My tryst with Mark Tully & the Radio!
By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD
Sir Mark Tully, undoubtedly the ‘Grand Old Man’ of news broadcasting, said his last ‘Good Night’ to this world last month, on 25th January, though not over the radio, over which he had said whatever he had to say, over thirty long years.
An Indian-born British journalist, he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1964 and moved over to India a year later, becoming its Indian correspondent. He served the BBC for exactly thirty years, the last twenty as its Indian bureau chief, based in New Delhi.
Though he studied in England and took up his first job there, India, which eventually became his home, was not new to him, because he was born to British parents at Tollygunge in Calcutta on 24th October, 1935. He spent his first ten years in India, going to a British boarding school at Darjeeling at the age of four, before he was dispatched to England for further schooling, at the age of nine.
I use the word ‘dispatched’ here, because his going there was perhaps meant to give him a proper ‘English’ upbringing, when his English nanny found him learning, to count numbers in Hindi, from their driver. She was greatly appalled that her ward was picking up what she felt was the language of his servants, when he was being groomed to become their master.
So, from ek, do, teen in Tollygunge, it was a quick transition to one, two and three at Cambridge for him! As a student at Cambridge, he studied Theology and after finishing his graduation, he joined the Lincoln Theological College, with plans of becoming a priest of the Church of England.
But as a student there, he began to have misgivings about whether he would be able to hold on to the celibacy that was mandatory for a Christian priest, which led to his saying good-bye to the calling, after just two terms.
Thankfully, this realisation came to him sooner than later, because had it surfaced in him after he had taken his vows of celibacy, he would perhaps have been a very frustrated man, torn between the need to hold on to them as a good Christian priest and the biological urge to lead the life of a family man. And, in his taking this crucial decision, he was perhaps right too, because he married a lady called Margaret and had four children through her, proving to himself and to all others, that he was certainly not cut out to be a celibate priest!
While in the service of the BBC, he covered all the major events and incidents in South Asia, including the Indo-Pak conflicts, the Bhopal gas tragedy, Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the ensuing anti-Sikh riots and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, to mention just a few.
Although as a prestigious Pressman he enjoyed a very good personal rapport with Indira Gandhi, he had to spend time on English soil, when he was expelled from India during Emergency, which she declared as an act of self-preservation, when cornered by the long arm of the law.
However, after a year-and-a-half in exile, Tully returned to India, to which he certainly had a special attachment, instead of seeking a posting to some another region of the world, although at that time there were many other very opportune playing fields, open to a man of his prowess. And, it is in India that he stayed, till his very end, dying at the ripe old age of ninety, at a hospital in Delhi, where he lived, most of his life.
He resigned from the BBC in 1984 and turned to writing books about his experiences and about the transformation the country of his birth was going through. I have read every one of his nearly ten books and found them so interesting and informative that they now find a place of pride among my most favourite books.
Now, to tell you how I bumped into Mark Tully, I have to take you back to the days of my childhood, as the son of a man whose most passionate hobby, besides reading and photography, was to build radios at home. Yes, my dad, who led most of his life as a coffee planter, had a short stint as a Reader of Psychology at the Maharaja’s College here in Mysore from where he did his B.A. Honours. And, at that time, one of his teachers who was closest to him, was Prof. M.V. Gopalaswamy (MVG), the man who started a private radio station in his house, Vitthala Vihar, in Vontikoppal, during September 1936 and who very aptly and in a masterstroke of innovation, named his channel as Akashvani, a name that has stuck steadfastly, ever since it was officially adopted in 1957, as the on-air name of All India Radio.
However, some sources say that the name was suggested to MVG by the mother of his colleague and fellow teacher at the Maharaja’s College, Na. Kasturi, who later became the first Assistant Director of Mysore Radio Station. Very interestingly, although Na. Kasturi, being originally from Kerala, had had all his education in Malayalam, he rose up to quickly become a giant to reckon with, in Kannada literature!
MVG went on to become the Principal of the Maharaja’s College and upon his retirement from there he moved to Bangalore, where he established a mental hospital that has now grown to become the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS).
My dad, due to his close association with MVG, perhaps found the radio engineering skills of his professor more alluring than the Psychology that he used to teach, which led to his spending all his spare time in helping the grand-old radio-man in his pursuits to upgrade his thirty-watt Philips transmitter to greater strengths.
And, my dad’s strange fascination for playing with radio waves persisted long after he bid adieu to Psychology and teaching, to return to his roots in the deepest reaches of the Western Ghats, to tend to the land that his father had left for him and his siblings. By that time he had become an avid radio hobbyist, studying books about building radios and constantly putting that knowledge to test.
So, ever since I came on the scene, as the first-born child of my parents, right from my infancy, I too developed an ear for the static raster of home-made, valve driven radios, long before I could comprehend the words that came out of them! Thanks to my mom’s great devotion to preserving things from the past, we still have to this day, all my dad’s books and extensive hand-written notes, both about Psychology and radio engineering and all his good old radios, carefully preserved in our home.
And, my childhood fascination for the radio too has thankfully remained preserved with me to this day, despite all the other gadgets that surround me. Although I do not watch television even for five minutes in a year, yes, you read me right, I still listen to the radio regularly, although now, with the advent of FM transmission, there is not much of shortwave transmission going on in the world.
Still, I never miss or long for what I do not see on television, as long as I have piles of books around me and a trusty radio set sitting by my bedside. I have just no use for what someone has very rightly called the ‘Idiot Box,’ for it is exactly that, considering all the distorted tripe that comes out of it as news and entertainment these days!
Because it was the BBC that we always turned to for world news on radio in our home, Mark Tully quickly became my favourite newscaster and long after he quit BBC, the channel has still remained the dominant source of world news for me, over many years.
Before the advent of digital radio, with the facility to have pre-set frequencies, I used to always have two radios on hand. One to play around with different stations and the other tuned exactly for 11.955 MHz, the frequency of the BBC’s Asian broadcast. All I had to do then was to just flick the switch every morning, without having to struggle to tune the radio, to hear Mark’s booming voice telling me what was happening around the world!
Rest in Peace Mark… you’ll be missed, but not forgotten!
This post was published on February 16, 2026 6:27 pm