He was the city’s first RJ. His popularity was unprecedented (an envelope with just ‘B.R.Shivaramaiah, Bangalore’, scribbled across it would reach him without fail). The septuagenarian takes Manasi Paresh Kumar down his memory lane
It was sometime in the 70’s. Ravindra Kalakshetra was bursting at the seams with bell bottoms and bee hive hairdos. The screaming audience jostled for shoulder space; extended necks tried to catch a glimpse of the man who brightened their mundane existence every week like a warm hug on a cold night. And there he was –a lean man with plump side burns. The hall erupted into maniacal celebration. Soaking in the din of adulation was B R Shivaramaiah –the man with ‘the ‘golden voice; a voice the crowds knew as Uttara Bhadra; a voice that mesmerised the airwaves every Tuesday at 8.30 PM. He was Bangalore’s pioneering radio jockey.
Talking about that day, which was a celebration of his 25th week of radio success, the now 77-year-old B R Shivaramaiah recalls: “I was specially out-fitted for the evening with a dark suit and multi-coloured floral shirt. I was introduced on stage with booming music, then the spotlights framed me… It was crazy. Today, it seems surreal that people were so much in love with a voice on the radio. I got marriage proposals by the dozen from women much to the annoyed amusement of my wife…”
An income tax officer by profession, Shivaramaiah’s voice was discovered by chance, when Gubbi Veeranna’s son Shivanand praised his diction (which had irritated him then) instead of his acting when he had performed in A S Murthy’s first production Adhyakshate in 1959. He went on to act in several radio dramas after that, which his family heard on their neighbour’s radio. “Radio was a luxury at that time. I managed to buy my first radio only in 1970.”
In 1973, Shivaramaiah began his golden innings on the radio with the show Gana Sourabha on Vividha Bharati. Uttara Bhadra, his alter ego, on the show became so popular that the show itself came to be identified by that name. “Can you imagine an RJ, with a name like Shivaramaiah, becoming popular?” he asks, laughingly. No we can’t. Even Shivaramaiah couldn’t understand how someone with an “old-man-sounding-name” became a popular RJ. “We actually called the character Maathina Malla (meaning smooth talker), but it didn’t sound right. I chose the name Uttara Bhadra, which was my birth star and ran with it. It just caught on,” says the man who later made the country’s first documentary film on the income tax department’s processes in the nineties – as part of the IT department’s initiative to become people friendly.
Today, Shivaramaiah is an A grade artist with AIR. “Radio compering in India at that time meant a very flat voice that had to stay somber and unemotional regardless of whether you were talking about a song or reading the news, except for an odd Amin Sayani (who worked for Radio Ceylon) who did things differently. So when we started the trend of ‘mad talk’ with emotion and humour, our listeners connected with the content and the program became a raging hit,” he explains.
The show which was the brain child of Gopinath Das and Jagannath of Prabhat Kalavidaru studios, was actually a sponsored program by Byrappa Saree House in the city -an extended commercial. The owner of the showroom Eshwarappa wanted something funky to catch the attention of the people. So the duo came up with the idea of this talk show intersperced with songs and mentions of the shop. “Many people don’t know this, but I was not the original voice for the program, the first couple of episodes that aired had someone else hosting the show and the writer was also a different guy. But it had not clicked with the audience yet. I and the late H N Dwarkanath (the writer of the show) came in when the pair had not turned up one day,” recalls Shivaramaiah. The trio of Shivaramaiah, Dwarkanath and Jagannath (who was the sound engineer for this show) brought magic to the air waves and then there was no looking back.
Each episode stretched the imagination and tickled the funny bone of the listeners all the while promoting the sponsor. “One episode was about a cricket match between current apsaras (filmstars) and retired apsaras (mythical Rambha, Menaka and Urvashi) with Chitragupta as the umpire. We plugged the sponsor saying that the women looked stunning in their sarees from the shop as they played the game. Another episode was about a woman who appeared as a premonition to me after I ate too many chilli bondas. In one episode that was aired close to the Ganesh festival, I played almost twenty five characters from Mahabharata, both male and female,” recalls Shivaramaiah. He would begin the show with a plethora of greetings at the speed of a bullet train and end the show with – “Will see you next week, take care. These were things unheard of at those times,” says Shivaramaiah who hardly rehearsed before the recording. “We recorded on Sundays from 12 in the night till three in the morning at Prabhat Studios. Then technology meant spool recordings and you had to be perfect with your tenor and bass. There was little you could do technologically if the voice modulation was not right, unlike today.”
The show’s 25th week saw Dr Rajkumar share unbeknown personal anecdotes. “He was shooting for the movie Babruvahaan in Chennai. We had carried all our recording equipment from here. We were actually given only half an hour with him, but he ended up talking for more than three hours. From why he named Shivarajkumar as Nagaraj Shivaraj Puttasamy to how Parvathamma was actually called Pappachi, we spoke about everything at length. He even sang for us without any music, which he had never done.”
And suddenly it all ended without a warning. “The sponsor had enjoyed tremendous popularity with the show. His business had gone through the roof and I guess one day he decided not to produce the show anymore,” he recalls. So after five successful years the show, Gana Sourabha or Uttara Bhadra as it was popularly called was pulled off the air. “I don’t remember what the last show was because I did not know it was the last show. We had recorded a couple of other episodes as well, but then had to can them. So there was no formal goodbye as such,” he says. Also, by then, television was slowly taking over people’s imagination. Today all that Shivaramaiah has to remember his RJing days by are recordings of three episodes of the show. “Nobody had a tape recorder those days and I am not sure if AIR has the recordings of it. I doubt Prabhat also has the recordings of the program.”
As the city rediscovers its love affair with the radio, the man who started it for us, has no doubt that there is still a market for such a show despite the cosmopolitan mix of audience. “There are no barriers for quality programs,” he says. Shivaramaiah is still among the most respected theatre artists of Kannada stage, works in television gives his voice to the radio and is one of the best known comperes for music shows. Though it rankles his family that he hasn’t been recognized by the government, the man himself shrugs off the apathy. “I miss the adulation of my listeners more than anything else.”
source: http://www.bangaloremirror.com / Home> Sunday Read> City> Special / Bangalore Mirror / by Manasi Paresh Kumar / Sunday, May 27th, 2012
