They say my grandfather, Mir Ghulam Rasool Nazki, an acclaimed poet and writer (who started his career as a teacher at the tender age of 16) found his literal and metaphorical voice through radio.
His long and celebrated association with Radio Kashmir is part of the tapestry of our family memory. Woven into it is the dramatic episode of his journalistic career (documented by a treasured couple of images in our family archives) when he commentated live during President Rajendra Prasad’s boat procession in Srinagar in 1950. This was a high-profile event - India’s first President accompanied by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Kashmir’s Prime Minister at the time, in a procession of boats along Srinagar’s beautiful river Jhelum. This was also the first time Radio Kashmir had done a live broadcast from outside of their studios.
Equipped with his microphone, he was reporting the event from amidst the people who were its participants, as well as being part of the audience he was reporting for. As I look at that picture, I imagine that in that crowd and huddled around radio sets at home, they were hearing his commentary just as they were a living part of what was happening there and then. With his microphone, he was bringing to life their story, the story of that moment, for his audience – for them.
Fast-forward 70 odd years
Here I am, his granddaughter, producing and presenting live from London the 主播大秀’s flagship TV programme, Sairbeen, which itself evolved from the iconic (and still popular) radio programme of the same name. And it is my job to bring the 主播大秀’s stories to life for our TV audience.
Every day, as I enter the state-of-the-art TV studio to which, as part of the Sairbeen refresh, we have now moved our live broadcasts, I remember the start of the pilots when I felt the giant touchscreen staring at me, as if it was waiting for me to test it out. And as I was getting to grips with all the touching, swiping, opening and closing boxes, I sometimes found myself thinking back to the days of that treasured picture from our family album: my grandfather, Mir Ghulam Rasool Nazki, with that microphone in his hand, doing what I am doing now: bringing the story…
But then, how can one even start to compare, and not even with past decades but just a few years back. Our media landscape has been revolutionised by the access to information provided by social media. As I present live in front of that touchscreen, I know that our basic journalistic mantra remains unchanged: content - and trustworthy content at that – is queen (or king, if you like). The touchscreen empowers me to bring stories in a way that was hardly feasible a few years ago.
It allows me to deliver to our TV audience a picture-challenged story - without anybody even noticing that there has been a challenge in the first place. And then of course there are stories that just lend themselves better to the touchscreen, especially those sourced from, or revolving around, social (at 主播大秀 Urdu we call it Social-estan). While we are on air in that studio, our audiences follow stories from various sources and engage with them on multiple platforms - so, we need to keep up, but also to be ahead of that game with stories that they can trust.
The need for trusted news
I hope that the journalists’ drive to make content as engaging and relatable as possible for as wide an audience as possible will mean more young, and female, audiences will come to them for independent and trusted news. I see my role, any presenter’s role, as that of a guide – someone who leads you through exclusively curated content. In front of that touchscreen, this role of mine becomes even more “hands-on” as I invite the viewer to swipe, touch, open and close boxes with me, talking them through various elements of the story and also serving as an anchor holding all of the content in place.
It was on 1 July 1948 that my grandfather made his and the station’s very first radio announcement on Radio Kashmir in Srinagar. I started presenting Sairbeen on TV in 2013, and the butterflies in my stomach just before going live haven’t disappeared – and I don't think they ever will. As any TV presenter, I am all too aware of the stress and the “high” of live broadcasts. As things go well - or with a glitch, I know that everything is fluid just as almost everything is fixable, as long as you are honest with your audience.
But I still do find myself wondering every now and then, in the middle of a touchscreen sequence, what the microphone yielding Mir Ghulam Rasool Nazki would have made of all this.