Say their job involved meetings, feedback sessions before presenting bulletins

Going back to an era where the only access to news was the radio or the daily live news bulletin on ‘Chennai Tholaikatchi Maiyyam,’ newsreaders from Doordarshan came together on Sunday to reminisce and share memorable experiences from their stint.

“Our focus used to be on taking in-depth news to the public and not just how many news items we were getting across. All our broadcasts then used to be live and there used to be nearly 50 to 60 people working on a news bulletin,” said S. Varadharajen, who was a newsreader from 1976 for nearly 20 years. Chennai Tholaikatchi Maiyyam later came to be known as DD Podhigai.

Mr. Varadharajen recalled how newsreaders then had extensive meetings and feedback sessions before bulletins. “Ahead of the visit of foreign politicians and delegates to the country, we would be taught how to pronounce their names correctly,” he said. While he went on to become a theatre artist and actor, Mr. Varadharajen said that he still was recognised by many as a newsreader from the channel.

The “DD News roots” association has been meeting every year on the first Sunday of March. “Many of them who started their careers as newsreaders at DD had gone on to work in other channels. In those days, we were the only channel on television and it made us proud to read the news,” said Sentamil Arasu, an engineer who was a newsreader at DD for 18 years.

‘News is one-sided now’

When asked about how news had evolved, Mr. Arasu said that while they just used to read the news back then and took information to the people, the way news was presented now had completely changed.

“While discussions and other programmes are interesting, a lot of the news has become very one-sided as a result of allegiances,” he said.

Sandhya Rajagopal, Nijanthan, Naseema Sikandar, Jayashree Sundar and other newsreaders and producers were part of the meeting.

H. Ramakrishnan, a news presenter who had also worked in AIR before his stint in television noted that the channel was and still is very conservative with regard to news. “Ours was always a ‘news’ bulletin and not a ‘views’ bulletin. There are many who still continue to watch the news on DD as they attach a lot of value to it,” he said.

Reminiscing about how televisions and radio before that were the sole sources of news in the past, Mr. Ramakrishnan said that Marina beach and Panagal Park used to have municipal radios in the 1960s. “In the evenings, there would be a good number of people sitting there and listening to the news broadcast. It brought people together,” he said.