Fantasy - My own radio talk show in Bangalore!

One of my favorite fantasies of life on going back to India involves hosting a morning talk show on FM radio in Bangalore. My primary fantasy, of course, is to be a filthy rich writer, wherever I am. But hosting a radio talk show comes right up there, along with owning a successful landmark middle-class-family-institution kinda restaurant.

Hosting a radio talk show in my own city Bangalore, interacting with all kinds of Bangaloreans, having a finger on the pulse of the city, being part of the city's cultural makeup, helping the city get up and get going every morning... how cool would that be!

I think I am well-suited to do that. I am born and brought up in Bangalore. I lived there for the first quarter century of my life. Like a true Bangalorean, I know five different languages, which are most spoken locally in Bangalore. I love interacting with people, facilitating discussions, and I can get them going quite nicely with my ability to see different sides of an issue and my penchant for playing the devil's advocate. I can just see how it would all play out.

I wake up at 4 AM every weekday morning, get ready and go to the radio studio. I am joined there by my team: a young vivacious talkative female co-hostess with plenty of attitude and pizzaz, a totally wacky male co-host who is good at doing all kinds of crazy pranks, a "hottie" female phone operator and a guest host of the month or quarter.

My female co-hostess is smart, quick with the words and more than an effective counterfoil to me. While my views might tend to be idealistic, controversial, playing the devil's advocate, wacky or downright weird, my female co-hostess will be the voice of common sense, reason and sanity. The male prankster is probably the guy who got into all kinds of trouble when you were in school or college. And that is precisely the talent which will come in handy for my show. We will get him to play all kinds of tricks and pranks and dares with our listeners. The phone operator looks and sounds hot. People will call in just to hear her voice, if not anything else. She will effectively field the countless calls we receive day after day after day.

The wild card of our team is the guest host. This is my original idea. We will choose the guest host from countless everyday Bangaloreans who would like to appear on our show. A guest host will be chosen for a period of one month or one quarter, during which they will be on the show with us every single weekday. For the next month or quarter, a new guest host will join us. I will have lunch once or twice a week with people who apply to be our guest host to select a person with the attitude and talent our show needs. The guest host is very important because they will provide us the perspective, the point of view of the everyday Bangalorean. They will bring their background, their culture and conditioning, their language and slang, their attitude, their personality to the show. For example, imagine having a college student on the show daily. S/he would provide the student perspective and the student slang that the rest of us in the team would have lost touch with. The guest host will put us in closer touch with our listeners. Nice idea, huh?

Apart from the core team above, we will of course, have our sound technicians, etc. who are the regular fixtures in the radio station. But what I've described above is the core talk show team.

So, every weekday morning, I will reach the studio at 6 AM and meet my entire team. We'll spend half an hour daily, taking a walk or working out or whatever to get warmed up and get into the groove of one another. We will come back to the studio at 6:30 AM, have our breakfast, coffee, tea and start the show at 7. And for the next three hours, from 7 AM to 10 AM, every weekday morning, we will have all of Bangalore listening to us, laughing with us, being entertained with us. We will play music. We will initiate debates and discussions on myriad interesting and often controversial subjects, including politics, social and family matters, entertainment, sports, religion. We will be frank, we will be bold and we will not compromise on the truth. We will have interviews of celebrities and common people. We will play pranks, practical jokes, experiments on the phone and in real life. We will generally have a ball! And doing all this, we will make a lot of money and hopefully help make things better for Bangalore, India and the world in our own way.

We will end the show at 10 AM, to get out and do whatever each of us does. I probably will write and/or run my own restaurant, do the legwork and preparations for the next day's show, participate in various events in Bangalore in my capacity as a local celebrity. :)

What a fantasy! Now I will go sleep.