Namaskar main hoon aapki dost Jyoti Parmar. Aap sun rahe hain seedha prasaaran Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation se, frequency 25.11905 megahertz par. Samay hua hai subah ke 5:30. Shuruwaat karte hain bhagwan ki aaradhana se.

AS Jyoti Parmar plays a devotional song for her listeners in a small room of Radio Ceylon (now Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation) in the early hours, she continues her father Digvijay Parmar’s legacy, who spent 30 years at Asia’s oldest radio station in Colombo. Jyoti hails from Uttarakhand. She was a child when her father got a job with Radio Ceylon in 1967. The station featured top radio announcers of that time like Gopal Sharma, Vijay Kishore Dubey and Ameen Sayani. She first stood in front of the mike 20 years ago, taking people’s requests. The listeners were from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

As she continues playing old melodies from this heritage building, she realises that the world back home has changed. The famous segments, Binaca Geetmala and Lipton ke Sitaare, are now part of history and have been replaced by Bhoole Bisre, Purani filmon ka sangeet, Ek hi film ke geet.

Jyoti doesn’t get a five-figure salary like some Indian radio jockeys do. At a time when FM stations are competing for business, little has changed for her. There are no SMS contests, nor does she ask her listeners to email their feedback. Apart from the telephone calls, letters remain the most popular mode to request for songs.  

“We’ve remained a conventional radio station,” smiles the 41-year-old, showing her library of 75,000 LP records of Hindi movie songs. “People are moving ahead, but we are taking them back to a golden era,” she says.

... contd.