'Forever Favourite'

The other day, I was unpacking one of the few remaining cartons. We still have a few lying around. As I went on, a lot of interesting things were coming out. A few craft items (my poor attempts), some home décor stuff, stationery etc. The bottom most packet was the most interesting. It had around 100 + audio cassettes, imagine !!!

Who uses audio cassettes now a days !! who wants to take headache of buying audio cassettes, preserving them etc. Now in the era of i-pods and ‘free, downloadable MP3s’, collecting music has become very easy. But that’s now. Most of us have grown up listening to music on audio cassettes. The most interesting part was to get custom-made cassettes, recording assorted numbers in a single cassette (those cassettes were usually named ‘Forever favourite’ ). In Bombay generally such recordists would be located near the station. Drawing the list of such seasonal favourites was an enjoyable task and usually it took more than one head to come up with an ‘acceptable’ list. Could be because this cassette never really belonged only to the owner. It was for the entire gang and which meant everybody’s choice had to be included.

That evening, when I was browsing through my new-found collection and came across the most amazing treasure. There were so many old (or may be not so old) movies like ‘Ashiqui’ , Chandanee, QSQT, Tezaab, Dil etc. Mainly during this time I had started buying cassettes on my own. Hence all the seasonal hot-favourties including Michael Jackson, Madonna and Bryan Adams’ old numbers. There were so many old cassettes belonging to my father which had rare collection from Lata, Rafi and Mukesh, ‘Hits of Shammi Kapoor’, ‘Evergreen Raj Kapoor’ etc. There was a huge collection of Marathi music. Then there were some for one act play, movies with dialogues, Katha-kathan (story-telling) by Va. Pu. Kale and Pu. La. Deshpande. There were at least 10-12 cassettes of Gazals mostly by Jagjit-Chitra Singh, Pankaj Udhas and Gulaam Ali. That collection is relatively new because I started appreciating Hindi Gazals much late in life.

There was a small polythene in that packet and from outside I could make out that there were around 4-5 cassettes inside. I hastily opened that packet and I had almost guessed it right. Those were the cassettes I had got recorded in my Hostel. I put one of them in the cassette player and eagerly waited for the first song to play. It started with Alice followed by Last Christmas and then all the numbers from Acqua (I am a Barbie girl, Dr. Jones).. It went on and on… The most surprising part was I exactly knew the order in which the songs would follow in that cassette. Years back, I had heard those cassettes so many times that my brain had mapped the exact order of those songs and the lyrics too. So I went on listening to all those great (and not so great) songs. I was screaming the lyrics loudly and dancing on the bed just as we had in our hostel rooms (sometimes even at 3 am.) There were songs that I was listening to almost after decades like Buffalo Soldier (Neelu, rememeber Patrick Sir??) Sexy eyes, Long and lasting love, It must have been love, Careless whisper, Shery Shery lady, Brother Louie, Its sad to belong to someone else, Boyzone, Backstreet boys and on and on…

Those few hours I completely relived our hostel days (and nights). Music was integral part of our lives then, we had music for every occasion. All of us were equally crazy about dance so any tune would set us to dance. I am so sure that anyone of us who would be listening to those songs can’t remain deprived of the same emotions that I experienced that evening. We had so well internalized that music.
Today, I want to tell all those girls that a little part of me still belongs to them and to the times I have spent with them. Today we are (literally) poles apart but I am sure all of us preserve and cherish the times of togetherness !!! Love you all …


Neel's Bdday party, midnight cake cutting followed by our ballroom dance (Neelu, don't miss the music player on the floor)


Thats me and Yaj singing 'Sacrifice'.. (I still remember)