Another era, or two years ago

Does anyone remember the Shubha Mudgal album Ab Ke Sawan from a very long time ago (actually, just about 6 years)? It had lovely songs like Seekho Na, Hai Pyar to Musafir, Dere Dere and my favourite, a song called Bairi Chayn. I heard this album so incessantly and obsessively back then that I still remember most of the lyrics and am very tempted to quote all of them extensively here. Don’t worry, I won’t, but it was quite an exceptional album – I could almost compare it to Rabbi.

I suddenly thought about it today and had a sudden urge to listen to it -- the kind of mad urge you only get when it comes to doing completely useless stuff and never about filling tax forms. And realized that though I still had the tape in my possession (a remarkable achievement in itself, considering I lose an average of two sunglasses a month), I had nothing to play it on. I have a tape recorder that has not been used in more than a year, whose head is so far gone that my quite basic cellphone has better sound. Incidentally, this tape recorder was acquired by us just about a couple of years back – I can only guess that we were planning to save it for a private antique collection, for why we would have gone and bought a two-in-one when it was at the very edge of its extinction as a species I have no idea.

Like most civilized people (who haven’t got around to buying a home theatre), we listen to music mostly on the computer. There are nifty little peer-to-peer music search engines that my most computer savvy brother installs for us from time to time, using which we download music illegally from the Net. Most of the time, though, my brother does this himself and we, lazy parasites that we are, just copy songs from his hard disk onto ours. I said from time to time because most of these engines help to positively colonize our system with viruses, so we are forced to regretfully abandon them after a time and reformat the comp or whatever.

Now, my brother is not quite as fond of Shubha Mudgal (what a voice) as me, so understandably the songs were not shyly waiting at some corner of the hard drive to be discovered and listened to. And I was quite determined to use the tape. Finally, I realized I have another almost prehistoric device at my disposal – my dictaphone (yes, it uses actual cassette tapes, yes, those brown spools you can actually touch with a finger).

So I am playing the tape on it right now. The sound emanating from its tiny speaker is pretty bad (very close to transistor radio sound), you have to actually rewind and forward to get to a song you want to hear, and it runs on unrechargeable batteries that have almost run out. My techno-junkie brother looks at me aghast, with a ‘how can you bear this’ look on his face, but I’m having a lot of fun.

P.S. On a not completely unrelated note, I happened to tune in to Vividh Bharati for about ten minutes on the two-in-one earlier this evening. A show called Aaj ke Fankaar was just starting with the evening’s host, Neelam something, singing praises of ‘Jumping Jake’ Jeetendra, who, according to her, belonged to a family of jewellers but was bitten by the ‘Glaymour bug’, necessitating an entry into films and dancing to such immortal classics as Taki, o taki, o taki taki taki re, jab se teri aankhon mein jhanki…