Back in 1990, when Surabhi was launched as a weekly cultural show on Doordarshan ( DD ), the word ‘viral’ still stood for a nasty fever. The purpose of the show was to give the Indian audience a flavour of every part of the country they belong to. As anchors, Siddharth Kak and Renuka Shahane , point out: “People of our country were proud of India but didn’t know what for. Surabhi offered them an opportunity to connect deeper with their own nation. It gave them a reason to be proud of India.”Surabhi had a glorious run on the national channel till 2001 (with a year’s break in 1991). It was the longest running show of that era on Indian Television - one that received both critical as well as commercial acclaim. But there was no marketing strategy behind or viewership targets driving this. And yet the show fetched millions of postcards from the audience on a weekly basis.In 1993, India Post introduced contest postcards after Surabhi received 14 lakh letters in a week. This eventually got the show an entry into the Limca Book of Records.Surabhi managed to have Amul as its title sponsor for nine of its ten years on the channel. Not once did the marketer ask for viewership figures, regional breakup, and so on. Those were simpler times, yes. But somewhere, the success of this show and how it transformed Surabhi into an undisputed great brand of India, is a lesson in itself. It makes you believe that hard work and pure intent to serve good content to the audience are enough: everything else will fall into place. Here’s how it fell into place for Surabhi:Kak was in his early 40s when he got the opportunity to create Surabhi. It was an outcome of a change in the government, he recounts. "VP Singh (the then prime minister) had a minister in the South who was a friend. The new government wanted to liberalise programming on TV, especially the shows on current affairs and culture.” Over the course of crystallising the content plan, he met the then secretary of Information & Broadcasting. “I was looking at doing a serious documentary-like show with themes where we would show(lineage of classical musicians and dancers) and suchlike. The secretary casually mentioned: How nice would it be if you could be in one place in one segment of the show, and another in the next. You’ll cover so much of India at once, like a rainbow.” That’s how Surabhi was born.He now needed a charming face to present the show with him on screen, because "who would have watched a 40-year-old man onscreen," he quips. But it had to be someone intelligent. “I have seen a lot of good-looking people whose eyes are blank. We needed someone with a strong personality so that when she said something, people believed she knew what she was talking about,” says Kak. In came Shahane. But her entry to the show has a story of its own.Shahane tells us she was watching her audition tapes recently, so the memory is still fresh for her. "I had to speak in klisht Hindi (using difficult words). I thought I was pretty well-versed in Hindi but this was too Sanskritised for me,” she recalls. Nevertheless, she learnt the script by heart, thanks to her good memory - which Kak claims to have leveraged in the years to come, by giving her the longer lines of the script.But when the audition started, Shahane forgot everything about this one 'Brihadeshwar temple' that she had to speak about. “There wasn’t a single line I said that confirmed to the script. Yet I kept going on with a wide smile on my face. I think that’s what Geeta (Kak’s wife who was conducting the auditions) liked. She loved the fact that I could be cool and laugh through the whole thing.”Initially, Shahane used to anchor the Q&A segment that came at the end of the show, and was an assistant director on the side - which meant she was involved in choosing the music for segments, logging tapes, sitting for edits, you name it.A year later, she joined in as co-anchor and had to give up direction because of lack of time. Together, they brought a human face to Indian culture. “Till then,” she felt, "Indian culture was very serious, dry, and even elitist. We presented it to the audience in a conversational tone, throwing humour here and there. It showed that the culture is in fact 'us'.”In its first year, the show was commissioned by DD. Kak recalls sitting all day with an assistant to call marketing personnel and tell them about the number of seconds available for advertising during the show. "It was a nightmare. We just about survived,” he says. One day, Kak read something about Amul and decided to pitch to the brand through its agency Ulka’s media wing (now Lodestar UM). “I used to know Ulka's Anil Kapoor who introduced me to Shashi (Sinha). He even told me Shashi’s salary so that I was convinced he is senior enough to handle the job on his own. With the efforts of the agency and a small presentation from our end, we got Amul onboard.”To renew the sponsorship in the second year, Kak and team had to present to Dr Verghese Kurien, the founder of Amul. The hitch -- Dr Kurien went off to sleep at 9 every night so he had never watched a single episode of Surabhi. “We showed him a few excerpts from the show during our presentation. He saw it, turned around and told his team: "Gentlemen, please give them what they want.” Surabhi was on a roll for the years that followed,” says Kak.When Shahane joined Surabhi, she admits she didn’t know what she was going to be a part of. “I had just finished shooting for Circus, but it didn’t come on air until after Surabhi was launched. That’s why most people think Surabhi was my first show, but it was actually Circus that made me realise I wanted to discontinue my PhD and take up acting as a profession.” When she got a call from Kak’s office for an audition, she wasn’t sure whether to take it up or not because this wasn’t acting, it was an