In December 2013, India’s former foreign secretary and national security advisor Shivshankar Menon was addressing young Indian Foreign Service trainees. In the midst of sharing his experiences and some nuggets of advice for the new recruits, Menon offered a theory on why demeanour implicitly adds to the credibility of certain types of professionals. 

“Notice how the more an occupation deals with risk, the more uniform their dress is? A soldier risks his life, the banker risks your money, and the diplomat deals with the risks of war and peace. It is in order to convey the assurance that they know what they are doing, to reassure society, the client or the interlocutor that these professions dress in what amounts to a uniform. And it seems to work,” he said.

To add to sartorial decorum, Menon’s argument can be extended to include the tone and tenor of communication. In this context, it’s worthwhile to see how people consider the style of professionals disseminating news on broadcasting platforms – from radios to TV news channels to even news portals in the digital space. 

The question crept in this week with the passing away of Gitanjali Aiyar, one of the leading Doordarshan English news anchors of the last three decades of the 20th century. Many recalled fond memories of Doordarshan news programmes and anchors of the past. While it’s easy to downplay such responses as mere nostalgia, a lot of it has little to do with that.

Instead, it is a yearning for old-school news broadcasting which is now being valued for its understated, sober, frills-free and punctilious style of delivery. It harks back to the days when Doordarshan news readers could inform you about the seat tally in a landslide electoral win with the same placid poise with which they would run you through the statistics in the latest economic survey. Though the news bulletins were produced under the tight leash of the state-run public broadcaster, it didn’t chip away the credibility of the news delivered and of the professionals delivering it. 

In retrospect, however, the association of credibility with such a studied approach to straightforward delivery must be juxtaposed against the war rooms of noisy debates that pass off as news shows on numerous TV channels, and even against the quirky approach of digital platforms to reach – or “engage” – news consumers.

If we turn our gaze back, the legacy of Doordarshan news anchors of the last century was also shaped by the socio-cultural milieu in which the public broadcaster was placed in a country where TV viewership was gradually increasing to form a pan-India sphere of its own.

First, the Doordarshan news anchors were primarily newsreaders and not journalists occupying primetime news slots. Like their counterparts in Akashvani, their studied distance from the flux of news stories and events had the detached air of a messenger. Unlike many journalists anchoring news shows on private TV channels and later on digital portals, Doordarshan news anchors were seen through a non-participant prism in the news universe. They confined themselves to delivering the news product with finesse, poise and command over the spoken word.

News broadcasting also had educational value. This was a time when the aspirational class viewed radio and TV news as a tool to widen their awareness of current affairs and their exposure to the standardised pronunciation of words in Indian languages and English. In middle-class homes owning TV sets, many parents prodded their children to watch the evening news bulletin. They expected their children to imbibe lessons in vocabulary, phonetics, calm delivery and, of course, current affairs by just watching what the anchors did. It formed an evening prelude to what many schools adopted as a practice during morning assemblies – reading out the day’s news.

Second, when Doordarshan was the sole player in broadcasting, it formed a common viewing experience across the country. In a countrywide frame, news anchors became national communicators. They were household names as much for their news delivery as for their sartorial choices: hairstyles and understated fashion clues. It wasn’t uncommon for people to identify the voices of English newsreaders – Rini Simon Khanna, Neethi Ravindran, Tejeshwar Singh, Sunit Tandon and Gitanjali Aiyar, to name a few – even without looking at their TV screens. The same was true for Hindi newsreaders like JV Raman, Ved Prakash, Salma Sultan, Manjari Joshi, Shammi Narang and many more.

Third, the bulletin format of primetime news slots made news viewing a useful exercise in terms of what contemporary parlance would call “value for time”. The format shunned the practice of developing a news story into a debating show, as is the practice now. So, it had ample time to offer a capsule of major news stories around the country, and some from abroad too. For someone seeking to be informed about major news events, the bulletins stood them in good stead as an interim bridge of the day’s roundup, prior to news consumers getting more details and commentary in the next morning’s newspapers. 

In this way, information – not scoring debating points – became the prime drivers to listen to the news bulletins. Far more important than being participants in a political vortex and the ensuing debates, the anchors carried value for being useful for what information they had to offer.

Discounting the expected tinge of nostalgia, it would be helpful to accept that our fond memories of newsreaders like Gitanjali Aiyar also mirror the wish for an old-school, frills-free, straightforward, informative news cast. The mere thought of it seems comforting in times when TV news in India has largely been replaced by diatribes and verbal duels, and the digital space is largely split into cocoons of ideological validation and the quirks of news packaging.