In the 1990s, when Indian homes had just one television set and Sunday mornings belonged undisputedly to Doordarshan, a gentle voice would announce: "Namaste… swagat hai aapka Surabhi mein."
And with that simple greeting from Siddharth Kak and Renuka Shahane's warm smile, millions of Indians were transported into a weekly celebration of their own country's astonishing diversity.
Surabhi was never just a television programme. It was a national movement disguised as a cultural magazine show.
From remote villages in Manipur to fishing hamlets in Kerala, from the apple orchards of Himachal to the tea gardens of Assam, people sat down on the floor in front of black-and-white sets (or the prized new colour ones) to watch ordinary Indians doing extraordinary things with their heritage. A potter in Kumartuli shaping Durga idols. A Theyyam dancer in full trance. A Baul singer lost in ecstasy. A master weaver in Kanchipuramaking silk speak. Surabhi didn't just show India to Indians – it made every viewer feel that the entire country was one large joint family.
And the family wrote back. In lakhs.
In 1993, a single week saw 14 lakh postcards flood the Surabhi office – a deluge so massive that the Andheri post office in Mumbai ran out of storage space. Siddharth Kak later recalled getting frantic calls from postmasters: "We have no place to keep them, no vans to deliver them!" He ended up hiring tempos himself to ferry sacks of mail. The humble 15-paise inland letter and postcard, meant originally for farmers' schemes, was being "misused" on an industrial scale by an entire nation desperate to participate in a TV quiz.
India Post, in an unprecedented move, created an entirely new category: the ₹2 Competition Postcard, specially designed for quiz shows and contests. It remains one of the few instances in world postal history where a television programme literally forced a national postal service to invent a new product.
That record-breaking 14 lakh letters in one week earned Surabhi a proud entry in the Limca Book of Records – still unbeaten for the highest documented viewer response in Indian television history.
What makes the phenomenon even more extraordinary is that nobody planned it.
There were no marketing budgets, no SMS voting, no social media campaigns, no TRP anxiety, no celebrity endorsements (except the utterly butterly delicious Amul girl who quietly sponsored the show for years). There was only sincere storytelling, two hosts who treated viewers like extended family, and content so rich that people felt compelled to respond – with ink, paper, and a 25-paise stamp (later ₹2).
Every week the show ended with Renuka Shahane reading out letters: a child from Nagaland sending a drawing, a grandmother from Rajasthan sharing a folk recipe, a college student in Shillong suggesting a topic. Winners received prizes as simple as a book or a cassette, yet the joy of seeing your name on national television was priceless. Surabhi turned passive viewers into active participants in cultural preservation.
The show ran gloriously from the early 1990s to 2001 (with a brief pause in 1991), clocking over 415 episodes – making it the longest-running cultural programme in Indian television history. It moved homes from Doordarshan to Star Plus in its final years, but its heart remained firmly in that simple DD studio where Siddharth Kak and Renuka Shahane sat cross-legged on the floor, as if they were in your living room.
Today, when algorithms decide what we watch and outrage travels faster than light, Surabhi feels like a gentle reminder of a kinder time – when a television show could unite a billion people not through controversy, but through curiosity, pride, and love for their own culture.
On World Television Day, we salute Surabhi – the fragrance that still lingers in the hearts of everyone who ever rushed to buy a postcard on Sunday evening, carefully wrote their quiz answers in the best handwriting they could manage, and posted it with a prayer on Monday morning.
Because somewhere in this country, there are still cupboards and old trunks where yellowing Surabhi postcards are kept like treasured family heirlooms.
And that, more than any TRP or award, is the real record that will never be broken.
#WorldTelevisionDay #Surabhi #IndianCulture #Nostalgia #Doordarshan #SiddharthKak #RenukaShahane #ClassicTV #IncredibleIndia
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