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The Hindu : Listening to Fauji Bhayiyon Ke Liye, the very popular programme of Vividh Bharati had two attractions: the obvious one is the songs that one could die for. The secondis the quaint charm of listening to letters from soldiers in remote corners. Remember Jhumri Talaiyya? Even in those days of the radio, with sets which had to be turned in unimaginable directions to tune into two frequencies, the world would present itself in its most compressed form. Your feelings about that wistful “Tum na jaane kis jahaan mein kho gaye” were exactly the feelings of the faceless fauji bhai. That one song, that one letter and with the cherished magical box as medium, distances collapsed.Now, stormed as we are by urban-centric FM radio channels, forget the back of the beyond Jhumri Talaiyya, we don’t even connect to our neighbouring Srirangapatna. When Shruti S. Prakash, Assistant Programme Director of WorldSpace Sparsha speaks of a Major Kiran who was listening to Kannada programmes in far off Saichen, and is now carrying his set to Congo, where he is presently posted to – it felt human bridges were being built all over again. Worldspace’s 24-hour Kannada channel Sparsha, literally and metaphorically, touches people and at various geographical ends.Not only do you have people listening to it in the other corner of the globe, but there are also people in our own backyard, in places like Kushalnagara, Vitla and the rest tuning in. With their 10 MSN stations getting underway, Worldspace is now accessible anywhere in the world.“We have a wide audience, people with diverse interests. Therefore we make sure that we have all kinds of programmes,” explains Chaitanya Hegde, Senior Programme Director, Sparsha, as he pulls out a 40-page letter from a Hyderabad listener, who gives a detailed analysis of the programmes they air.“It’s very touching that people take so much trouble to share their thoughts with us,” says…More