OR SO sang John Denver and it still sounds like he sang it yesterday. It's been playing on radio all these years after all. There's sure some truth in those words from that song, ``Country Roads,'' at least on Chennai roads.

Especially, when you are driving through the city, tuned in to FM, listening to voices of enthusiastic callers on the dial-in show, songs from yesteryear, the wise-cracks and the sound-bytes of radio jockeys, the unseen men behind the mike, making themselves heard across ``maybe a million homes,'' not to forget the same old jingles that have been ringing in our ears for what seems like years together.

And suddenly, you feel nostalgic, of having gone back in time to the ``good old days'' of Vividh Bharathi, the era before the skies were invaded by satellites, before the clutter of images across a sea of channels and the `digital' wave.

There where people who laid the radio to rest or rust in the attic, pronouncing it dead on the arrival of the satellite channels. But it still haunted them inside air-conditioned cars trapped in the city traffic-car-stereos and FM have almost been synonymous.

Listening to radio on the roads became so popular that Maruti came up with its Traffic Beat programme with RJs A. Krishnan and Dr. Rajeev Fernando who calls himself Dr. Evil hosting the daily dial-in show `M-Time'.

``There's a lot of stuff happening here, but not many know about it. It's not just MTV and Channel V0 that are happening, we have specials, dial-in shows, interactive stuff happening right here in the city, call us and you will know,'' Dr. Evil chuckles, rattling away the numbers-4983830 and 4985725.

Like, it was just on Thursday, that AIR had a `Women's Day' special, of one hour soon after the dial-in show, that featured Anita Ratnam and Dr.Sarika Mahajan, the special guests for the evening who spoke on a range of issues.

``Why a women's day at all...It's tokenism created by Hallmark cards'' to ``51 per cent of the world's population is women, holding 5 per cent of positions of power,'' to ``We can't take 10 per cent of the population of urban women to represent the women of the world''...to ``why all advertising needs a woman to sell anything from aftershaves to cars'' to more serious issues such as abortion and domestic violence.

``We hadn't planned any of the topics, the discussion just happened. Spontaneity is the name of the game,'' says RJ A. Krishnan, who apart from being associated with AIR for six years, and producer of the Traffic Beat programme, is also a professional voice-over and a newsreader with Sun TV.

``This is my last six months in the city. And I want to rock the city before I leave,'' says RJ Dr.Evil, who is the ``fag end of his house-surgeoncy at KMC.''

Not all of us can afford Worldspace. Make the most of our friendly neighbourhood radio station. Tune in.

By Sudhish Kamath