Wednesday, June 18, 2014

AIR FM Rainbow India : what's the buzz?

Listening to the RADIO is one of my favourite pastimes and in the days of the ubiquitous short wave, DXing was one of my hobbies, besides philately and a bit of numismatics.

DXing was when we would try to get the most obscure radio stations on our portable short wave radios, listen into the programmes and send reception reports to the radio stations, receiving QSL cards, free programmes, T-shirts and other cool stuff  via return mail.

The last T-shirt I received was from Worldspace Radio... my obsession from 2004 to 2006, when it sadly folded up without warning.

The radio station that I currently tune into is none other than the AIR FM Rainbow India channel of All India Radio. The western music shows are of interest to me, and they have The Matchless Music Hour on from 9 am to 10 am everyday. This actually means about 40 minutes of Western Music if you shave off 5 minutes for the news bulletins and 5 minutes for the ads... and believe this about 12 minutes for THREE Hindi songs [oldies] that are inserted in the show.

This is clearly an aberration for the national broadcaster. Why can't Rainbow India  have its own old Hindi music show and let us have an hour of western music un-interrupted? Whose hare-brained idea was this anyway?

You can also tune into the 12 noon show called Play it Cool and another 6 pm slot on weekday evenings. The Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evening shows are usually well compered. The 12 pm slots are rather patchy, good on some days and indescribably amateurish and sloppy on others.

My own relationship with AIR western music programmes, as a listener go back several years, in fact to infancy when one tuned into AIR Calcutta B for Musical Bandbox, and later when AIR Delhi B western music request shows would be inundated with requests from 'The Gangtalk Gang' - Tsewang, Prabhat rai, Kesang, Frank Krishner were regulars then, again in 2004, when I was in Delhi for a short spell, AIR western music shows did receive my active participation as a listener.

AIR FM rainbow is the ONLY source for western music over radio in most of the small towns of the North and East.Several kids who want to improve their English try to tune in to these shows.

The RJs should take their responsibilities seriously, check their diction and grammar, prepare their scripts well, because AIR is the national broadcaster, and it's not meant to be a 'hip' 'sloppy' and 'slangy' private radio station.

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