‘Where on earth are pa-dha-ni-sa?’ asked a friend and because I wasn’t aware if he was really talking about musical notes, I asked, ‘What? I mean, are you into music now?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I am talking about the Saregama Caravan, that expensive gadget that I now call digital waste.’
A couple of hours of fiddling around with this gadget convinced me as well that this caravan has no intention to really go places and yes, the sargam was terribly incomplete. For starters, the company claims that it comes pre-loaded with 5000 songs. That’s it? The number of songs that I’d want to listen to is constantly increasing and even the ones in the era gone by had far more than a measly five thousand. I think the Caravan strategists took upon themselves to decide which song-list their buyers must listen. A bad start for sure.
By the way, every gadget today is getting smarter and talk about AI. Even low-end smartphones get regular updates to keep them vibrant in a marketplace that is moving ahead at break-neck speed. Consumers have access to apps like Gaana, Saavn, Wynk, Amazon music, and Solo besides devices like Echo to give them a literally unlimited spread of songs from the world over. Consumers in India are just waking up to the charm of podcasts. Everyone today has fairly powerful and reasonably fine-tuned Bluetooth speakers (and some can even be taken out when it rains) that give outputs that can place any get-together on a high decibel scale. And what does Saregama Caravan do? They give you a gadget that sits like a Dodo and wants a user to play more with the old-fashioned jog-dial than spending quality time with songs that you want to hear.
Caravan website claims that songs are neatly ‘categorized into stations based on lyricists, actors, singers, music composers, specials’ and that users ‘can switch from Kishore Kumar classics, to R.D Burman’s pulsating hits, to songs picturised on the Angry young man – Amitabh Bachchan and other legends of Hindi Cinema’. They also have inane categories like ‘Romance, Sad, Gurbani, Mangeskars, Kapoors, Ghazal, Bhakti’ and a few more with the addition of ‘Ameen Sayani’s Geetmala countdown collection spanning 50 years’. If this seems impressive let me tell you that it isn’t. Each time a user jog-dials to some lyricist or a singer or a music composer mentioned, the songs begin predictably… and so every morning if you reach out for Kishore Kumar, you get to hear the same song until you get up and shake up that jog-dial there. It is far easier today to simply have a personal list of songs on any of the music apps (without paying subscription, if that is what bothers you) where you can set your own sequence and are free to add or delete any number. This is what I call being music-friendly. This is the sort of operational freedom that new technology is out to offer. The Saregama Caravan is more like an old-fashioned, plastic-bodied, expensive dictator that is out to cane your ear-drums and not to bring the sweet promises of good wholesome music.
When I told all this to a user of Saregama Caravan, he said, ‘There is quite a bit of technology here. There is one USB slot where I can insert my pen-drive and listen to songs. The gadget also has Bluetooth and even an Aux IN facility.’
‘Ha! Ha!’ I laughed and added, ‘Pen-drives are dead, my friend. And if even need to employ Bluetooth or a cable to connect to my smartphone, why would I want to pay seven times the amount? In fact, I’d go for better brands known in the world of audio and choose from any of the speakers from JBL, boAt, Sony, Photron, Philips, iBall, Sennheiser, Samsung, Bang and Olufsen, Bose, Bowers and Wilkins, Fugoo Style, UE Wonderboom and the list is literally unending.’ The truth is that both the online and offline market is brimming with a charming array of speakers and some of them are environment friendly as well. By the way, there are speakers that have better retro looks than the worthless Saregama Caravan can ever manage. These speakers are portable and some are splash-proof as well. A lot of Bluetooth speakers today come with add-ons like fancy night-lights, torches, and yes, even AM?FM radios. Why on earth will anyone want to buy a Saregama Caravan is beyond my comprehension.
The strategists at Saregama Caravan project their gadget as a perfect gift for parents and grand-parents. Come on guys, you are terribly out-of-sync with the sort of new-age mental set-up that even octogenarians yearn for. These are times when even my 87 year old father loves to ask me if his smartphone has AI in-built or not. He loves to remain young at heart and wouldn’t want to be reminded so often that his preferences are from an era when people rode tongas and were glued on to transistors with hard-plastic bodies.
We are living in times when we are all waiting for even Spotify to enter which will in many ways revolutionize the way we perceive and listen to music. Music tastes are inclusive and one wants a bit of jazz to pop up between spells of songs that were popular in the forties and the fifties. Everyone is conscious of reducing their carbon footprint with the help of this company, Carbon Click. Everyone wants AI to zoom in and make valid suggestions even when all one wants is to listen to songs from the past. Listeners are too discerning today and certainly don’t want a dictator like the Saregama Caravan to come and waste their time with choices that need the jog-dial to work overtime. No one wants Dodos posing as music Gods.
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Saregama Caravan_nothing but digital waste
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Arvind Passey
17 January 2019
