How do cities retain a sense of themselves, given the massive amount of change that they are seeing? For the large metropolitan city, it is relatively easy to do so, given the large number of conversations around the subject. Every metro is simultaneously an idea in upper case, one that bears a certain measure of self-conscious self-examination; everyone has a view on whether Delhi is an overgrown village or if Kolkata can ever really change, whether Mumbai is losing its tenacious spirit or if Bangalore will retain even a vestige of its earlier charm. Cinema represents these towns quite well, and many different media work together to capture the evolving spirit of these places.

The smaller town lives in the shadows of the metros, and has fewer mechanisms available to map change. The small town was in earlier days, limited by its own self-satisfied imagination of itself- its boundaries were sharply defined, and it was a self-contained cocoon, full of familiar faces and shared histories. Every individual could represent the town in some ways, for each carried a sense of the town as a whole. People, events and subjects had common currency and the idea of anything becoming the ‘talk of the town’ was more truth than quaint exaggeration. The idea that “all of Kanpur or Ranchi” was talking about some scandalous happening was spoken of casually and was more than mildly plausible.

If the sense of place was largely a physical experience, given the size of the town and the familiarity of the people, the daily newspaper gave it some shape and form. The city paper brought the world to the town, but it also spoke for the events that shaped the experience of living there. Newspapers covered the city, but tended to do so through formal ‘events’ that carried sufficient gravitas to be featured. The newspaper functioned a bit like the town clock tower, in that it organised reality around a central defining feature. It gave shape to time, and created a sense of place. The city was, in the journalistic frame used by the newspaper, a collection of crimes, accidents, local political developments, civic issues, speeches, functions, and eminent local personalities.

As towns have grown, and grown exponentially as wholly unfamiliar sights and sounds have begun to populate the once sleepy space, retaining a sense of the town has become more difficult. The small town is connected much more seamlessly with the rest of the country and world and rich veins of influence cut a swath through the town’s own settled sense of self.

Perhaps no medium captures the crackling sociology of the surging new spirit of cities particularly that of small town India, better than FM radio. On the face of it, this seems improbable, for after all radio as a medium, powerful as its influence has been, is hardly a new phenomenon. For decades, it has helped connect the local with the national, as large parts of the country were soldered together, ear to the transistor by the songs of Hindi cinema. FM is after all, Vividh Bharati with better reception and wackier announcers, not exactly the recipe for discontinuous and disproportionate change.

What FM radio does is give voice to the city in all its liquid stream-of-consciousness currency. It lives in the ever present, and does with energy and enthusiasm, an excitable running commentary on the everyday interests of the city’s residents, particularly the young. All over India, RJs on FM stations are evolving a unique local voice that fuses media-fuelled aspirations with local doubt, the headiness of new opportunities with a reinforcement of an existing way of life. The tone is cheerful, electric even, and the interaction a combination of diversion, stimulation and worldly counselling. The most essential function it performs is still the same, that of playing popular film songs, but the power of FM lies really in its ability to engage in a spirited dialogue with the present, ceaselessly mapping time as it slides from one moment to another.

The conversation does not locate itself in the world of ‘happenings’, nor is in the least bit concerned with what is deemed important but in the new universe of the hyper-trivial. New malls, restaurants, shopping bargains rub shoulders with romantic problems, real and imagined. FM radio teases out the private into the dominion of the public, one confession at a time. The listener is in fact the protagonist, in the sense that radio promotes a parallel dialogue in the listener’s head as one eavesdrops into relatable situations being faced by others. The inner life of the listeners becomes part of the collective outer life, as radio symbolically helps people hold hands as they walk down unfamiliar new paths. Change is legitimised, made sense of and accepted as one finds oneself in the happy company of the new. The city is fed to itself morsel by engaging morsel. Packaged in the grammar of agreeable drivel, FM radio is part of the new ‘bak-bak’ economy that has sprung up in small town India, which breaks down the modern into little bits of the enjoyably trivial.

The RJs are often minor local celebrities who manage to capture something vital and true about a particular town. Armed without maps, and working off their own scripts, these ambassadors of change evolve their own distinctive ways of dealing with their audiences. Every town has its own unique character which finds expression as the daily process of trial-and-error successively refines the RJ’s patter a till a real connection is forged. No other medium offers the combination of real-time currency, one-to-one intimacy and a sense of belonging to a community as does radio; no other medium creates such a fluid narrative of time and place. A city can be understood in many ways, but if one is interested in understanding its newer impulses and its real everyday concerns, listening to FM radio might be a good place to start.