NEW DELHI: 'Main Samay hoon…..' were words that resonated in every television owning Indian home between 1988 and 1990 on the Doordarshan screen every Sunday morning before the era of the private channels.

Coming soon after the ‘Ramayana’ series by the late Ramanand Sagar, the Mahabharata series by B R Chopra became a must for every television watcher, and mnay made efforts to visit friends to watch the eposodes if they did not own a TV set.

Now in a new experiment, the same series is to be broadcast on All India Radio’s national channel – in what AIR Director General Fayyaz Sheheryar terms as a ‘customised radio version’.

The popular series will be broadcast in 154 episodes on the national channel of Akashvani fron 19 December from Monday to Friday in the mornings from 11.15 am.
Sheheryar told radioandmusic.com that the series was being termed as “the renaissance of ancient India’s religious philosophy for enriching the youth of the 21st century.”

Asked how action or other scenes that could not be adapted to radio, he said that the help of a ‘sutradhar’ (narrator) had been taken to fill in whenever such scenes occur.

The 94-episode Hindi series originally ran from 2 October 1988 to 24 June 1990 on DD National. It was produced by B. R. Chopra and directed by his son Ravi Chopra.