In search of short-wave radio

"What?" says the face of most vendors in Bombay when you mention the word radio.

"What?" says the face of most vendors in Bombay when you mention the word radio.
"Radio," I say, "short-wave radio."
"FM?"
"No, short-wave, SW, SW."
"No."

The "no" is disappointingly curt, never followed with a "maybe you could try" possibly because vendors know it's a futile exercise. "Has no one told you?" one of the vendors, echoing Nietzsche might say. "Radio is dead." Not to the faithful it isn't. You'd think the device has yet to be invented such is people's surprise at hearing of it. Surely all of the outlets stuffed to the brim with SIM cards and mobile phone gadgetry today, not so long ago sold radio sets, many of which had short-wave bands.

u00a0I am now in Goa, off season, denied the pleasure of turning the dial and tuning into: "Pip-pip-pip... This is the BBC, London". When I was 12 in 1984 my grandfather visited us from Iran. He had a hefty of Russian Vega multi-band shortwave radio stuck to his ear. He slept in my room, crackles assailing the clarity of the broadcasters' sentences, thunder claps and the strange sound of a dog being skinned alive played backwards.
u00a0
One night, after he'd fallen asleep, I turned the radio off. He woke up with a start: "Agghh! Who was that? What's happened." I switched it back on and he went back to sleep.

Grandpa couldn't read or write. He was a soldier who had been stationed in Soviet Union in the 1930s and spoke the language. Now a retired taxi driver, he was a keen Radio Moscow listener. His children were used to reading him the newspaper in the morning, probably as he held his Russian Vega radio to the other ear.

The first place he wanted to visit in London was Greenwich the centre of time, Greenwich Mean Time, which surely radio had familiarised him with. The BBC Persian service started in 1941 and is widely perceived to have played an instrumental role in Iran's 1979 revolution.

So, today, in India, I miss the BBC both as an Iranian and a Brit - of course, there's BBC World TV but it does things radio can't get away with you get five minutes of graphics to its signature tune that tell you the temperature in Delhi, Peking and Kuala Lumpur before thinking 'Did I just watch the temperature in six different cities for five minutes?'

You can't do that, in radio, lull people into a sense of hypnosis. Radio, as the rather tuned-in Marshall McLuhan put it, is a hot medium.

A radio on this trip would, so far, have spared me the photograph of a dead Tamil Tiger rebel leader, all bloated and goggle-eyed, which is how I imagine the average US TV viewer to be.

Celebrations over the victory of Manchester United and the Congress party over one weekend would be left to my imagination, with Ms Sonia Gandhi tossing Mr Manmohan Singh in the air with him landing and performing a little jig, like footballers do when they score a goal. As it was, Mr Singh politely smiled as Ms Gandhi, in wonderful gender-role reversal, gently handed him flowers.

Also, this week I would have been spared the sight of policemen in the Islamic Republic of Iran beating up young people protesting the 're-election' of President Ahmadinejad. "Don't worry," said my friend Chiara, who is Indian. "Both of our countries are in a mess." "Yes," I said, "but what we Iranians wouldn't give for a bit of India's secular democracy."

In the world of the image, the imagination is left starved. Still, here in Goa, it's helping my new radio to work the market in Mapusa finally yielded one. It's ridiculously light plastic box, Chinese, and doesn't pick up anything, not even FM it just crackles. This is despite its claim to pick up "TV sound".

"Last for two days," said the vendor, with refreshing honesty. "Or two years, if you treat well who knows."u00a0 It cost Rs 120 which could have bought me a good few dosas on my starving writer's budget but while I cannot explore the waves for the world's English language output, sometimes stopping at French broadcasts to marvel at the language I never bothered to learn, the crackles of this otherwise useless box help me sleep.

Iranian-born Peyvand Khorsandi is a journalist and stand-up comic based in London. He is in Goa writing his first collection of short stories.

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