Kolkata: There are very few Bengalis on Sunday who did not wake up at the crack of dawn to listen to the sombre voice of the legendary Virendra Krishna Bhadra singing hymns of Mahalaya on the radio, marking the beginning of Durga Puja, the grandest annual festival of Bengal.
But it would all be incomplete without a gadget that often gathers dust at some corner of people's homes. It is the humble radio through which the iconic reciting of the Mahalaya hymn is broadcasted every year. And that's when one looks for the radioman.
No, he is not some comic book superhero but a pleasant old man Amit Rajan Karmakar who has been repairing radios for almost 70 years. For the last few years, his business picks up as Mahalaya draws closer with scores of people coming to his shop to get their old radios repaired so that they don't miss listening to the Mahalaya hymns.
His tryst with radio started in 1952 when he opened a small shop at Kumartuli, the artisans' hub in North Kolkata, where Durga idols are built. It will not be wrong to call his shop a radio museum. A few radios in his shop are almost 100 years old but he still maintains them with great care.
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Karmakar said that when he started his shop electricity was limited to a few well-to-do households thus making radio-TV a luxury. The lack of electricity pushed people more towards using battery-powered radios. " Business was good until about 1990. But then things changed," said Karmakar. With the advent of colour TV in the city, people drifted away from radios. So my business declined. Several people who earned their living by repairing radios switched to other professions," Karmakar told ETV Bharat.
But with elderly people once again starting to favour radio instead of television for listening to Mahalaya hymns, Karmakar's business is gradually getting back on track. It improved further after Covid-19 cases started declining across the country.
"The radio of my father's time was very old. It was made of wood and got damaged. But Mahalaya is approaching. It is a different feeling to listen to Mahalaya on radio than on television. So I repaired it yesterday," said Das as he turned to another customer who has arrived at his shop to get his father's radio repaired.
