'The largest listenership for Vividh Bharati outside the country is in Spain.'
'The labourers who go there for the tomato-picking season feel cut off from their country and listen to Vividh Bharati to overcome their loneliness.'
Neelesh Kulkarni, who along with Vikrant Pande has authored Akashvani, Hundred Years of Stories from All India Radio wears many hats.
"I first went behind a mic at All India Radio by featuring in a children's programme 60, 62 years ago," he recalls.
"I owe to the training I got then, all my achievements in the fields of public speaking, voice-overs, cricket commentary, theatre, etc. The book is a humble attempt at saying, 'Thank you!'."
A management graduate and entrepreneur who quit the corporate world after a seven year stint, Kulkarni has run his own business for the last 39 years.
His first book In the Footsteps of Rama, Travels with the Ramayana (Harper Collins) is in its second edition. It has been translated into Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati and made into a six-part OTT series. The Hindi translation was declared the best nonfiction book for 2023-2024 by FICCI.
He was also part of the best-selling anthology, Where the Gods Dwell, Thirteen Temples and Their (Hi)Stories (Westland Books), which is also in its second edition.
His Open Sesame, Magic Tricks for Kids was published by Red Panda in March 2024.
Uprising, The Liberation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, the first book on the only successful people-led armed struggle in the history of the Indian freedom movement, was published by Westland Books last year. It is being translated into Marathi and Gujarati and is also being made into an OTT series.
He is currently working on a children's book, an anecdotal history of Delhi University and a book on the Varkaree tradition.
"Where else can you get such stupendous reach? How can a medium with such massive reach and a committed listener base be an underdog?", Neelesh Kulkarni tells Sunil Gatade about why he embarked on a book on AIR.
After In the Footsteps of Rama and the one on the freedom struggle for Dadra and Nagar Haveli, what prompted you to take an unconventional topic like All India Radio?
I owe a debt of gratitude to All India Radio on two counts.
My father worked at All India Radio his entire working life, and I was brought up on the salary he earned from there.
I first went behind a microphone at the age of 7 on All India Radio's children's programme and was a regular on it for almost six years, which was a massive learning experience for me.
In my various activities, such as performing on stage, recording voiceovers, providing cricket commentary, or serving as a public speaking coach, it is the training I received from All India Radio that has shaped me into who I am.
The book is therefore an attempt to repay the debt of gratitude I owe the organisation. The choice was therefore not a surprise but a natural extension of my writing.
What was the biggest revelation while researching the book on the national broadcaster?
Whenever I speak about my book, people presume it is a nostalgia trip, and when I began writing the book, I assumed it would be just that -- a paean to a golden past, concluding with a sorry farewell, kind of an ending.
What came as a revelation was that not only is All India Radio on the move, but it is poised for a quantum leap with the use of technology.
I also learnt that All India Radio has a captive audience that does not move from it, regardless of the temptation of private FM channels. Both, needless to say, were heartening.
Despite AIR being all pervasive, there is a perception in the changed scenario that it has become an underdog amid the glitz and glamour of the private radio channels. Do you agree?
Not at all. It still has the most extensive listenership and the most loyal fan base.
It is now heard all over the world in stereophonic sound through the 'NEWS-ON-AIR' mobile app.
Expats can listen to the radio stations of their hometowns through the app and stay connected to their roots, regardless of their location.
For example, the largest listenership for Vividh Bharati outside the country is in Spain.
The labourers who go there for the tomato-picking season feel isolated and cut off from their country and listen to Vividh Bharati to overcome their loneliness.
Similarly, a soldier from Kerala posted in Siachen can listen to his favourite programmes from his local radio station on his mobile.
Also, people in remote hamlets, where there is not even mobile connectivity, listen to and receive radio through the Free Dish.
Where else can you get such stupendous reach? How can a medium with such massive reach and a committed listener base be an underdog?
Why do you think AIR has not been able to become the BBC, which often criticises its own government?
What percentage of private radio and television channels criticise the government? Why blame All India Radio alone? Additionally, it's a public broadcaster, and it has to highlight the achievements of the government.
Notwithstanding this, programmes critiquing the government have been made in the past, though I cannot predict whether they will be in the future.
Any suggestions to AIR for wider reach and greater interaction with its audience?
Better marketing of their tech initiatives so that things like the NEWS on AIR app and the free dish get wider attention and become more popular.
With that, AIR will take a quantum leap in not only its reach but also its revenue.
****
A fascinating excerpt from Akashvani: A Century of Stories from All India Radio.
We meet the Deputy Director General (Central archives), Anshuman Rai, to explore the archives. A tall, bearded, soft-spoken engineer in his early fifties, he has held the current position with AIR for two of his thirty years.
We ask him what content the archives have, and his answer fascinates us.
AIR possesses a national treasure a complete map of the nation's cultural, social, and political life from the twenties onwards.
He takes us to the library, which has miles and miles of tapes systematically stored in a temperature and humidity-controlled environment. We are overwhelmed as he reels off what the tapes contain.
'No one has ever counted the length of the programming available within the archives,' says Rai.
The Prasar Bharati website puts the figure at about 17,000 hours of programming, although many sources estimate it is almost one lakh hours.
