When it was announced earlier this week that Aung San Suu Kyi will soon be cast away for Desert Island Discs, it was suggested her choices of music will be ‘really interesting’, because, under house arrest in Burma, she had been forced to live in ‘a time warp, a capsule away from the world’. But will she really be so out of touch with the musical tastes of Radio 4 listeners?
Suu Kyi has often mentioned her gratitude to the BBC, and the World Service in particular, for leading her to places, ideas, music and poetry that were located and inspired thousands of miles away from the house where she was confined just outside Rangoon. (Her admiration for the World Service has been echoed by political prisoners everywhere from John McCarthy in the Bekaa Valley in the 1980s to Ingrid Betancourt in the Colombian jungle almost 20 years later.)
The role that the World Service plays on the global stage is often under-appreciated.
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