Kate Chisholm

United nations

Plus: Radio 4’s 15-minute drama on Modesty Blaise is silly but so refreshingly dated

The Indian Prime Minister has twigged something that President Trump has yet to understand. On Monday, celebrated as World Radio Day, Narendra Modi tweeted his congratulations to ‘all radio lovers and those who work for the radio industry and keep the medium active and vibrant’. Modi uses radio to reach out to those in his country who live in its most remote and inaccessible corners, giving a monthly address to the nation known as ‘Mann Ki Baat’ (or ‘To mind’). He says it’s his way of ‘sharing his thoughts’ with his citizens, and a useful way of extending the tentacles of government into those areas where television sets are uncommon, let alone computer screens or smartphones.

Modi has understood the power of radio to reach those parts that even Twitter can’t access, and the way that radio is in many ways more powerful than online communication — because of the way it gets inside your mind. As the World Radio Day website says, ‘It informs and transforms’, and best of all it allows for audience participation, not through an exchange of words written and read via a digitally manipulated screen but through the human voice, a tangible connection, person to person. If you have a radio, you need never feel alone — as so many hostages have testified after their release. What kept them entertained and informed, but most of all helped them not to lose their connection to the world and their own selves while in solitary confinement, was listening to voices on air, often via the BBC World Service.

On Wednesday, Hope Speaks Out on the World Service (produced by Mukti Jain Campion) told the story of a radio station run by refugees that is helping to connect those who have been forced to flee their homelands with those who have given them refuge.

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