Dinodia Photos/Getty Image
Mahatma Gandhi at a public meeting in western India in 1944
In 1929, a young volunteer of the Indian National Congress party had a moment of epiphany.
Nanik Motwane was watching the venerated national hero Mahatma Gandhi struggling to get himself heard at huge pro-Independence public meetings. The leader would be "going from platform to platform" at the same venue to "enable his weak voice to be heard by large numbers [of people]," Motwane recounted later.
That's when the 27-year-old second-generation migrant businessman decided to find a way to "amplify the voice" of the leader so that "all who were anxious, more to hear than to see him, would be able to hear him clearly".
Two years later, Motwane was ready with a public address system at the Congress party's session in Karachi - which is now a bustling city in present-day Pakistan. One of his earliest surviving photographs shows the beaming businessman wearing the trademark white Gandhi cap and showing the leader the branding on his microphone: Chicago Radio.
For the next two decades, Chicago Radio became synonymous with the loudspeakers that relayed India's struggle for freedom from imperial rule to the masses. "We called our loudspeakers the 'voice of India'," says Kiran Motwane, son of Nanik, and third-generation scion of the family.
Chicago Radio/Motwane
Nanik Motwane showing Gandhi his microphone during a meeting in Karachi in 1929
Chicago Radio was a curious name for a firm based in...
Read Full Story: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-62390087
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