Last week, I had the chance to visit the "museum of waste" of Goonj in Sarita Vihar, which showcases a collection of unused old items donated to the NGO. There, I saw this absolute beauty, a large vintage radio set along with speakers, that brought back a few childhood memories.
For middle class families with no store-rooms, balconies were the place to hoard junk items, and ours had a 2 ftx1ft skeleton of a radio taking most of the space. Made by one of my mom's maternal uncles and gifted to her in her wedding, the radio was lying non-functional for quite some time when I first noticed it, but it had its uses for me. The parts of different shapes and sizes fascinated me and I imagined it to be a laboratory full of modern machines and myself as a famous inventor. I was Marie Curie. What science did to me or what I did to science in later years is a different story altogether, one I am not too eager to discuss. The radio set also doubled up as the machine room of Titanic as I played the captain of the ill-fated ship. It always had a happy ending as the 8-year-old version of myself successfully dodged the iceberg every time.
We had a functioning radio too, of Murphy company. Two knobs for power and volume, one for stations, Akashvani Kolkata, Vividh Bharati, Yuva Vani, East Bengal-Mohun Bagan football match relay. The radio used to be on all day, mostly churning out songs and causing no distraction because it is a gadget which can keep running and you can go on with your usual work unhindered. Till now, I inexplicably remember random things I used to hear at that time on the radio, such as a four-line song made for advertising the merits of a particular insecticide or the title track of a horror drama series that used to be on air at 12 noon every Saturday.
But my earliest memory of that radio set is a joyous one. It was during the 1983 cricket World Cup, or the Prudential Cup, as the papers used to call it. I used to watch, half asleep, as everyone else in the family would gather round the radio late at night, in darkness, to listen to the relay of the matches. I will look at the blinking red and yellow lights and drift off to sleep and in the next morning, the breakfast table will come alive with discussions on the exploits of Mahinder Amarnath or Kapil Dev. On the night of the final match, I woke up to the sound of bursting of firecrackers. The lights were on. One of my sisters requested my mom to allow her to go to the flat of one of the neighbours to watch the award presentation ceremony. Mom said yes and she rushed out. Theirs was the only house in the society to have a television set then and it was a common occurrence that half of the mohalla will turn up there for such special occasions. No one used to mind at that time. And no one ever thought there will be a TV in your pocket one day.
That's enough for today, now let me put on my earphones and listen to AIR FM
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