The Death of a Superhero—Video Killed the Radio Star
(You are a radio star) video killed the radio star – Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley.
Putting people up on a pedestal is something I am unable to do. Inherent in-built scepticism being one reason, and in the end, all heroes disappoint. The closer they are to you, the larger is the disappointment. Of course, as is the case with everything else in life, one learns with experience, and the exception proves the rule.
Perhaps the one exception in my case was Ameen Sayani. Sayani, who was 91, died last week. He was my only surviving hero in life. And as someone who never launched a revolution, and after his death inspired people to wear T-shirts with a print of his face so that they could think they were part of a revolution themselves, or as someone who never starred as a lead actor in a movie as an angry young man, or was never a cricketer who could hit these mesmerising straight drives or pull out the helicopter as and when required, or was never a rockstar who committed suicide or died young of a drug overdose, or was never a politician who promised to eradicate poverty or build a temple, Sayani made for an odd and an unlikely hero, whose heydays were close to three decades behind him. But it was what it was.
Sayani came into my life in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when as an angst-ridden teenager I hated anyone and everyone. My rare moments of happiness came when I heard him host the Cibaca Geetmaala—a countdown show of Hindi film songs—every Monday night on Vividh Bharati at 8 pm. (Dear sixties and seventies kids, if you are reading this, I know the show was broadcast on Wednesdays on Radio Ceylon and was called the Binaca Geetmaala. So, this is not a mistake.)
His soothing voice was music to my ears. In an era when load shedding was as common as cheap internet on a smartphone these days, and regular power cuts were the norm, his voice was with me on dull and dark summer nights, on dull and dark winter nights, and dull and dark monsoon nights. It was like he was just talking to me.
The songs played in the countdown show were not very different from the songs of new Hindi movies that played on Vividh Bharati otherwise; it was his voice full of joy and happiness, talking to us in a language we could understand, that made all the difference. And in my deepest darkest moments since those years, when I am trying to be optimistic and build up some positivity in my mind, it is his voice that I try to remember, just saying behno aur bhaiyyon (sisters and brothers, and never brothers and sisters).
In the nearly two decades that I have lived in Mumbai, my fondest memory is that of meeting Sayani, twice, not just once, and having a short conversation with him on both occasions, telling him how much he meant to me growing up.
But our relationship was a short one. The Cibaca Geetmaala ended in 1994 (and from what I remember the name had changed to Cibaca Sangeetmaala by then.) The unregulated rise of cable TV—which first came to large parts of India in late 1991 and to our home in February 1992—destroyed it. If you could watch a songs countdown show on TV, why would you want to just listen to it on radio—Video killed the Radio Star. (Like it is now killing reading.)
Sayani did try to change with the times. If my memory serves me right, he tried doing a countdown show on TV as well. But that didn’t work. (The interesting thing here is that it is not easy to Google up information regarding pre-2000 India.) He tried being an RJ on FM radio as well—that worked better than him being on TV—but he was one of the many RJs out there.
Any success is a product of the time and place we are in. Sayani was a radio star and as radio made way for TV, other stars sprung up and he had to make way for them. Success is also a function of luck and being at the right place at the right time. This factor also had a role to play in Sayani’s success.
The year was 1952. India’s first general election had happened. And Balkrishna Vishwanath Keskar was appointed as the information and broadcasting minister. He was a classical music purist and as Sumant Batra put it in a piece, Keskar “declared that All India Radio (AIR) would not air film songs and virtually banned them from AIR’s menu”.
This immediately created a market gap. People were not going to stop listening to film songs just because a minister wanted to force classical music down their throats. And given that there was a visible unfulfilled societal need, an entrepreneur moved in to satisfy that need, hoping to profit from it.
The entrepreneur happened to be one Daniel Molina. He started a company to produce radio programmes and advertisem*nts, Batra writes. And whom did he hire as the programme director for this? Hamid Sayani, Ameen Sayani’s elder brother.
Now, at the same time, the Swiss company, Ciba, wanted to launch a new toothpaste brand, Binaca Top, in the Indian market. They decided to sponsor a programme called Geetmaala, a countdown of Hindi film songs to be aired on Radio Ceylon—which, as Sidharth Bhatia writes in The Wire, used a powerful short-wave transmitter left behind by the Americans in Sri Lanka (previously, Ceylon) to broadcast. The programme was to be produced by the company that Molina set up.
The trouble was that they were paying Rs 25 per week for this programme. And none of the senior broadcasters at that point were interested in hosting it, forcing Sayani senior to offer the job to his younger brother. Or so the story goes.
As Sayani told Avijit Ghosh of The Times of India in 2009: “Geetmala came on the scene as a low-priced experiment. I was given the job because none of the senior broadcasters cared.” Like is the case with many disruptive innovations, they start small, and typically, the larger players in the market are not bothered with this new competition. Then success comes gradually over the years.
In the case of Binana Geetmaala, success came quick; almost immediately. As Suanshu Khurana writes in The Indian Express: “The first show brought in… 9,000 letters, some requesting songs and others from women fans who liberally sprinkled romantic adulation for the voice they had fallen in love with.” Or as Sayani told Ghosh: “Within a few months, AIR lost a major chunk of its popular listenership.”
Sayani didn’t stop with just Binaca Geetmaala. Over the years, he hosted several other popular radio shows, including the Bournvita Quiz Contest (hosted originally by Hamid Sayani and made famous later on cable TV by Derek O'Brien, now a Rajya Sabha member), Saridon ke Saathi, and S Kumars ka Filmi Muqaddama. S Kumars at that point of time was a famous suiting and shirting brand. Saridon is a headache-relief tablet. Sayani was all over radio and film publicity, and appeared in quite a few movies, playing who else, but himself.
