HAVING MY SAY - How India Found Its Frequency
When the Indian government finally decided to "open the airwaves" to private enterprises in the mid-to-late 90s, media houses went positively giddy with excitement. Another platform to monetize. Another avenue for growth. Free-to-air music bundled with conversations.
What's not to love?
Never mind that many of the big players would eventually mess up the maths, bid far too aggressively and inadvertently self-sabotage their own business plans. The ripple effects of that bad math, misplaced ambition and (some would whisper) bloated egos continue to echo through the industry decades later.
But hindsight, as they say, is a luxury.
At the time, everyone was far too busy mapping out ambitious plans with very little foresight. Let's face it—we had little. This was all new territory and almost everyone was a rookie at the game.
No Regrets, Always.
It was in the lead-up to this frenzied period that I found myself assisting consultant Brian Tellis at the Times of India head office. I fondly recollect us rattling the plush wood-paneled walls on the Directors' floor with our raucous laughter and spots of mischief. No regrets.
Over the next couple of years though, we got busy cooking up a cracker of a project with Mr. Arora firmly at the helm. Suffice to say, I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck into everything. And I mean everything.From hardware and software to studio design. Deep diving into the programming and production systems being used as benchmarks in mature international markets those days. Data assimilation. Focus groups. Soundscape mapping. Talent scouting. Talent training. The lot. The learning curve was tremendous.
Big Ask of a Little Town
With licenses finally in place, the city of Indore was picked as the proof of project. A big ask for a little town that didn't even have a professional recording studio at the time. Everything had to be built from the ground up.While the infra and tech teams worked that plot, we spent our days pounding the pavements, hitting the city's hotspots, busting out a sweat, recce-ing markets, streets, public spaces, schools and neighbourhoods in real time.
IRL, in Gen Z speak .
Blueprints, Boot Leather and a Very Steep Learning Curve
We mapped demographics, built listener profiles, studied habits and behaviours. We fine-tuned programming templates, refined production workflows, tested and retested everything. Much of what emerged from that exercise would eventually become the blueprint for stations that followed. The grunt work was relentless. The hours were ridiculous. The learning curve, steep.
I'm guessing that workload alone would send today's Gen Z into a tailspin of mental health days and wellness breaks. Then again, AI could probably compress six months of that slog into a long weekend today.
Very different times.
Radio's Technological Leap
But at that point in Indian broadcasting history, radio was about to take one of its biggest technological leaps. We moved decisively into the digital ecosystem. I vividly recollect working on bringing Radio Computing Software (RCS) into the country. It was then considered the gold standard of broadcast software worldwide. (A shout-out here to Richard Rene and Elliot Stechman )
What a game changer. Suddenly radio could be programmed, scheduled and managed with a level of sophistication we'd only imagined before. The flip side, of course, was that these fancy proprietary technologies would eventually become expensive habits that took a healthy bite out of the bottom line.
Again. Hindsight.
No Pipeline. No Rules. Just Spark.
The fun, however, was in talent scouting. It happened everywhere. There were no boundaries. One of my favourite stories from that era involves Polly — better known as RJ Mantra aka Mantra Mugdh —who was quite literally poached from the front desk of the hotel we were staying at in Indore.
The industry was full of stories like that. There was no talent pipeline. No influencer culture. No creator economy. You simply spotted people with spark and gave them a chance to dazzle behind a microphone.
Blueprint to Brick-and-Mortar
For me personally, watching a project manifest from blueprint to brick-and-mortar was what kept me juiced. I loved every bit of it. Over the next few years, I found myself involved—some projects more intimately than others—in helping set up the first seven stations of what would eventually become India's leading radio network: Radio Mirchi.
A special shout-out to a cracker of a team led by Pritam Parigi, alongside Prashant Panday and Sunil Sahjwani These big boys understood the assignment and built a legacy that continues to fuel the network's leadership position in the industry today.
The Pivot
Concurrently, I was co-hosting the 'Good Morning Mumbai' breakfast slot with Brian Tellis (ex Co-Founder Fountainhead Solutions Pvt Ltb ) And this is where we fully pivoted from analogue to digital on-air systems. The transformation was both exciting and extraordinary. Systems became streamlined. Hardware and software began taking over processes that had once been entirely manual. Libraries stored in physical formats now had to be digitized.
Which sounds simple until you're the one doing it. Data entry. Like I said, we worked the plot from the grass roots up. We spent agonizing hours entering metadata into RCS. Every song had to be tagged with copious amounts of data then. Mood. Tempo. Timbre. Theme. Category. etc. etc. etc. Hundreds. Then thousands. I was weirdly fascinated by it all. See, I've always been a bit of a tech junkie and an incurable futurist, which meant I thoroughly enjoyed getting under the hood and trying to understand the tricky and sticky bits.
The Future Was Humming
To me, the future felt tangible. I could almost hear it humming. Meanwhile, outside the studio, life was changing too. I got busy starting a family. And what looked like a six-month sabbatical seemed like a perfectly sensible idea.
Just six months. A little pause. A little reset. Nothing dramatic.
Or so I thought...
Why This Matters To You
If you're in media today, it's worth remembering that some of the country's most successful radio brands weren't built in boardrooms. They were built in marketplaces, on school playgrounds, at college canteens, train stations and bus stops, around chai wallahs and local addas.
Long before dashboards, algorithms and audience analytics, we had shoe-leather research, instinct and curiosity.
Technology may have evolved. Human behaviour hasn't.
The lesson wasn't so much as 'how to build radio'. The lesson was how to manifest something from nothing.
That addiction has never left me.
Next up…
The sabbatical that wasn't, the broadcast school that almost was, and Mumbai's first urban Community Radio Station that most definitely happened.
Disclaimer
This essay is based on real events, real people and copious quantities of caffeine.
However,
Thirty years has a funny habit of compressing timelines, polishing punchlines, hiding names behind dusty filing cabinets in the brain and elevating ordinary conversations into extraordinary ones. That's the thing with memory ...ok, my memory. Some names may have escaped me entirely, while others may have been creatively embellished.
These essays aren't fiction, nor are they intended to be the definitive history of Indian radio. They're simply my recollection of a wonderfully chaotic career, told through my gloriously unreliable lens of lived experience.
To every colleague, mentor, producer, engineer, executive, intern, artist, listener, client, student and fellow troublemaker who crossed my path—thank you. If I haven't mentioned you here, please don't mistake the omission for a lack of affection. After all, this is a quick skim through three decades—not the unabridged memoir. The full memoir would probably run to several tomes, multiple playlists and at least one therapist.
Until then, we’ll settle for this. Feel free to drop your comments here.
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