Forever pressing play with Lou Ottens’ invention, the cassette tape
The Hindu
For radio loyalists, vintage music collectors, and historians, the passing of Lou Ottens was a sobering moment.
Hyderabad-based Bass artiste, DJ and RJ Bala Subramanyam, better known as Dakta Dub, says he was taken aback by how truly upset he was when he heard the news of Ottens’ death on March 6. Many are especially intrigued by the history of Ottens love for audio. The Dutch inventor indulged a curiosity in experimenting with radios when he was a teenager, even going so far as to build one himself from scratch so that he and his parents could tune into the Radio Oranje in the Netherlands in the late 1930s. He modified the radio with a directional antenna to avoid Nazi German radio jammers.
In a few days, there would be a burst of greetings. They would resonate with different wavelengths of emotion and effort. Simple and insincere. Simple but sincere. Complex yet insincere. Complex and sincere. That last category would encompass physical greeting cards that come at some price to the sender, the cost more hidden than revealed. These are customised and handcrafted cards; if the reader fancies sending them when 2026 dawns, they might want to pick the brains of these two residents of Chennai, one a corporate professional and the other yet to outgrow the school uniform

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The Kochi Biennale is evolving, better, I love it. There have been problems in the past but they it seems to have been ironed out. For me, the atmosphere, the fact of getting younger artists doing work, showing them, getting the involvement of the local people… it is the biggest asset, the People’s Biennale part of it. This Biennale has a great atmosphere and It is a feeling of having succeeded, everybody is feeling a sense of achievement… so that’s it is quite good!










