Short-wave radios are interesting little things. Sadly, you get to see very few of them these days. The quality of long distance audio on the Net is obviously much better. Television brings direct visual effects. There is something a bit more active about the short-wave radio however. It has a certain feel and an almost human quality to it.
Maybe, it is the fact that by nature, the short-wave radio is a bit imperfect. Perhaps, it forces you to indulge in a little more imagination. Cricket commentary never felt better than on radio. Lata Mangeshkar sometimes sounds even better on a creaky old short-wave radio. Maybe, I'm getting a bit carried away.
In Calicut, in the late 70s and in the early-to-mid 80s, there was very little television. This was the case with most of non-metropolitan India. Therefore, all of us kids had to rely on our short-wave radios for entertainment. Which mostly translated to cricket commentary.
We had a Philips radio -- bought when we were in Calcutta for a while. To my young mind, this somehow seemed to strengthen the Kerala-Bengal bond. Brought up by parents who have a great appreciation of Calcutta and its culture, this seemed to mark out the radio for even greater approval.
It had a small, roughly triangular break in the glass that enclosed the dial. That was where the knob that changed the bands met the glass. Medium-wave was when the knob pointed upward. This was mostly used for home tests. 9:45 AM during a home series meant switching the radio on. Listening to the long, high-pitched beep before live programming began, gave you a special thrill. It was the perfect lead up to the morning of a test match. When the beep gave way to the All India Radio signature tune, you moved a little closer. When the announcer said first in Hindi and then in English that you were being transferred to the test match venue for live commentary, you felt a small tingle run up your spine.
My most abiding memory of AIR cricket commentary is that of Anant Setalvad. His gentle, coaxing voice. Setalvad seemed to sound extra special during tests at the Wankhede. His knowledge of cricket seemed beyond reproach. Deep, booming voices are often the object of much appreciation. But, Setalwad was different. He never raised his voice, seemed in total control always and yet raised a gentle feel of anticipation as he described the bowler running in. Or as he put it, "...as we wait for Kapil Dev to come in to bowl...."
At times, our radio wouldn't have proper reception. I used to hop over the open rain-water drain that acted as some sort of separator between our house and our neighbour's when my friend Sankar's radio worked better. The fence between our houses we had cut a gap in, but the drain we couldn't get rid of. Sankar had perfected this art of putting the radio close to the telephone to get better reception. Once, in the middle of one such hop over the drain, I heard the sound on his radio go up in a crescendo. I rushed up to the radio. Something that had happened only once before had happened again. Gavaskar had been out first ball -- c Shivnarine b Clarke 0. It was the Bangalore test of the '78-'79 West Indies series. Cricketing dismissals have a tableau-like aspect to them. You tend to remember exactly what you were doing when someone got out.
There were a few in the AIR commentary teams of the late 70s and early 80s who had commentating quirks you never forget. Suresh Saraiya used to sound almost like a Raju Bharathan article read out aloud. For Suresh, adverbs always came in pairs. A ball on legstump was always hit gracefully as well as effectively. It was almost as if he didn't want to stop describing a stroke. There was a curious sing-song quality to his commentary that went well with the adverb pairs. Now, I reflect on his enjoyment of the game, then I fancy I used to snigger a bit. Another commentator you tend not to forget was Jaiprakash Narayan, father of current cricketer J P Yadav. At times, you felt he was directing some military manoeuvre as he described the field as a bowler ran into bowl. It was almost as if he was commanding someone to attention, as he invariably ended with "a fine leg right on the boundary". He used to refer to himself as Narayan Jaiprakash, why, I never quite understood. When Narayan Jaiprakash returned you to the studios of All India Radio, it seemed like you'd just finished flipping through the index of some big book.
Akash Lal with his pseudo-Australian accent used to be the subject of much ridicule amongst us friends. But, I suppose in some strange way, he added a bit of colour to the commentary. The Hindi commentators used to sound fairly similar except for Jasdev Singh and Sushil Doshi. Sushil Doshi for some reason created in me a sense of expectation -- I think it was the crispness of voice --that to some extent rivaled Henry Blofeld's "He's up to the wicket, he bowls". Jasdev's command of the Hindi language couldn't be missed even by the not-so fluent in Hindi.
It was not just the commentators that had quirks. The commentary schedules also had certain patterns you got used to after a bit. The pre-lunch session never had breaks, the session between lunch and tea was the worst breaks-wise. AIR Calicut had all sorts of news bulletins and sundry other programmes from 12:30 to 2:10 PM, so unless you were creative enough to find non-local radio stations like AIR Madras that had just the one news break, you were pretty much stuck as far as commentary went, till ten past two. Once, during the '78-'79 Australia series in India, I remember listening impatiently to a news bulletin in Tamil during the early post-lunch session of one of the tests when suddenly barely audible over the news reader's voice, I heard a commentator excitedly announce an Australian batsman's dismissal. On perking up my ears a bit, I found it was Graeme Wood. I felt the same rush of adrenalin a journalist would feel when he's stumbled upon a scoop.
Radio Australia had a special feel to it. Mostly because if you are in India, tests in Australia started so early in the morning. If ever there was proof needed that geography dictates national character, this was it. There's nothing that quite matches the feeling that a kid gets when the first thing he does on getting up is fiddle in the dark with a radio dial. Ears straining expectantly for Alan McGilvray and Jim Maxwell, he is what philosophers would say, one with the radio. It's not very dissimilar to what athletes feel when they are in the zone.
Fine tuning into Radio Australia wasn't too difficult on our radio since 13m band was at extreme left on the dial. You simply turned the dial so far left that the dial needle actually stood up a bit, the twine that tied the dial to the needle could stretch only so much. BBC needed more deft manoeuvring. I think I first found BBC during the India-England series in England in '79. Gower made a brilliant unbeaten 200 at Edgbaston and since that knock, I used to hope Don Mosey would be on air when Gower eased lazily into a cover drive. Everything seemed in slow synchrony and blended perfectly into each other -- the cover drive, the polite, controlled applause of the English crowd and the deliberate tones of the Alderman. Absolutely nothing could beat Henry Blofeld's idiosyncratic allegories -- Curtley Ambrose was variously described as an animated beanstalk and standing arms akimbo rather like a teapot. Brian Johnston was well, an institution. I still listen and chuckle at the famous leg-over clip on the BBC website.
On an India trip three years back, I landed in Bombay on the first day of the India-New Zealand test series. I wandered around Sahar Airport looking for someone listening to commentary of the first day's play at the Wankhede. Soon enough, I heard the strains of static-filled medium-wave commentary from a duty-free shop. I hadn't heard Anant Setalvad in years. I felt like I'd seen a long-lost friend. Years of television viewing hadn't dimmed my appetite for radio. The Packer series is credited with making cricket telecasts what they are today, but surely, the real work had been done earlier. For, half the viewing pleasure we experience now must come from seeing the worlds these radio commentators helped us imagine then.