Commentary was an art, then

Aditya Mukherjee 

Today’s young generation may not have heard much about the word ‘transistor’ in this age of smartphones and social media. Perhaps they can’t even imagine how riveting and pulsating radio commentary — both in Hindi and English — on Test cricket used to be back in the Seventies and the Eighties.  In fact, cricket and commentary had become an inseparable part of our growing-up years. In those days, not every middle-class household could afford to own a TV set. Its chief presiding deities were a radio and a transistor set. The latter came in handy for listening to running commentary, as due to its portability, it could be carried either in a small bag or even in one’s trouser pocket.

 When I was a school-going student, many of my friends would furtively fish out a transistor set during lunch hours, joined in by other cricket-crazy students, who huddled around this small talkative piece, and had their ears glued to the hypnotic voice of Ravi Chaturvedi, Sushil Doshi and Jasdev Singh. Besides being gifted with a voice of the first water, their impeccable Hindi diction, choice of words, and voice modulation, made the commentary absorbing. There was so much to learn from their language while enjoying their eloquent commentary.

On several occasions, our principal caught students listening to radio commentary on the sly. He would promptly snatch the transistor and later return it with a warning. Such was the allure and attraction of radio commentary during those days.

Only cricket matches played in Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium used to be telecast live on the black-and-white TV sets. To catch up with matches played outside Delhi, all we had to do was to tune in to AIR.

A palm-size contraption, the transistor held its own charm. With a mere twirling of the knob, the speakers crackled and came to life. A frisson of excitement would run through us as we got connected to a live match, awaiting with bated breath the completion of Sunil Gavaskar’s century, or reacting with trepidation every time Pakistan’s flamboyant batsman, Zaheer Abbas, went on hitting a flurry of boundaries.

Even paan and barber shops had either a radio set or a transistor blaring out the commentary, with customers animatedly discussing and clinically dissecting Kapil Dev’s bowling spell, Vivian Richards’ destructive batting or Chetan Chauhan’s slow-as-a-snail innings. One can say radio and transistors had a virtual monopoly over our lives.

 These innocuous battery-powered contraptions have long faded into obsolescence. What we have today is live mobile streaming of one day and Test matches on our smartphones. Looking at today’s TV cricket commentators, one gets the feeling that the art of commentary is dying. One can’t but feel nostalgic about those simple old days when radio commentary made so much difference to our humdrum lives.