little uncomplicated FM transistors that you just had to plug in and adjust the channel by turning a small knob to enjoy your favorite radio channel. In a family where everyone loved music to some degree, it would come into action right at the beginning of the day. Whoever woke up first would turn the radio on. And it wasn’t done for personal use by that person. The radio was intentionally turned on loud enough to ensure everyone woke up listening to music.

After we all left for school/college/work, it was also my Mom’s companion in those days when there was little to watch for her on Television. Its uncomplicatedness made it easy for her to use as she went along her daily routine while songs played on the radio. Since it was also the favorite stress buster of everyone in the family after they returned home, the radio hardly went silent throughout the day. It was always there, playing music in the background, no matter what. Radio shows and Radio Jockeys were almost an extension of our families. It impacted our days and lives when our favorite RJs like Nitin, Saima or Sourav-Anant wouldn't turn up for their jobs. The happiness that the radio industry tries to sell us often used to work its charm into our lives and made many a tough days feel bearable. The festivals were also lit up by the channels. It was so ubiquitous that it woke up with the person who got up first in the morning and went to sleep with the person who switched the lights off the last in the day.

As the years rolled by, our lives changed. Cable Television with its hundred channels infiltrated our lives in a way we never could imagine earlier. We got more engrossed in our phones that now had inbuilt FM apps that didn’t even need the effort of adjusting channels. Also, smartphones meant, we could now have thousands of songs of our choice in our pocket that we could go to at any time of the day. Our days would now begin with the noise of the news channels that my father would tune into right after waking up. Mom got engrossed in the rewatch of the TV shows that she had missed out the previous night. Smartphones would keep the rest of us occupied. The music still played but now on everyone’s personal phones or laptops. The availability of any and every sort of music on YouTube made it the favorite source of music, only behind the phone’s MP3. That clunky looking 'dabba' gradually became obsolete in some time in this fast-changing household. I don’t even remember whether it malfunctioned first or whether it was discarded first. But gradually, it disappeared from our lives.

Just as we saw in the above lines that life changes fast, it changed again in the last few months. The person who shared the most intimate relationship with the FM Radio left. With Mom gone, it’s just me and my father left in the house. For as long as I am home, there is always some or the other music on. But in my absence, a pall of gloom descends upon this house. Switching the radio on and connecting it to a Bluetooth speaker is too much of a task for my father. He spends his days alone among these silent walls, a fairly torturous proposition to think of.

This situation made me seek out an old friend – a small and uncomplicated FM Radio. Quite strangely, the dabbas that were ubiquitous a decade ago, couldn’t be found when I tried looking for them in the market. Their place has been taken by snazzy looking multi functionality instruments that offer hundreds of things, among which one is the FM Radio. The search made me realize how blatantly the market is biased in the favour of the young while conveniently turning its back on the needs and the comforts of the elderlies.

Eventually, I did find what I was looking for, a product that interestingly now carried the word ‘Retro’ in its name. What a fast-moving world we inhabit. Don't we? It again has multiple functionalities, but at its heart, it’s a simple FM Radio, which has that knob that needs turning if one wants to adjust the channel. After years of tapping the smartphone screen to change channels, when I turned this little knob today after what seemed ages, it brought back a flood of memories. I also realized what made the FM so attractive all these years ago. The thrill of not knowing what will play next was so much better than songs playing from a manicured playlist. The discovery of good new music always brightened the mood, which was then followed by a period where we were frantically hoping for the song to turn up somewhere on the other channels. That wait and it getting ended also had its own charm.

Besides, I also came to understand that, why Mom always enjoyed FM more even though she had learned to play music on her phone towards the end of her life. While she relished the music part, the continuous chirping of the radio, in the form of RJs talking or even advertisements must have, in some way, helped compensate for the lack of people in the house. Music is beautiful, but maybe there is something even greater in the human voice that seems to be talking to you in your loneliness. In hindsight, I believe it must have been comforting for her in all those hours when we weren’t around her. Maybe, if I had got it earlier, it would have made her last few days slightly more bearable.

All these realizations only make me rue the disappearance of the radio from the household several years ago. While a part of me is glad that I have brought it back, a part of me wishes I hadn’t let go of it in the first place at all because, sometimes, it's just not people who make families.