Radio is just lost in the meadow

There was a time when a voice could arrive from nowhere.

You could be lying awake in bed, the room dark and everyone else asleep, and suddenly someone would begin telling a story. You could not see the storyteller. You did not know what they looked like, what they were doing, or even where they were sitting. There was only the voice, travelling through the night and finding its way into your room.

That was the strange intimacy of radio.

Today, it is difficult to find people listening to it. Our phones carry YouTube, podcasts, streaming platforms, social media, music and live news. Almost everything is available whenever we want it. We no longer have to wait for a programme to begin; we simply press play.

Somewhere along the way, radio became almost invisible.

But perhaps the radio has not disappeared. Perhaps we have simply stopped looking for it.

The sound of a different Bangladesh

Before smartphones and the internet became extensions of our hands, radio was one of the country's most important windows to the outside world.

It was especially important during the Liberation War of 1971, when access to electricity and other means of communication was limited. Radio carried news, messages, and information across the country, connecting people to events beyond their immediate surroundings. In a time of uncertainty, it offered something invaluable: a voice telling people what was happening.

Radio was not confined to living rooms. At village tea stalls, people gathered around small radio sets to listen to the news, sports and entertainment programmes. Fishermen and people living in remote areas depended on broadcasts, including weather updates, to keep track of changing conditions. A radio could sit in the corner of a shop or hang from a wall, playing quietly as people went about their day.

It was not merely a machine. It was part of the rhythm of life.

Waiting for Bhoot FM

For my generation, radio belongs to a different kind of memory.

I remember waiting for Bhoot FM, Sufi Hours, Hello Dhaka, Jibon Golpo, Kuasha and Love Guru. I remember waiting for the elders in my family to fall asleep so I could listen to Bhoot FM.

There was something almost magical about it.

You heard a voice without ever seeing the person behind it. You listened to stories told by strangers and, somehow, felt as though they were speaking directly to you. Sometimes I would send messages to the programmes, hoping to hear my own words read out on air.

The excitement was not only about the content. It was about the waiting.

The programme had a particular time. If you missed it, you missed it. There was no pause button, no replay, no streaming service waiting patiently for you. You had to be there.

That made listening feel like an event.

I even remember buying books based on stories from Bhoot FM because I enjoyed the programme so much. The voices of the presenters, their pronunciation, their pauses, and the way they created a sense of closeness with thousands of unseen listeners made radio feel remarkably personal.

We could not see them, yet we felt that we knew them.

Then everything became available

Technology changed that relationship. Today, almost nothing asks us to wait.

If we want music, it is there. If we want a story, it is there. If we want news, it is there. If we want to hear someone's voice at 3am, we can find a podcast or video made months or years earlier.

Our phones have turned waiting into an inconvenience.

Even radio has been absorbed into this new world. Some phones no longer include traditional FM radio, while radio that is available through apps often depends on an internet connection.

There is an irony here. The medium that once survived when electricity and communication infrastructure were limited has itself become increasingly dependent on the very digital infrastructure that was supposed to replace it.

The question, then, is not whether technology is better than radio

Of course it is faster. It is more convenient. It offers more choices.

The question is why radio had to become invisible.

It did not have to disappear. It could have evolved.

Traditional broadcasts could have been paired with mobile apps, podcasts, digital archives and interactive programmes. Old broadcasts could have been preserved instead of disappearing into forgotten recordings. Programmes that once existed only at a particular hour could have been made available to new generations without losing the magic of live broadcasting.

We modernised almost everything around radio. Perhaps we simply forgot to modernise radio itself.

When the internet goes silent

My thoughts about radio became more complicated during the July uprising.

I was at home, and internet access was unavailable. Suddenly, the digital world that had seemed permanent was gone.

That experience made me think about how dependent we have become on a communication system that feels invisible precisely because it is everywhere. We use it for news, conversation, work, entertainment, and information without thinking about what happens when it stops working.

And then I thought about radio.

There was a time when losing access to the internet would not have meant losing access to the world in quite the same way. A radio could still speak. It could still carry information. It could still connect one person to thousands of others.

Perhaps that is one reason radio still matters.

Not because it can compete with a smartphone. But because it reminds us that communication does not have to be complicated to be powerful.

I worry that an entire generation may grow up without knowing what radio once meant.

They may never know the peculiar excitement of turning a dial and searching through frequencies. They may never sit beside a small radio at a tea stall. They may never wait for a favourite programme at a particular hour, knowing that the voice they are about to hear is being heard by thousands of other people at exactly the same time.

They may never know the intimacy of listening to someone they have never seen.

And perhaps that is not necessarily tragic. Cultures change. Technologies become obsolete. New forms of storytelling replace old ones.

But when something disappears, we do not always realise what we have lost immediately. Sometimes we notice only when we try to remember the sound.

Perhaps radio does not need to return to the centre of our lives. It does not need to defeat YouTube, Spotify or podcasts. It does not need to pretend that the last few decades never happened. It simply needs to survive.

We should be able to modernise the old without erasing it.

Radio once connected people when almost nothing else could. It informed us, entertained us and quietly entered our memories. Its greatest strength was never the technology itself. It was the human voice travelling across distance, entering homes, tea stalls, boats and lonely rooms without asking for much in return.

Now everything is becoming digital, immediate and searchable.

Maybe what we need is not to bring the old radio back exactly as it was, but to make sure its voice does not disappear completely.

Because sometimes a culture does not vanish with a dramatic goodbye. Sometimes it simply becomes quiet.

And one day, we look around and realise that we can no longer remember what it sounded like.