Remembering Rita Mukherjee and Yuva Vani: Indira Gandhi's vision for youth radio

JULY’S SECOND HALF, in 1969, was tumultuous. Deputy prime minister Morarji Desai resigned on the 16th, miffed at the finance portfolio being taken away from him. Three days later, the government of prime minister Indira Gandhi nationalised 14 private banks which cumulatively held 70 per cent of the deposits in the country. The split in the Congress had begun its sharp cleave.

 

That did not deter Indira Gandhi, though preoccupied as she otherwise was, from fulfilling a commitment she had made to herself five years earlier as minister for information and broadcasting in Lal Bahadur Shastri’s cabinet. She launched something that had not been attempted in any other part of the world—a radio station exclusively for, by and of the young, for whom, as she said at the inauguration of Yuva Vani on July 21, “your whole life is ahead of you”. She went on to list the attributes she felt the young women and men who would power the station should possess—to be forward-looking, while unashamedly proud of their culture and heritage, and to be fearless, “absolutely fearless”.

 

We were. When you first entered the barracks that housed Yuva Vani, skulking between an imperious Broadcasting House and a carefree 24-hour canteen, your immediate sense was files and folders that seared all visible space. Then, two steps later, you were before Rita Mukherjee, the station’s founder executive, her uncluttered desk gazing serenely on the chaos without, her uncluttered smile one of warmth and welcome.

 

Rita (who passed away three years ago) was the safe harbour from the exciting but chaotic disarray of our teenaged years, so much like the papers piled outside. And she allowed us to sense that disarray was not unique to us, to our demographics, to our backgrounds. Sent into the world with a creaky cassette recorder, we wandered into other people’s lives and were allowed to join in them. Sent into the studio with a pile of vinyl records in our arms, we found our feelings, and those of our friends, and occasionally lovers—made and not yet made—captured in lyric and song.

 

Sent before a microphone with a book to review or to read aloud from, we found assurance in the coherence of organised minds to bring a measure of logic to the desires and despairs of our own. Sent before adults of accomplishment on the programme ‘Firing Line’ (some Very Important Persons, some Less Important, others just Important), we posed questions steeped in political incorrectness and often received answers so marinated as well.

 

We were not the Paris of 1968. We did not need to be. Kindness can bring results more assuredly than violent protest, as we learned from the man whose birth centenary we observed the year Yuva Vani came into being, a man who once described radio as “shakti”. We remained true to Gandhiji. Civility was never surrendered. Yes, political correctness was the A, B and C of All India Radio. But we were D for Delhi.

 

And it was Delhi that particularly animated us, hushed by its tombs and brooding river, warmed by the smile of the child selling flowers at the traffic light, cocooned in the clamour of jostling street vendors—so many lives, so many stories. Rita asked us to tease them out, transforming, in her effective but unobtrusive way, the idea of Yuva Vani from that of the voice of youth to the voices of all the many who would shape young people’s—our—lives.

 

She gave us our identity in whatever form we chose to express it. At first, we were names. And then we became music, each of us beginning a ‘Sunday Requests’ evening we hosted with a “signature tune” uniquely our own. We brought to the studios the magic that shaped our life on campus where, as Nana Mouskouri sang, our loves were young and new, our heavens painted blue, as we lay on the summer grass.

 

She allowed us all, whether listener or presenter, to exult in the excitement of the present, yes, a present with heartache as much as hope, petulance as much as promise, but a present ours to define.

 

And then, all too swiftly, our present became our past and, like Icarus, we would ever so often seek to fly back to what had been, only to find our failing wings were crafted from feathers and wax. But, even if we could not return, she was there to reach out to, and be reached out to by. She never allowed, even as she dealt with the new present, to forget the old past she had so gently tamed, allowing each of us to be who we truly were, for that brief flicker of time before we went on to be who we were expected to be.

 

July 21, 1969 had other heroes, too. One of them, Neil Armstrong, who walked upon the moon that day, was to speak of “great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth’s protective layers”. Euphemisms of phrase, and euthanasia of radical ideas, often shaped those layers, effectively concealing the truth within. We dispelled them; our generation did not need artifice or subterfuge to peel the layers that masked ideas whose very simplicity imbued them with greatness, a secret, in Aubrey Menen’s phrase, which, when we grow old, we begrudge the young.

 

Or, equally, in the exultation of being young, we deny the old. For 45 years we did our best not to, creating a channel by and for the young and yet welcoming of all ages. Inevitably it became a casualty—by 2014, the vast swathe of private and public channels sweeping India’s radio landscape edged it out of an assured listenership. Its sun, which once shone so spontaneously in eternal high noon, had set.

 

And thinking back to the first years, as Yuva Vani ventured its first tentative steps, memory recalls four musicians across the world    giving the touch of finish to a song one of them had authored and which, now collectively, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young planned to record and release.

 

And you, of tender years

Can’t know the fears your
elders grew by

Help them with your youth

They seek the truth before
they can die....

 

Ramu Damodaran’s Yuva Vani feature , Echoes of a Generation, won the 1976 Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union Award for the best radio documentary. He is a former IFS officer who served at the UN for three decades.

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