LAST week, Naik Muhammad Kakar and his daughter Rozina made an arduous journey from remote Loralai, Balochistan, to distant Colombo in Sri Lanka, with just one purpose in mind – to thank and pay tribute to the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) for keeping alive old Indian film songs in the face of a relentless onslaught of cacophony currently emanating from Bollywood.

Kakar, a man in his late 50s, and his school-going daughter Rozina came with several kilos of gifts for the announcers and other staffers of SLBC’s Hindi service, which has, for the past half century, been catering for discerning film music lovers in both Pakistan and India despite crippling financial constraints.

“The gifts were from a number of regular listeners of SLBC’s Hindi service in Pakistan,” said Daud Ehtisham of the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo.

According to Kakar, there are over 3,000 regular listeners of the SLBC’s Hindi service in Pakistan, with Karachi itself having over 1000. Kakar has emerged as the kingpin of SLBC listeners in Pakistan, having formed a network of listeners.

“He knows each and every one of them personally. All his friends are SLBC fans. In fact Kakar said he would not make friends with anyone who is not an SLBC listener,” Ehtisham said.

Kakar gave medals and certificates for “excellence” to each of the 10 Hindi announcers at SLBC, with the citation saying: “T hanks for the continued commitment required for Hindi section of Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation. You made the difference.”

And Kakar came to Sri Lanka solely to visit the SLBC and talk to its staff, generations of whom he had heard on the air over a period of three decades.

“We asked him if he would like to see any other place in Sri Lanka, but the answer was a firm no. The only item on his itinerary was the visit to the SLBC,” Ehtisham said.

“The visit is a dream come true. My prayer has been answered,” Kakar told SLBC interviewer Jyoti Parmar in a broadcast which elicited a number of email responses.

The SLBC is perhaps the only radio station in the world which broadcasts the haunting melodies of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. It all began in the 1950s, when All India Radio banned film music for being “cheap”. Radio Pakistan stopped it after the 1965 war with India. Radio Goa stopped it after India seized the territory from the Portuguese in 1961.

But the huge gap was quickly filled by Radio Ceylon in collaboration with Radio Enterprises, a Mumbai-based company run by an American national.

Radio Ceylon recruited many competent Hindi announcers from India, among whom were Gopal Sharma, Manohar Mahajan and Dalvir Singh Parmar. The commercial service was hugely popular in the Sub-continent thanks to a unique style of presentation developed by Mumbai-based Amin Sayani and carried forward by the in-house announcers at Radio Ceylon in Colombo.

REPOSITORY OF OLD SONGS: Over time, Radio Ceylon and its successor, SLBC, became the foremost repository of Hindi film music in the world.

“There is a craving for pre-1960s songs both in Pakistan and India. Ours is the only station which plays a K.L.Saigal song every day. We also have special programmes on the birth or death anniversaries of bygone artistes to keep memories alive. The SLBC is the only station to air special programmes to remember old greats like G.M.Durrani, Zohrabai Ambalewali, Sitara Kanpuri, Raj Kumari Dubey, and Noorjahan,” the producer of the Hindi service, Jyoti Parmar, said.

After Indian TV and radio stations began to broadcast Hindi film music again, SLBC lost its market. Advertising revenue dwindled fast. The Hindi service began to face a severe financial crunch, threatening its very existence.

“It was on the verge of closure when the present chairman, Hudson Samarasinghe, took over. Being a lover of Hindi film music, he was determined to keep the show going,” Parmar said.

It is in the context of such a grim scenario that Naik Muhammad Kakar’s extraordinary gesture of coming all the way from Balochistan to SLBC only to encourage its staff, assumes a special significance. His visit has breathed life into the SLBC.

Published in Dawn, June 10th, 2014