#365DaysOfWriting – Day Fifty-Eight
The lost art of listening to the FM.
I’m listening to Red FM 93.5 right now as I sit in my cab. If I had to think of the last time I listened to the FM for such a long stretch, I would have to go back to my college days. Almost 10 years back. Bloody hell, I’m old, but that’s beside the point.
It was sweetly infuriating
Red FM has this segment called ‘चार superhit गाने चिपक के।’ (Four superhit songs back-to-back). Out of the 4, only one song would be the one you liked, the other 3 would be trash. On the occasional glorious day I would get 3 good songs (that’s probably happened a sum total of 3 times in my whole life) but never 4. And once you’ve heard your favourite song, you’d have to wait for it to be played again. That wait was sweet agony.
The ‘no-range’ zone
FM Radio was the granddaddy of no-range long before our mobile phones. When we’d go for a long drive just to the outskirts of the city, the quality of the transmission kept getting worse until it was just static. Then we’d just turn it off in frustration.
The cricket scoreboard
Move over, ball-by-ball text commentary on ESPNCricinfo. On 107.1 FM, you could listen (still think you can) to live commentary during important India matches. This was especially important for a cricket fan back in the day because the Internet hadn’t evolved that much on the mobile, and if you were stuck in traffic there was no where else you could get the score from, apart from calling home.
The cool dude
I remember being one of the first among my friends to get a phone that played FM. My value instantly went up and I was suddenly ‘cool’. God knows how many people I shared headphones with.
Then of course, the iPhone and iTunes came along. And I could listen to my favourites whenever I wanted to.
