Wireless in Mumbai.

One thing has always foxed me. While we took to British spellings readily, why didn’t we adapt the favourite British nomenclature ‘wireless’ instead of sticking to ‘radio’? Could it be because our radio was not wireless in the good old days? For instance, our first radio at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html was a multi-band, valve-powered Bush, not the more popular Murphy. It was bought just after 1947 from a huge radio showroom at Opera House which is now no more. It had a green ‘magic eye’ to show whether the listener had fine-tuned the station. If memory serves, it was a gimmick, pure and simple. But the point to note is that it was by no means wireless. There used to be an aerial wire not quite stretched diagonally between two poles at the opposite corners of our terrace. The bottom end of it was inserted in a slot at the back of the radio set. The aerial used to be quite a nuisance especially in the kite-flying season snaring the guide thread whenever we flew kites from the front terrace rather than the one on top of the flat, next to the tiled roof. I remember consulting a weekly or fortnightly guide called (probably) The Listener after the eponymous BBC weekly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Listener known for its literary content. The desi programme guide used to list systematically all the All India Radio stations in three columns on every page. The transmission would start around 6.30 a.m. and would close down at 11.00 p.m. There used to be a couple of breaks in the transmission along the way. I remember listening to Nehru’s famous eulogy at Gandhi’s funeral (“the light has gone out of our lives”) on our radio. http://www.eulogywriters.com/ghandi.htm. I wrote a moving section about it in my still unpublished novel on Gandhi and Hollywood, The Last Gandhi Movie http://www.addgandhi.com/original/. Our Bush radio also brought us endless hours of entertainment including Binaca Hit Parade on Monday evenings from Radio Ceylon and, later on, film songs on Vividh Bharati. In the fifties, the transistor radio debuted in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio. Our first transistor radio set was a Philips bought in 1967 after I started working on the Philips Radio account at Clarion-McCann. It had a built-in aerial as well as an extendable one and worked on battery cells. So, finally radio had turned wireless. The FM era was still far, far away, though.

All this brings to mind what WH Auden wrote:

Let all your last thinks be all thanks:
… … … … … … … … … In boyhood
you were permitted to meet
beautiful contraptions,
soon to be banished from the earth,
saddle-tanks loks, beam engines
and over-shot water wheels.
Yes, love, you have been lucky.

('A Lullaby', April 1972)

How very true.

O Henry. Not your average, run-of-the-mill “Ugly American”.

Reading O Henry in the time of Bush and Powell is quite an eye opener. It dawns on you that empathy with the human condition is not anathema to all Americans. B&P are busy in the holy crusade of single-mindedly resurrecting that sixties' phantasm aptly called (if memory serves) "The Ugly American".

"She began to eat with a sort of dainty ferocity like some starved wild animal." Surely this - and The Gift of The Magi - could have been written only by someone who had observed hunger at close quarters and probably felt its pangs as well. O Henry, born William Sidney Porter, was imprisoned for embezzlement. He borrowed his pen name from Orrin Henry, an Ohio prison guard. Coincidence and chance loom large in his tales. Those two and, yes, the nagging suspicion that, all said and done, the control of events is not at all in human hands. http://www.lsjunction.com/people/porter.htm, http://www.auburn.edu/~vestmon/Gift_of_the_Magi.html

Professional hazards.

Actors are such hoaxes, don’t you agree? Not their fault. It comes with the job. They’re ‘role acting’ on stage, when the cameras are rolling, even in real (not only reel) life when they talk to the gossip rags, to give just a few examples. It happens to all of us, come to think of it. See the stuff ordinary folks like you and me do on camera. Think of the way they dress when they go to watch cricket matches. Think of the way they raise their hands and sway to music in the television tamashas and call attention to themselves in the idiot-box debates. At times, one wonders if the theme line of actors from all walks of life should not be “Watch my lips”? (Excerpted from an old BBC Radio 4 program: BUSH: “Watch my nose: no new taxes.” / QUAYLE: “Er ... Mr President ... That's meant to be ‘Watch my lips’.” / BUSH: “No, Dan. If they watch my lips, they'll see that I'm lying through my teeth. Watch my nose, no new taxes.” / QUAYLE: “Er ... Mr President ... Your nose ... It's getting longer!” http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/90q3/bushl2.html.)

Offshoring’s latest offshoot. Fat of(f) the land.

Just yell “Cease and desist, dude!” if you’ve read this hush-hush outsourcing joke before. “The United States is rapidly outsourcing obesity to India and hopes to shed as many as three trillion pounds of unsightly cellulite annually, President George W. Bush announced today.” Sounds too devious to be his brainwave? Listen to how he explained the diabolically clever plot to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Milwaukee: “most of the millions of jobs outsourced since [I] was elected President were extremely sedentary”. “In the long run, the weight loss more than makes up for the job loss,” is the President’s unrepentant justification. According to the writer of this exclusive story who is no other than the irrepressible Andy Borowitz: “Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam recently said in a nationally televised address that India was ‘in the throes of a Supersizing epidemic,’ adding that ‘the time has come for the Indian people to decide whether or not they want to look like Dick Cheney’.” Wonder how I omitted seeing this not-to-be-missed telecast. Oh, to be an idiot-box addicted couch potato! http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive.asp. (Please look for the 7 April 2004 article: ‘U.S. OUTSOURCES OBESITY TO INDIA’.)