Then the motto of the NYT was ‘Expect The World’, and in so writing about Botswana, it gave us a glimpse of that world, however incomplete that might have been. In any case, it might be that for a reader of that newspaper, these radio announcements, unimaginable in a cosmopolitan, dense and cacophonous island of New York City, not only served as a reliable conveyance of necessary information in a far-flung country but also as morbidly cute – symbolically, the modern age version of the African drum echo!
As a matter of fact, there was a time in this country, perhaps in the 1970s, when radio used to be inherently useful and indispensable as a source of news, information, public notices, learning, and even Sunday evening classical music. Its hissing, static noise on SW and MW, mediated by a slew of foreign radio stations found only on those wavelengths, coupled with a patchy service on FM, to us gloriously weaved technological modernity with our simple way of life, our social interaction, and our basic education. Indeed, notwithstanding the prevalence of its limitations, we maintained during our childhood, an un-grumbling acceptance of radio’s utility and imperfections, so complete that it became a kind of perfection.
