LOOKING BACK
The news read by ...
REBECCA ABRAHAM
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Listening to accents on radio was a source of fun in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Growing up in the India of the 1960s and early 1970s, the news on the radio was read by Lotika Ratnam, Shurajeet Sen, and Bam-b-dam Singh — three of a handful of voices whose super posh accents rang out of a brown leather covered radio transporting us to a world outside our own.
A little later, at my school in Delhi I had an elocution teacher, a Mrs. Roy, whose refined accent some of us struggled to understand. Rumour had it that she spoke this way because she had worked at All India Radio. Her mission was to improve our speech, but before allowing us to open our mouths she worked on our posture. She had us stand up tall and straight like the kids in the “Sound of Music”: heads up, shoulders back, hands in front, fingers clasped just so. Then she got us to throw our voices to the back of the classroom, shape our mouths in a perfect ‘o’ and produce bewilderingly different sounds at the beginning of a “when” and a “vase”. Pretending to be one of the von Trapp kids was no problem for me; what I struggled with was the “when” and the “vase”.
A revelation
And so with perfect postures and improved voices we recited lines by unheard of poets and read aloud from long-winded passages of prose. Then somewhere in between all this, while listening to Mrs. Roy’s now easy-to-understand voice, I had a revelation: how could someone’s name be Bam-b-dam Singh? When what you have always taken for granted is found to be not so, the earthquake that happens in the mind is never forgotten. So it is that I often return to the moment when it dawned on me that Bam-b-dam Singh was actually Pamela Singh, said in an All India Radio presenter’s posh voice.
Now, my father listens to the BBC World Service and, at 85 he may well be their oldest and most avid listener in all of South India. A few years ago rushing to get home in time for a much anticipated programme and realising he wouldn’t make it, he stopped his tiny Maruti 800 on the side of a not-so-busy road, stuck his radio out of the window, pulled its aerial out, turned it on, sat back and listened. As far as he was concerned nothing — curiosity of onlookers, strange looks from people in cars puttering by or embarrassment of grandchildren — was going to come between him and his relationship with the BBC.
Thanks to him, I too (in somewhat distant Hong Kong) listen to the BBC World Service and, as I do, I listen for the names of the presenters. While I am not terribly excited by the easily decipherable Fergus Nicoll or Peter Day or even Lyse Doucet, what thrills me are names like Blay-dee-goga and Komla-dumond.
As I hear them say their names my mind does a cartwheel and I thank my lucky stars that even though I now know that Gucci is said somewhat like Kochi and Chicago is not, my life continues to have its Bam-b-dam Singh moments. Then I wonder what my father, reclining in his cane chair in small town Kerala, makes of what he is hearing: ‘The news read by Blay-dee-goga’. And no, I have never tried to find out what her name actually is.
The writer lives in Hong Kong.
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