A DAY before the first Russian sputnik was fired on Oct. 4, 1957. All India Radio introduced its programme of Vividh Bharati.
The two events are unrelated. But the chief producer of Vividh Bharati loves to mention them together with a grin for, though not as spectacular as the progress of man’s space-probing, Vividh Bharati has grown into a popular programme.” A measure of the listeners’ interest is the receipt, on an average, of 30,000 letters every month.
Vividh Bharati programmes are simultaneously broadcast over 19 of AIR’s 36 stations. They include the powerful stations of Delhi, Bombay and Madras, the not-so-powerful Calcutta, and fifteen other 1 kw. stations. Of the lesser stations, four each are in the South and western India and the rest in northern India.
Mr Narendra Sharma, the chief producer, explained that Vividh Bharati was conceived as a “digest programme” much like “digest literature.” Its effort was to present, largely, light music--devotional and folk songs, recorded film songs and the like.
But to break the monotony of an all-song listening, the programme is punctuated with features like Chitrashala, Hawa Mahal, Chitra Dhwani and Patravali in which are presented skits, interview with film stars and light talks. After the national emergency, Hindi news is broadcast twice a day.
Beginning with a daily five-hour broadcast on week-days and seven hours on Sundays and festival days, the listening hours have now been increased to 11.5 hours on weekdays and 13 hours on Sundays, Saturdays (to provide alternative listening to the national programme) and holidays.
{{/usCountry}}Beginning with a daily five-hour broadcast on week-days and seven hours on Sundays and festival days, the listening hours have now been increased to 11.5 hours on weekdays and 13 hours on Sundays, Saturdays (to provide alternative listening to the national programme) and holidays.
{{/usCountry}}Why Vividh Bharati is considered a “digest programme” is because this comprises items selected from various stations, re-edited to appeal to the uninitiated, processed and taped into “gold copies” for simultaneous broadcasting from many points. A digest does not appeal to the high-brow, and the high-brow is precisely not the one Vividh Bharati wants to reach.
Among the most popular programmes is the listeners’ request for recorded film songs. The bulk of letters received relate to this programme. The requests reflect the popularity that play-back singers enjoy otherwise. Lata Mangeshkar tops, followed by Mohammed Raft Others popular with listeners are Mukesh, Asha Bhonsle, Manna Dey, Mahendra Kapur, Talat Mahmud and Suman Kalyanpur.
The listeners are spread over a wide area. Outside India, requests come from East Africa, South-east Asia, Mauritius, Ceylon, Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan. Letters have also been received from Europe and Japan.
Is it all praise that listeners bestow on Vividh Bharati? There is a considerable body of critics. Some object to the repetition of programmes (non-musical), others dislike a certain kind of music which have been broadcast, many grudges not playing the records of songs AIR has rejected and several complain that their requests have not been attended to.
Most of the critics fall in the last category. But Vividh Bharati has a long-winding arrangement and the earliest that it can play a request is 21 days.
Though its headquarters is in Delhi, the letters are received in Bombay. They are processed, arranged, the songs taped and duplicates sent to all the stations for simultaneous broadcasting. This takes up three weeks.
Mr Sharma agreed that a requested record should be played within about 10 or 12 days. But this, he insists, is impossible as long as Vividh Bharati units are divided between Delhi and Bombay, where the Vividh Bharati programme originally started.
The ideal of ten days may be reached when the Bombay Broadcasting House building is completed after about a year and Vividh Bharati units centralised there. But when the projected net-work of 28 stations for adequate coverage of the whole country will be achieved is anybody’s guess.