The bulky radios of the 1960s that came with valves, aerial wiring and earthing and took long minutes to warm up before the first cackle came through are now the stuff of reminiscences. “Our Murphy occupied a shelf in the dining room and family time-table revolved around it. My husband left home for office just as the Rabindrasangeet on Akashvani Kolkata ended. I had lunch with the Mahila Mandal programme on the same station and served dinner in time for the evening news on AIR. We didn’t have to check the clock. We knew the hour of the day from the programme being aired,” says Savita Mitra, 60, a political activist in Durgapur, West Bengal.
Her husband had bought the radio when she arrived as a young bride from Kolkata, too new to mingle with anybody, too shy to talk to the neighbours. She wanted a Murphy, because she, like all her friends, loved the brand’s mascot—the cute Murphy baby. “It cost more than a thousand rupees,” she says. Expensive, but essential. Every day, after her husband left for work, she filled her empty house with AIR. “Neighbourhood women began to drop in and we’d listen to the programmes together. Slowly, the new town became familiar territory.”
Today, the modern radio is sharp, smart and digital; cigarette case-shaped devices priced at a few hundred and aimed at a crowd for whom short and medium waves do not exist. These are the digital FM radios that, industry experts promise, will shrink further in size.

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