Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

There is a little story that I grew up listening to that is still told by mom with much relish. Many years ago, we were living in a rented house in a building that had 3 or 4 other houses on the ground floor. I was 1 or 2 when I apparently grew quite fond of a particular song. Each time the neighbours would play that song on their record player, I would run to their door and do what you could probably call a dance. One day the neighbours took an offence to this harmless act and told me off (I have a feeling there was something more involved – hint: there were no diapers in India in those days). That very evening, dad got home the record player and made sure that the song was played loud enough to reach the neighbours. The song ironically was Rootho Na (translation: Don’t take offence) and the movie Ahsaas (translation: Feeling/Realization).

The thing I still haven’t gotten over is that the first composer I shook a leg to was Bappi Lahiri.

The man’s notorious for:

And as a google search for his images would reveal, he is suspected of being a goldmine.

So even though the record player was procured well after I was born, as far as my memory is concerned, the record player and our collection of a handful of EPs and LPs were always there.

I have memories of listening to Kabuliwala on an LP of children’s song:

I have memories of amusing myself by playing 33 RPM LPs at 78 RPM. Gibbirish Hindi lyrics like gapuchi gapuchi gum gum kisiki kisiki kisiki kum kum (Translation: gapuchi gapuchi gum gum kisiki kisiki kisiki kum kum – I kid ye not!) lend themselves nicely to that sort of mischief.

I have memories of using its speaker with my first computer through a clever hack involving a stereo pin and crocodile clips.

For some reason the record player was never given away or sold – just packed away, forgotten and after a gap of few years remembered again. Like a narrator in a play who appears every now and then to move the story forward.

I recently saw a 7” vinyl of an old Hindi film Qurbani at a used LP shop in Amsterdam.

I was so overcome with nostalgia, that during a visit to India last week, I located the record player in our loft, brought it down, dusted it and plugged it in. The yellowing newspaper in which it was wrapped bore a date in the year 2002. Surprisingly, even after 10 years of lying unused in a dingy, dusty, cobwebbed corner, it came to life. The turntable is a bit rickety (and noisy), the RPM selection switch a bit stiff, the volume and pitch control knobs a bit loose and the latches that allow the speaker and the rest of the unit to be neatly packed as one box a bit rusty, but if you place an LP on the turntable and gently drop the needle on it, it soldiers on producing that warm, nostalgia inducing sound that only LPs do.

I was quite taken with the cover art of the LPs. What makes them remarkable is that they were made in a pre-Photoshop era. People must’ve spent hours compositing some of these covers together:

[At some point in my life, I was particularly partial to anything with Amitabh Bachchan on it. Uncles and aunts would ask the question that uncles and aunts in India loved to ask 7-10yr olds in the 80s – “What do you want to become when you grow up?” “Amitabh Bachchan” would be my unwavering reply for many years.]

While time has rendered these covers kitschy, some should continue to appeal to the contemporary aesthetic:

The present day CD cover art has nothing on these 12”x12” (12”x24” for double LPs) cardboard covers.

The 7” EP records used to cost around Rs. 16 and the 12” LPs used to retail for Rs. 27. The 7” EPs would have room for about 2 tracks on each side. The 12” LPs fared a little better with 3 tracks on each side. I think that’s a lot of money for a middle-class family of four in the India of the 80s. The inconvenience of having to manually flip the record came free.

One record in our collection stands out – not only because it’s made up of paper-thin, transparent plastic, but also because I remember how it got home. We were waiting at our dentist’s reception for my routine dental checkup when dad stumbled upon it inside an old magazine. The 7” record has a short 5-min promo for the movie Zamane Ko Dikhana Hai.

[Notice that tobacco advertising/sponsorship in the 80s wasn’t frowned upon. Then they swapped tobacco for underworld and people have been complaining ever since.]

The wonderful thing is that it still plays. The stylus occasionally gets locked or skips grooves, but once you discount the age of the equipment here, the sound quality is perfectly serviceable.

At the end of the promo you can hear the faint march of the medium that would replace LPs – the cassette

“ye naujavan sangeet aapke liye ek dhakte hue stereo LP record per aur music cassette par bhi”

[Translation: This young music for you on a pulsating stereo LP record and on a music cassette too!]

I often wonder how much of our present media will still work in 30 years from now.

P.S. In the early days of the operation of the record player, the parents broke the stylus quite often. The last time they broke it, they bought a spare. Its turn never came:

P.P.S. The record player model was Fiesta Popular by HMV.

I am a relatively recent fan of The Beatles. Also, I now live in a country where Apple has an iTunes music store. More importantly, I happened to move here just a few months after The Beatles’ entire catalogue became available on iTunes. I’ve been making up for lost time by buying one iTunes LP edition of their album each month.

I am quite impressed at how quickly The Beatles kept re-inventing themselves. Their music covered so much ground that any pop number I now listen to sounds like a derivate work. What I had not done so far was follow the music John, Paul, George and Ringo made after their break-up. I recently came across “Maybe I’m amazed” from Paul McCartney’s first solo album:

Sounds like The Beatles’ solo output is worth pursuing as well!

Imagine a cold, overcast day. Now imagine a quaint pub at the corner of a street by a canal. Entering it on a day like this is like entering a new world. You are sitting, chatting with colleagues with a glass of iced tea in your hand. Music plays in the background but faintly – for it doesn’t want to intrude on your conversation. In fact it is so faint that it sounds like a whisper from a world beyond ours. The music changes and your ears catch a vaguely familiar strain. But they can’t quite place it. Besides this is a pub – most of whatever little reached your ears is drowned in conversations around you. That nagging sense of familiarity persists – and the inability to clearly hear the music strengthens it. Then suddenly, by some stroke of good fortune, the conversations at your table and at the table beyond and at the bar stools pause for a fraction of a second – as if everyone was reading from the same page and encountered a full stop. And you hear with unmistakable clarity a voice that you know can only be Paul McCartney softly crooning:

Michelle, my belle.
Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble,
Très bien ensemble.

A Beatles binge ensued for 2 days – one that has left me happy and sad in equal measures. Happy because it’s such delightful music. Sad because of how short-lived it all was.

While listening to this bit in John and Yoko’s Ballad today:

Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton,
Talking in our beds for a week.
The newspaper said, “Say what you doing in bed?”
I said, “We’re only trying to get us some peace”.

I realized that while roaming around Amsterdam during our visit in January, we had come across a shop selling prints of black-and-white pictures of John and Yoko taken during their aforementioned stay. There is something mesmerizing about these pictures, and I stood there staring at this one in particular for a long time:

I didn’t have my camera then, but while I was interviewing (the reason why we were here in January), my wife hunted the shop down and got a picture of the picture for me (we hadn’t taken a note of the street name – what magical powers she used to find this place again will remain a mystery to me).

P.S. I am impressed at how thoroughly documented their music is on Wikipedia. Practically every song has a page of its own with all sorts of quotes, notes and anecdotes – anything that doesn’t have a copyright attached.

The musicians at Centraal Station were playing at the North (IJ-facing) exit today. Here is what they sound like:

Download: mp3 (476 kb) | ogg (380 kb)

The overcast weather of the last three days and the cold river-front breeze makes the music sound more melancholy than it should.

It was Mahler’s 100th death centenary today. I was expecting google to do their customary doodle but it wasn’t on their .com homepage and it seems like their .de and .at homepages gave it a miss as well. As a teeny private tribute, I played Mahler on my headphones all day.

Slightly spooky coincidence of the day: while checking the tram routes to office, I discovered that tram 16 terminates at Gustav Mahlerlaan: