From a bulky box at the centre of family life to a gizmo for the iFirst generation, the radio has shrunk in size. The memories haven’t. Tune in, you’ll hear the history of a nation
They were the listening generation. They crowded around a box every evening, fumbled through the airwaves and adjusted their watches to the evening news. Every neighbourhood had somebody with a Murphy, Bush or Philips, and every family wanted one, just as much as they wanted a new Ambassador.
They were a generation that proudly brought the country to a halt on March 15, 1975 because they had to listen to a radio. They still remember That Day. Hockey World Cup finals. India vs Pakistan. Captain Ajit Pal Singh’s boys out in the middle. Inside the Kuala Lampur stadium, the cheering is deafening. On the roads of India, the silence is deafening. Shops are shuttered, offices are empty, buses haven’t left the terminus, even trains have come to a standstill. The only thing that’s working is the radio, in drawing rooms, club houses, hospital corridors, government offices, garden sheds, bidi factories, college canteens...

Everybody is watching with their ears as the team parries and blocks and as, in an adrenaline-drenched strike, the master dribbler Ashok Kumar sends the ball flying towards the nets. “GOAL,” shouts a victorious nation.
India wins 2-1.
Did the generation that saw it happen, ball for ball, almost as if they had ringside seats, know they had lived through history? “Nobody would believe it now that once upon a time, India had come to a stop because the people wanted to listen to the radio,” recalls Aslam Sher Khan, one of the biggest stars of that long-ago moment.
It was one of hockey’s last hurrahs; the coming years would see another sport emerge as our unofficial national game, and another medium would feed the eyeballs of sports-lovers. But despite the proliferation of the television, the radio, against all logic, has refused to fade away.
It has changed in design and style, reflecting, more than any other lifestyle product, the transforming dimensions of India as it travelled from a closed economy—where one needed a licence to own a radio—to a liberal one and continued on a global trajectory. Of the big, old brands, Murphy and Bush have long since left India and National Echo of the Tata group was acquired by Philips, one of the few names from another era that still survives.

... contd.