Sudheer S, senior manager with Philips, says changing values have determined the new shapes. “The radio, at one time, was the family entertainer. Now, families no longer listen to the radio together. The teenager of today certainly doesn’t want to share his entertainment with his parents or siblings. It’s his own thing, so the FM radio with its attachable ear plugs is a big hit,” he says.
His colleague Rajesh Bansal from the marketing division adds: “The radio market, including the unorganised sector, is worth Rs 170 crore and divided unevenly between the standalone radio and the digital FM radio that we launched in the late 1990s when FM was taking off.” The sales graphs of the two types reflects the demography of India—the standalones and two-in-ones “do well” in the non-metros, especially the rural belts of the Bimaru region, while the latter is flooding markets everywhere else.
“In recent years, we’ve seen the digital FM sets sweep into villages and small towns earmarked for the traditional radio sets,” says Sudheer, adding that the typical standalone radio buyer is “a farmer between the ages of 20 and 50”.

Look a little deeper and you’d notice that the farmer is also a man caught in a cusp, a custodian of the old-fashioned values urban India once boasted and now despises—thrift, utilitarianism and community feeling. For him, the radio-sum-cassette/CD player is value for money. Not for him the iPod that can do only so much.
Somali Pant, a 24-year-old civil engineer, explains her own fixation with the radio: “It was a part of my growing-up years. I remember the late-night plays that my parents would listen to. It’s amazing how ‘visual’ they were; we could almost see the villain creaking the door open, the rain pattering down the roof in a stream,” she says. Then, there were those humid summer evenings of long power cuts “when there was no TV and people gathered on terraces with their radios.”

... contd.