anchor’s role.She reached out to Aziz Mirza (director of Circus, and many popular Bollywood films) for guidance. “Aziz Sir told me I must work with Siddharth. Surabhi has been a journey of discovery for me as well. I remember we were shooting in Fatehpur Sikri for our 100th episode - the first time I had stepped out of the studio for a shoot (Shooting usually happened at Video World, Khar).” People kept asking Kak why he hadn’t got Shahane along for the shoot. “Maybe I had a bigger personality on the screen so they didn't even realise I was standing right next to him. But as soon as they did, we were mobbed by no less than 10,000 people. I couldn’t imagine people wanted to take our autographs. There were no phones that time, luckily, so no scope for selfies. This was the first time I realised we were really popular.”Kak adds: “I knew we had made an impact when, deep in the forests of the Andaman Islands on a shoot, a woman picking firewood pointed at us saying: Surabhi?” Community watching was a norm back in those days when TV was a luxury item. Surabhi was one show that the whole village would watch together.Surabhi changed the lives of the people that made it what it eventually became. For Shahane who was all of 24 when she started co-anchoring, Surabhi gave her the biggest break. (It was only after she came on the show that she was offered a role in Bollywood blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Koun). In fact, Kak tells us the makers of the movie checked with him if she was a reliable professional to work with. “People know my name because of Surabhi. Or they call me Surabhi,” she quips. “I was no film star and yet I would hear people wanting to have that ’Surabhihaircut’. Now the two co-hosts of the show have Tigers named after them in Mumbai’s Jijamata Udyan/Byculla zoo. They’ve had their faces on Amul’s butter packets and made it to Amul’s classic outdoor ads as well.Inside Surabhi’s treasure trove also lies the story of a gentleman called Feroz Ashraf . Ashraf was initially hired to count the postcards, but he volunteered to do the script translations for them. What translations, you’d ask. Well, Kak - an Indian by birth - would think and write in English. His love for Hindi grew over the course of the show, but the scripts were still written in English.So, they had to be translated into Hindi. When on foreign locations, Shahane would do the translations herself since the budget didn’t allow them to take too many people along.When in India, Ashraf would do the task. “He would do adaptations of the English script and not just translations. He wanted to get the perfect flavour of the language out there,” says Kak. Ashraf was a teacher and ran an NGO that fought for the education of Muslim women in the slums of Mumbai. In 2015, Sudheendra Kulkarni-led Observer Research Foundation made a documentary on him - Uncle - highlighting his silent revolution.For Kak, Surabhi redeemed him of the label of an outsider in his own land. “I yearned to be accepted by my own country - but I was brought up in a western atmosphere and had acquired western education. I desperately wished to use my privilege to represent the people of my country: those living in a village who have the ability to be far better but don’t know what they have and neither does the world know of their existence.” The overwhelming response to the show ended his frustration. He knew he had been accepted as the son of the soil.Kak had a strong research team that included Sunil Shanbag (prominent theatre artist), Manjul Sinha, Pushkar Singh, Arunabh Bhattacharya and a few more. But as the show picked up, its audience doubled up as the research team. Kak recalls: “We used to say the Surabhi parivaar was in front of the screen. We were just a part of that family.”An initial fear was that they’d run out of subjects to talk about. That never happened because of the letters that came pouring in with suggestions. As Shahane points out: "We got everything together in small capsules; those who found the subject interesting would go deeper into it. This was the first show of its kind that parents would tell their children to watch as well. Like how my cultural knowledge came from Amar Chitra Katha, the next generation’s came from Surabhi. I miss it for my own children now because they’re not getting a holistic view of Indian culture. There is a lot of content but no anchor to it.”What’s stopping them from bringing Surabhi back then?“I don’t think Surabhi is something you can bring back on TV because that medium itself is obsolete now,” says Kak. Shahane adds that those days the channel never interfered in the way the producers wanted to make their show - something that would be impossible to do in the current times. But the Surabhi Foundation (run by Shahane and Kak) is at the cusp of trying a few things to revive the essence of the show in a digital interactive avatar.“We are planning to create physical spaces that let you experience the culture with the aid of virtual reality. We are also toying with the idea of creating a space that allows you to contemporise the cultural creations of the past - another way of interacting with culture, basically,” says Kak.In the 90s, illness and other work commitments notwithstanding, these anchors never missed an episode of broadcasting together. Sometimes they shot two episodes in one go, but there wasn’t a single episode where you didn’t see them welcoming the audience with folded hands and greeting them with their signature “Namaskar”.Will this version of Surabhi have the same faces that brought us the magic the first time, we ask. “I don’t think so,” says Shahane. “It has to create its own modern identity. It has to make the current and next generation feel proud of who we are now, just like Surabhi (original) did back in the 90s,” she concludes.