New Delhi, Feb. 21 -- For the first two decades of my life, daily popular entertainment meant the radio and the radio meant Ameen Sayani. Even as an 11-year-old, when I first heard his iconic hit parade Binaca Geetmala, I knew that Sayani was a real human being in flesh and blood. However, the thought that he could just as well be radio waves strangely exhilarated me.

"Agali paaydaan" (the next step/song) and "Choti ka bigul (bugle call to herald the top song of the week), his two signature catchphrases, became the defining words of the 1960s and 70s for me and millions of others.

Thirteen years after I first heard his effusive exhortations out of Radio Ceylon, I met Ameen Sayani at his office in Bombay in 1985 as a journalist. "For a l...