The Foul Mouth Stations

The Foul Mouth Stations

All of us must have heard or read about the recent controversy created by the Honourable Rajya Sabha member Jaya Bachchan’s comments about FM Radio stations where she mentioned that the Radio Jockeys should not try to mimic the proceedings of the house or voice of the elected representatives of people. Suddenly next day all hell broke loose on radio… all the RJs of the country were united in raising their protest against this so called censorship, anarchy, dictatorship etc. They all believed that they are free birds and whatever they are doing is in the name of entertainment and good humour. Poking fun in the name of entertainment at the cost of others has become a must for few of these Foul Mouth Stations. No need to censor but are we sure no need to introspect?

 All of us Dilliwallas (as we are termed) must have heard RJ Raunac on a particular FM Station, who at times acts as a split personality disorder and becomes Babua on Radio to pull up pranks on Dilliwallas. Raunac seems to be a good RJ with great voice and a sense to connect but what happens to him when he becomes Babua? Or is it the creative team that is not able to think on their feet? His jokes and themes of pulling pranks on people as Babua are obnoxious, to say the least. He just tends to get onto your nerve with absolutely no subject and one irritating voice imitation. All this to prove one point that Dilliwallas are short tempered and they have a rich abusive vocabulary. The complete sequence is beep beep…then a couple of words and then beep beep again!! I still do not get it!! What are we trying to prove over here? The so called mango people of this city who are stuck with zillions of their own problems and a gripping heat wave loose their temper and start abusing when someone asks them the stupidest question available on earth. Wow, we had absolutely no idea that people in this city would react like this when being targeted with silliest of the pranks with absolutely no content or theme. Just imagine once being on the other side of the communication and listening to this irritating voice and a prank with no content. It will wake up the abusive devil in all of us. Maybe we will react in the worst manner.

The other day I was travelling with my 6 year old and both of us were enjoying the melody on the radio while sitting in our car stuck in a long traffic jam. Suddenly this Babua avatar came on radio, called up some sensible guy and started troubling him with the silliest of his pranks. There goes beep beep… beep beep. The younger one got inquisitive and asked if there is a problem in the music system? I replied “no my darling”. Then she asked the embarrassing question “then papa this beep sound is because we should not hear the gandi baat”. And the next obvious reaction triggered by the nerves in my brain was to trouble my fingers and change the station. Now, this is the problem we land up in, we do not want censorship and we are in a mode of constant denial too. The belief is we do not need to introspect and all this is in good fun. Fun has lost its meaning in this FM world of ratings. Infact most of the FM stations have started believing that abuses are cool and a new style to chill. That the listeners are in the age group of 17-25 and are like loose canons when it comes to abuses. And this urge by FM stations of "lets bring it out in the open" for fun, is sad and serious enough to introspect. No need to go beyond this into the age group or gender of listeners.

Long back when khurafati Nitin started this prank service, it was good fun and every prank had a new and different flavour to it. It never had this short term route to success on the ladder of abuses. Nitin on radio was good fun and pure entertainment. A lot of the new breed of RJs and FM Stations followed the pattern. Some in a similar style but some wanted to be different. Different is a difficult word to predict. Different versions of the same game started rolling out on various FM Stations. But in recent past it is really drifting away from entertainment into the territory of abuses. A lot of times it becomes embarrassing to listen to it with people either whom you respect or love like a kid. I am nowhere saying that all the content on FM stations is like that, infact even Raunac as a RJ is great but his Babua avatar is just tasteless with no content and the only theme being to irritate the one who receives the call or listens to it on the Radio. We definitely need to introspect before it is censored…...

<a href="http://www.blogadda.com" title="Visit blogadda.com to discover Indian blogs"> <img src="http://www.blogadda.com/images/blogadda.png" width="80" height="15" border="0" alt="Visit blogadda.com to discover