India, Dec. 23 -- The earliest radio station in Asia, Radio Ceylon, turned 100 last week. Nearly a decade older than All India Radio (AIR), the Sri Lankan radio service was once the Indian Subcontinent's ears to the world of entertainment as it broadcast in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu besides Sinhala, and found listeners in faraway places. It came to symbolise the soft power of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, but also the commercial genius that recognised the radio's potential as a transnational popular communications platform. In the process, Radio Ceylon mostly managed to sidestep the treacherous political fault lines in the subcontinent and win listeners across languages and nationalities. For Indians, Radio Ceylon is identified mostly with Binaca Geetmala and its legendary host, Ameen Sayani. This popular weekly programme of Bollywood music contributed more to the popularisation of Hindi in the voice Mohammad Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar than all the government-funded promotional propaganda. Colombo carried its colonial cultural inheritance lightly and was least coy about celebrating Western popular music (Binaca Hit Parade) as much as Bollywood, whose popularity it understood very early. For sure, its task was made easy by BV Keskar, the Sorbonne-educated I&B minister in the Nehru cabinet, who considered popular music a crass form of entertainment and banned it on AIR stations. That's how Jhumri Telaiya, a town in Jharkhand, discovered Radio Ceylon and Sayani. Later, AIR made amends by inventing Vividh Bharati, hurting Radio Ceylon's popularity. The arrival of satellite television and the internet ended the reign of Radio Ceylon (Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation after Ceylon was renamed as Sri Lanka in 1972) and turned radio itself into an object of nostalgia. But not before it had taught us the lesson that music transcends national borders....