Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

I formed a positive association with rains at a very early age. Summers in Delhi are harsh. By mid-May temperatures hover in the 40-45ºC range in the afternoon, and rarely dip below 30ºC in the nights. All this would be compounded by long, untimely powercuts depriving you of even a fan – in temperatures that otherwise need air-conditioning to cope with. On a number of nights, I would wake up stewing in my sweat and wonder what had I done do deserve this misery.

On other nights I’d lie in my bed listening to songs that had sounds of thunder and rain and pretend that it’s raining outside.

And then the Monsoons would try to make it up to you. The phrase ‘too little, too late’ could be applied to the Monsoons in Delhi with remarkable regularity. Come August, and the wind in Delhi would turn so heavy with humidity, that it would begin to weigh you down. This would make the last days of summer (with maximum temperatures still above 35ºC) quite unbearable. And then one day, the skies would open up. The newspapers next morning would be full of pictures of traffic jams on waterlogged roads. A picture of a bus trapped in water under Minto Bridge would inadvertently be there on the front page. The power cuts would continue and on some days actually become worse. But the temperatures (at least in the evenings) would be pleasant enough for you to sleep through the night without a fan.

When I left Bangalore, the summers there were beginning to get a little warmer, but thankfully, were no where close to being as traumatic as summers in Delhi. Even on hottest of days, a pleasant cool breeze would magically transpire to keep you cool. After sunset, the city would cool down rapidly and I don’t remember a single night when I lost sleep because it was too warm. Still, I carried my pleasant associations with rain to Bangalore. The pre-monsoon showers would begin by March-end and it would rain regularly all the way till October. It was also my favourite time for traveling all over Karnataka but especially to the lush, rainy hills in Coorg and Chikmagalur.

In Amsterdam, it’s Monsoon every day. The city is under a cloud cover for almost the entire year. It’s also very windy. As a result you rarely get something resembling a torrential downpour. Rain here feels as if a barber’s water spray is being blown into your face. My pleasant associations with rains have come with me all the way here. On a Monday morning, when I look through our window at a feeble sunrise through layers and layers of rapidly shifting grey clouds, I actually get excited about my commute to work. On days when it’s freezing cold, and I am outside in the rain with an umbrella that I can’t open because the speed of wind would render the whole exercise pointless, I look at the sky (rain lashing my face, water droplets streaking through my hair) and finding myself unable to contain my joy, laugh like a man possessed.

I saw SRT’s tweet this morning but didn’t catch the reference till the wife mentioned it this evening:

Time flies but memories last forever. What a day it was!!! 02-04-2011

Time flies indeed. There we were in a borrowed apartment, on borrowed moments, cheering for the Indian cricket team till our throats went hoarse. I have hardly followed cricket since moving here. I’ve only kept a tab on all the series in which India has played and have been disappointed at the growing tally of losses in the last year or so. It’s as if the team reverted to the dispirited, losing side I used to follow in the 90s.

But it’s been easy to pretend that the Indian cricket team’s losing phase after world cup hasn’t happened. Cricket is neither followed nor broadcast on the ‘regular’ sports channels here. The Netherlands has a cricket team on paper, but I haven’t seen it covered anywhere other than Cricinfo, so the question of cricket stars endorsing products and hogging media doesn’t arise. In fact, it’s quite easy to believe while living here that cricket itself doesn’t exist. The only public reference about cricket I’ve found till date has been this vintage poster in the loo of the Olympic Stadium here:

(Seeing it reminded me of that scene in The Planet of the Apes where the protagonist discovers the archeological remains of a human settlement that has toys and articles implying the humans’ once dominant existence. I felt the same sense of helplessness and being in a long exile.)

Over the last few months I’ve found myself gradually slipping into indifference towards the game. I’ve never followed football (the dominant sport and spelled ‘voetbal’ here), and at my age find it quite impossible to ‘get into it’.

The only sport that I still actively follow is Formula 1, which is quite ironical because I would refuse to even acknowledge it as a sport till 2 years back. I then got involved with the launch of espnf1.com and started following it actively (it’s easier to build a product when you enjoy using it). Ironically still, I sometimes find myself relating to the sense of sorrow and loss portrayed in the novel Netherland.

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.

My memory is fading. This has to be written down. 30 years is not an awfully long time, but nothing has changed more than the way we buy and listen to music. A brief personal history starting with the radio:

My earliest memory of a music-playing device is that of our old family radio in our bedroom. I don’t know how it came to be in our house. It was either a hand-me-down from grandma, something that mom brought along when she got married or dad’s first big purchase as a bachelor. Like an old family dog, it was just there. Come evening, and it would be switched on and I’d eagerly wait for it to “warm up”. A green light in the top corner would gradually come up, followed by sound.

There weren’t many radio channels in India in the ‘80s. The radio was permanently tuned in to Vividh Bharti. There were a handful of advertisers and the same ads would play in more or less the same order in the evening (I had the order memorised and was quite proud of being able to guess the next ad before the last one would finish – the parents proudly attributed it to the regimen of soaked almonds in the morning). The programming itself was what you’d expect from a country with strong socialist leanings. There were the evening state-sponsored news bulletins with news of inauguration of power plants and dams, visiting dignitaries, NAM summits, losses and victories in hockey and cricket and weather reports. The entire bulletin would be read in the monotone of a bored school headmaster. Then there were the short radio dramas (Hawa Mahal, whose jingle I can still hum) and some miscellaneous music programming mostly featuring songs from old and new Bollywood films.

The radio was capable of tuning in to both Medium Wave (MW) and Short Wave (SW) transmission. SW was rarely used. While the MW static was pleasing and an integral part of the texture of the sound, the SW static – a confused mess of hiss, whistle, and crackle – was almost disturbing. I later found out that the radio had a spot behind it for connecting an external antenna. Since we never had one, it was almost impossible to get a steady lock on an SW channel.

I don’t know what became of the radio. It gradually fell out of use and one day stopped working. I remember we once unscrewed the thin wooden cover behind the radio to find a fascinating world of dusty, cobwebbed vacuum tubes. One of them had gone bad and a spare was either not available or very expensive. The radio probably went for a pittance to the neighbourhood junk-recycling man on his bicycle (raddi wala).

I think I now understand the fuss audiophiles raise over their valve amplifiers. There was a certain warmth about the sound from that radio which I haven’t experienced since then. Or perhaps it’s just impossible to separate the various associations of a child of 5 – the security and warmth of being with both the parents at night, that mandatory glass of oversweet, warm milk before sleep, the hum of the fan on hot, summer nights and the sound of the radio.