If you have traveled by the Mumbai local train then there are high chances of you having heard Sarla Choudhary’s voice over the loudspeakers. Ever wondered who the lady behind the voice is?
In 1982, Sarla was selected amongst hundreds of others who had appeared for the test of the announcer. Four years later, in 1986 she was made permanent and her voice resonated in all the stations across Mumbai through the loudspeakers.
“I was working as an announcer at one particular station and would announce manually. There was no computerised system at that time and we had to announce at each railway station,” she recalls, as published in ScoopWhoop.
According to a report published in Mid-Day, Sarla, along with a few select others were taken to All India Radio in 1991 to record what would become the commonplace announcements of arrival and departure being played back at every station for the next 20 years.
The announcements, which were in Marathi, were later mixed into a computer and centralised, thus being able to generate on their own. Sarla left that position in 2000, and now works as an office superintendent in the OHE department at Kalyan.
VA Malegaonkar, Chief PRO, CR, said, “We are proud that we have such women working with CR. She was selected for her soft voice and we are using her voice for over 20 years.”
Even today when she hears her own voice at the stations she is left with a smile. She feels nice when people appreciate the announcement’s that are played often at stations across Mumbai.
Recently we covered a story about an all women railway station from Jaipur’s Gandhinagar. What’s amazing about this is that from the ticket collector to the station superintendent, from the enquiry counter to the station master and even the pointsman – it’s an all-women show.
You can read all about it here.
While we can continue to talk and preach about equality, stories like these pave the way for it in the true sense of the word.
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