'More significant than the quantitative aspect is the nature of the content,' Rai tells us as we sit in his tastefully done-up office in Akashvani Bhavan.
He tells us it is the single largest repository of Indian music, with the rarest of rare recordings in North and South Indian music genres preserved for posterity.
So whether it is Bade Gulam Ali Khan singing Hari Om Tatsat, Pandit D V Paluskar singing Thumakchalatramchandra, M S Subbulakshmi enchanting with her Alivenienducheyvukurinji or Sidheshwari Devi mesmerising with singing a tappa of the Benaras Gharana -- the archives have them all.
The list of recordings available reads like a showcase of the who's who of Indian music.
Rare recordings of Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Ustad Abdul Halim Jaffar Khan, Ustad Vilayat Khan, Ustad Alla Rakha, Pandit Ram Narayan, Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, Pandit Bhajan Sopori, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and Lalgudi Jayaraman are amongst those available in the archives.
Besides this, Pandit Jasraj, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and younger vocalists like Ulhas Kashalkar, Kaushiki Chakraborty, and Jayteerth Mevundi all have recorded for AIR and have their performances stored here.
He says that Jagjit Singh's ghazals, Azia Ahmad Warsi's qawallis and numerous folk forms nestle together in the archives.
He adds, 'These archives are in addition to the Vividh Bharati archives in Mumbai, which has film and light music dating from the pre-Independence era to date.'
We realise that these archives would be ideal if anyone wanted to research the evolution of great musicians as artists.
The researcher would find recordings of almost all of them at various times.
Rai continues, 'Besides this, programmes on Indian folk culture also abound, and interviews with artists and scholars about different facets of India's vast cultural diversity find great representation here. In addition, works of eminent writers in the dramatised form are preserved here.'
'We undertook a campaign for recording folk songs sung at festivals and on occasions like births, naming ceremonies, weddings, etc, from all over India. We put them together in a programme called SanskarGeet. As a result, we have a collection of over 2,000 such songs and have proactively contributed to ensuring that the legacy is not lost,' Rai proclaims proudly.
We scan the archives to find a playlist of a hundred speeches by Gandhiji, speeches of Dr B R Ambedkar, Dr Rajendra Prasad, and Sarojini Naidu in the Constituent Assembly, and numerous speeches of prime ministers and presidents of the country.
Stalwarts from the world of business are not neglected either, and numerous audio biographies and interviews with those who shaped the country's industrial landscape also find space here.
We turn to Rai to find out what AIR is doing with this treasure.
'First and foremost, there is a need to preserve it lest this rich heritage gets lost to the ravages of time," he explains, 'But that is not enough. It has to be presented to people to engage with and relish. There is no point in letting it lie in an airconditioned crypt -- unheard and unsung.'
He explains that with the first objective in mind, a digitisation programme was started in 2004 and continued to grow under different verticals.
In 2018, a separate vertical was created for this activity, and the disparate verticals were brought under a common umbrella called Prasar Bharati Archives, the unit he currently heads.
He tells us that the drive gathered speed in 2019, and his section has digitised almost 95% of all the available content.
He informs us that the balance of 5% was too far gone to salvage, but attempts are being made to convert it by involving specialised agencies.
We ask him how the listeners access the archives, and he explains that his department uploads all the digitised content on four YouTube channels -- DD Cinema, DD Bharti, Prasar Bharati Archives and AIR Ragam.
The last two carry content from AIR, and the first two are from Doordarshan. We go to each of these and, at random, search for clips of various genres.
Searching for Mahatma Gandhi's speeches, for instance, displays multiple options, and each clip shows at least 2000 to 5000 views.
Similarly, searching the Ragam or classical music channel shows many uploaded clips with relatively lesser but steady and rising listenership. This kind of listenership for unheard of content is a big thing.
'People are beginning to notice the content. He tells us that there are often requests from movie and documentary filmmakers or producers of content for OTT platforms for permission to use these as part of their creations. 'We charge them for it, and the trend is only growing.'
His mobile phone rings, and seeing the name, he puts it on speaker mode, enabling us to listen in.
It is a documentary producer from Mumbai asking for an appointment to fly to Delhi to discuss the usage of a clip in her production.
He tells her to hear the clip on YouTube and come over only for a review and contract finalisation.
'See, this is what I was talking about,' he smiles cheerfully as he explains what else is planned.
'Seeing the interest in the uploaded content and the regular stream of enquiries we have been getting, a new policy has been formulated.
'We are now listing our digital assets and offering a menu for use in content creation. We will send this to various OTT channels, content creators, etc, ask them to choose any they might require, and then ask them to bid for them.
'So instead of passively waiting for some creators to discover some clips they may want, we will actively offer the list to them, making the likelihood of enquiries coming in much higher.'
All this is very positive, but what disturbs us is that the subscriber base of the archive channels is relatively low by today's standards. The two channels together have a subscriber base of just 2.12 lakhs.
Excerpted from Akashvani: A Century of Stories from All India Radio by Vikrant Pande and Neelesh Kulkarni, with Neelesh Kulkarni's kind permission.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff