AIR unspools age-old charm for new audience
CHENNAI: People who know Ko Swaminathan remember him walking into the All India Radio (AIR) office at 7 am with his five inch tape that had a 15 minute recording time. It was a time when there was a scarcity of spool tapes. “Rather than using a seven inch tape with 30 minute recording time, he would use just one 15 minute tape. After making two cuts in the tape, he would erase the tape and re-record in the same one to save tapes,” said V Chakravarthy, Programme Head of AIR, Chennai. Unaware that a few years down the road, his voice, along with warm cups of coffee and crisp newspapers, would drown out the morning din in more homes than he could imagine, Swaminathan inadvertently deprived the world of the chance to listen to the early episodes of Indru Oru Thagaval.
As his popularity grew, his tapes were saved, allowing Zonal Archival Officer S Muthuswamy and his team to digitize what was preserved of the five-minute programme that first began in 1988 and went on until 2012 when Swaminathan retired. The archival recordings, along with a three-hour interview of M S Viswanathan, recordings of veena maestro Emani Sankara Sastry and carnatic vocalist Tanjore Kalyanaraman will be officially released by the AIR at MTR studio, AIR campus, on October 19. For fans such as folk singer Pushpavanam Kuppusamy, it brings back a world of memories.
“He would speak about so many things with a style and sense of humour. I would listen until the very end, especially for the punch that he would close with,” he said.
MSV fans are equally agog. The three-hour interview, originally recorded in 2003, is believed to have been where he first spoke about several things in his life – regrets, relationships and experiences.
Some of them, especially the ones featuring his friend Tamil poet and lyricist Kannadasan, ring in nostalgia, said fans. According to AIR Chennai Programme Executive R Sudarsan, who had interviewed him, MSV had once been waiting for Kannadasan who was to provide the lyric for one of his songs.
Being the ‘night bird’ that he was, Kannadasan arrived at 4 am, long after MSV had gone to sleep. When the watchman refused him entry, Kannadasan quickly scribbled a few lines on a sheet of paper and gave it to the watchman before leaving. When MSV woke up in the morning, the watchman gave him the sheet that had the lines, “Avanukku enna thoongivittan, agapattavan naan allava”, which later went on to find its place in the MGR movie Periya Idathu Penn.
The interview originally went on for about five-and-a-half-hours, in four separate sittings. Sometimes, his harmonium would tag along.