I am a sucker for music really. Nothing changes my mood as music does. A few moments back I was harboring violent thoughts of smashing the screen of my laptop ( that would be good). Now.. as I have ?Summer of 69? playing in my earphones.. maybe I will defer the demolition for another day.
I am 27 years old?hardly an age to feel old. But sometimes I feel as if a generation has passed me by. They do not play my music anywhere anymore.
That brings me to me a more basic question, what is really my kind of music?
The first songs of my childhood were scratchy long playing records of ?The Sound of Music? and ?My Fair Lady?, shining black discs with a huge crimson dot in the center, and a thoughtful Dog peering into a gramophone?. Or Bright Green circles with Colombia written in Silver blocks?. It took me a fair amount of growing up before I was allowed to put the needle head onto a spinning record?.
How many summer afternoons were spent listening to songs of places and people I had never seen and hardly expected to see ever, twiddling with knobs on our two decade old Bush Radiogram. Sometimes, on a rare occasion, when someone would procure a functioning Video Cassette of an old classic in a hole in the Wall library in old Lucknow? we would gather in front of flickering VCR screens, trying hard to make out if we could see the face of Maria , trying to locate that one picture that adorned the cover of our records in the shelves?
Its almost an anticlimax now? to see neat stacks of ?The Sound of Music? CDs in Crossword, where people just have a look and pass them by. Hardly as exciting as the Sound of Music of my childhood. At times feel sad for the kids now? with everything just there for the picking?.
Is it not, that at times a memory that is a bit rough around the edges, exclusive and a bit hard to define.. becomes so much more to you than it would otherwise have.
Anyway, I digress?. My Music.
There was Cliff Richard?. Our boy from Lucknow. Trust any Lucknowite to name at least this one English singer as one his favorites? and this has more to do that Cliff Richard spent a couple of years at a local Convent school before his father packed his bags and left India in 1947.
But honestly, ? The Spanish Harlem? and ?The Evergreen Tree? are songs that I still hear at times? played anonymously on the piano, as background fillers at five stars?
I never really had the conviction for rock music? like so many of my friends in school and college? I guess I always was a bit ?Out? of it.
Asha Bhonsle was the most beautiful voice I heard growing up, and it still is?.
And then there was this band called The Corrs in the 90s? their debut album was a beauty? as much as their second one was bummer. Almost like our own home grown Silk Route?.
Recently heard a guy called Josh Turner? sings Country music and makes you go back to all the good things people sang about in the songs of old?.
She plays John Denver on the stereo when she is in the mood for cleaning up the house. So every time I hear strains of ?Leaving on a Jet Plane? wafting through the house, I know its time to get out of the way and curl up with a book somewhere? My father sings Talat Mehmood when he misses my mother, I listen to ?Summer of 69? when I have a lousy day at office. Ha !
Diwali vacations are a day away, yet my inbox is flooded with ?Happy Diwali? messages? kind of takes your mind somewhere else altogether.
Wish You All a Very Happy Diwali !
Comments from the past:
s
21 Oct 2006, 8:11am
and Happy Diwali to you too
s
25 Jan 2007, 1:32pm
one very long drowsy afternoon? no more posts?
Ashish
25 Jan 2007, 4:13pm
Call it a coincidence? Just posted one today !
Sussegad.... 