In that sense, I felt a little sad on reading all the obituaries, which introduced him just as a radio announcer. Given that radio has been around for more than 100 years, there have been scores of radio announcers. Sayani was an RJ and an influencer much before these terms even existed.
I remember so many of us wanting to talk like him; wanting to use Sayani-speak like behno aur bhaiyyon, paidaan (rank), sartaj (leader), and baharhaal (anyway) in our everyday conversations. In fact, the RJs who would host shows when FM first came to India would try so hard to sound like Sayani did. Even all the Love Gurus on the various FM channels suffered from a Sayani hangover. Some YouTube stars still do.
But all this started because Hamid Sayani couldn’t find anyone else wanting to host the show at the payment that was being offered. In that sense, Ameen Sayani was at the right place at the right time, a very important factor in the lives of individuals who go on to become extraordinarily successful in their lives. But he grabbed that opportunity and made it his own.
Also, Sayani was a product of an era of scarcity, when music wasn’t available at the touch of a button. At least until the late 1980s—when the success of T-Series ensured that audio cassettes became affordable—in order to listen to music at home one had to be rich. Record players (or what are now fashionably called turntables) were expensive. And so were individual records. I remember my mother’s parents used to have one and it was something that I found endlessly fascinating.
So if the aam aadmi, had to listen to music, they had to either go to the cinema, or wait for the song to be played on radio, explaining the great popularity of Sayani’s countdown show and all the song request shows on Vividh Bharati, which made the small town of Jhumri Telaiya, now in Jharkhand, famous all across the country. Rajnandgaon, now in Chhattisgarh, perhaps came a close second. Vividh Bharati is All India Radio’s popular entertainment channel and was launched in 1957, after the great success of Sayani and Radio Ceylon.
In that sense, Sayani’s popularity was a function of the economics of scarcity. When it came to entertainment, there were only a few options available. Doordarshan, the government’s TV channel, was available in only a few large cities, and for a very limited time during the day. It started to spread across smalltown India in the 1980s.
Our first TV was bought on Christmas Day 1984. And it was an Uptron, produced by a firm owned by the Uttar Pradesh government. Those were the days when quite a few state government firms produced TVs in India. Beltron was a brand produced by a firm owned by the Bihar government. Keltron was from the Kerala government. And then there was EC TV, made by the Electronics Corporation of India.
Getting back to Sayani. He was a product of the era of scarcity. But that wasn’t his fault really. The economic scenario was what it was and he did his best. This also leads to the question whether Sayani would have succeeded like he did, if there was more choice on radio. My heart wants to say yes. But my mind tells me, life has no counterfactuals. So, I really don’t know.
Of course, the world of music has moved on since then. Records were first replaced by cassettes; cassettes by compact discs; compact discs by music downloadable from websites, first pirated and free, and then paid; now music is available on streaming. Earlier one had to store music. Now one can just stream it. Physical space has given way to digital bandwidth. The economics of music has totally changed.
The music companies are not as much gatekeepers as they used to be. That power is now with audio and video streaming companies. That’s where the money primarily is (if at all). And all the singers and musicians these days also need to become social media celebrities as well. Just singing, writing songs, and composing music is simply not enough. That might help create a brand name, but it’s the social media that helps cash in on the brand name and get the moolah in.
Of course, choice has exploded. As Will Page writes in the 2021 book Tarzan Economics—Eight Principles for Pivoting Through Disruption: “Today, streaming companies are adding almost 55,000 unique songs a day; that’s easily a million songs a month, which scales up to over a million albums a year.”
This, in a way, limits the shelf-life of the popularity of a song, unlike the Cibaca Sangeetmaala, where songs would be a part of the ranking for months at end. And cassettes would sell in millions. All that doesn’t happen anymore.
And other than more music: There is more TV. More sports. More news. More text. More books. More Insta reels. More Facebook posts. More tweets. More LinkedIn gyan. More WhatsApp messages. More of Amazon nudging us to buy this and buy that. More of everything, competing for our attention in the same 24 hours that we have.
In that sense, the current media is really competing for our sleep. That’s the last bastion. All this content, as we tend to call it now, has made life more stressful, unlike listening to Sayani’s wonderful voice on radio, where he would talk about this and that and all that.
Indeed, we create the world that we live in, in our minds through our senses. And then that world gradually dies, through the death of people who have gone into our minds through our senses. The death of life as I have lived it has been happening for a while now, but Ameen Sayani’s death has been hardest blow of them all.
Sayani, before announcing the first ranked song of the week, would say: “Aur pehle paidaan par hai…” In my mind, he will always remain my number one hero… the first-ranked… pehle paidan par… with his voice on all the dark-disturbing nights, playing inside my head over and over again. All superheroes don’t go out wearing capes at night to fight crime in the city. Some just talk to you and play some music in between.
Go well Sir!
PS: Some of my friends complained that people in their 20s and even in their 30s have no idea of how big Ameen Sayani was. That’s how life is. How many of us in our 40s and 50s really know who are the heroes of those in their 20s and 30s? Have you ever heard of a musician called Anuv Jain? Or have you heard Aditya A’s Chaand Baaliyan? Or have you heard of Justh, whose song Chor, has just gone viral? Probably no. That’s how it is because most parents kill the little curiosity their kids have in life. And then as these kids grow up, they get stuck in the mundane and the mediocre, and whatever seems to be popular around them at any given point of time. People come. People go. Almost all popularity goes away with time.
PPS: Ameen Sayani rebuffed—rejected is too harsh a word—a thin young man who wanted to become a radio host. He regretted it, but if he hadn’t, we would’ve been deprived of one of the most epochal actors to grace Bollywood. Guess who?
