he had stayed up the night before but when we met mir the next afternoon his eyes glowed bright with energy and a quiet confidence that only comes out of knowing that hes among the best in the business anchor actor funnyman he has kolkata laugh and cry with him every morning on his breakfast show but behind every smile are hours of hard work and mir confesses to being under medication when he was unable to switch off from what he loves most radio before completing 20 years on air today mir opened up on tickling kolkatas funnybone and all thats landed him in troubleexcerpts you were still a college student when you joined radio way back in 1994 what my life today is is actually because of a washerman ramsaran paswan he doesnt know what he has done for me on a monsoon evening 20 years back my mother said go and collect the laundry i used to stay on ripon street that area would get flooded easily and i remember taking a rickshaw ramsaran gave me the clothes wrapped in an old newspaper i had the habit of reading news items even from a murir thonga as i looked at the paper i saw this ad that read fm is now coming to kolkata those who have the gift of the gab kindly apply the newspaper was seven days old and the interview had a sevenday limit that was the penultimate evening my logic told me there was no point in applying but my school friend asked me to give it a shot i didnt have a tape recorder at home i went to my friends place recorded my voice in a cassette and landed the job in the next few dayswhat did you record i rapped like baba sehgal i tried to relate baba sehgal to kundan lal saigal there were other such odd thingsdo you have a childhood association with the radio in 1990 before the world cup i coaxed my father into buying a television set the notion back then was kids dont study if theres a tv at home so i would listen to radio a lot i had this weird habit of taking aluminium bars connecting wires to them and linking it with someones television antenna to listen to radio stations around the world i was this dilton kind of a character it was the sheer joy of listening to radio that led me to experiment i would listen to ameen sayanis show and note down which was the number one song in a particular week i would listen to srabanti majumdar a lot i would tune into audio dramas to get away from the boredom of not having a tv at home there was no distraction and i was solely hooked on to television when i started out the concept of rj was not popular if i said i was a radio jockey people would ask where is