Nostalgia: Music to My Ears
An obsessively curated collection of audio tapes from the author’s past still means more to her than today’s abundance of digital music.
Every time the decluttering bug bites, I come upon that shelf whose contents could easily be banished to a storage box in the garage … or worse. And yet, I never seem to be able to do that. Through the decades, and across cities and continents, that precious cargo has been the one constant that has moved with me every time I have relocated. It has taken precedence over clothes, even books.
It is my collection of audio cassettes, a labor of love, that has been sadly relegated these days to neglected shelves in a forgotten corner of my home. But the memories associated with them are still so vivid that I would not think of parting with them.
Growing up before the days of the internet or mobile phones, my first memories of music were of the songs played on Akashvani, or All India Radio. I remember huddling around with my parents to listen to devotional songs as well as filmi ones. When I stayed with my grandparents, mornings had their own rhythm of listening to Telugu film songs. I credit those listening hours for enhancing my Telugu vocabulary. Years later, those songs made me seek out and watch the movies they were from. Songs such as “Chinukula Raali,” which I thought was the most romantic song ever when I first listened to it (I still think so), only to be utterly disappointed by the tragedy in the movie; and “Aakulo Aakunai,” that made me understand the beauty of words and forever made me a lyrical person.
[Right] The author’s meticulously curated and grouped audio cassette collection.
Then came the days of my undergraduate life in the hostel, where I was introduced to the world of Hindi music. I had listened to Bollywood music before (who didn't know Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, and Asha Bhosle in India?). But my new friends at the hostel, who were from all over India, exposed me to a whole new catalog of music, including pop, which was just getting started in India.
This discovery of an expanding world of music coincided with my purchase of a Sony Walkman (portable cassette players were all the rage in those days). Thus began the innumerable trips to Aziz Music Studio, a tiny shop that could barely fit two people and yet was loaded with huge binders listing every film song known to us. Sweating profusely in that store with no ventilation and parting with a good chunk of my pocket money, I would pore over those binders of Hindi and Telugu music to make a list of songs I wanted recorded onto my audio cassette. Whether it was a 60-minute or 90-minute tape, the goal was to utilize every last second of it, which meant timing the songs and calculating the optimal mix. With so many songs and so little pocket money to buy cassettes, we couldn’t afford to waste precious tape space.
With the growing collection came the challenges of cataloguing and grouping songs that would fit a particular mood or genre. Kishore Da's songs had to be divided into the sad ones, the boisterous ones, and the romantic ones. Same with Lata Ji’s equally versatile range of songs. There was a mood associated with every tape that couldn't be messed with!
When A.R. Rahman burst onto the scene, there was an entire side of a tape devoted just to his “Chhaiya Chhaiya” to be played in a loop. I kept going back and forth between Hindi and Telugu, reaching back in time, trying to capture every song I had ever listened to and had thought of as good. Sometimes, when reading the song names in the binders, I had to take a chance on some of the unknown ones. And if it didn't fit the mood of that tape or if I didn't like the song, I would go back to the store and write down another list to get the tape rewritten. Such was the level of obsession in ensuring perfection in every cassette!
Music has, of course, evolved since those days of my love affair with cassettes. Tapes gave way to CDs, and then to MP3s, which could be downloaded onto discs and USB drives. For a short while, the iPod was just as much of a rage as the Walkman was in its days. And now, we think nothing of the incredible instant access we all have to an endless selection of music at our fingertips, following us everywhere we go—on a device that we sometimes also use to make phone calls!
And yet, despite having multiple apps to build playlists, the ease of Google to track down any song, and the versatility of YouTube to not only play but also show them, there’s something in my old collection of audio tapes that remains irreplaceable—something no digital platform can replicate.
[Left] The author’s Sony Walkman, which started her many visits to the local cassette recording studio
I lost my Walkman, but there's a little radio/tape player that was my first Christmas gift in the U.S. (from a dear aunt who knew my obsession with music), and that I continue to hold on to. Listening to my old music collection in that tape player transports me back to a time when Alisha Chinai's “Made in India” felt patriotic for some reason, when Suneeta Rao's “Paree Hoon Main” made me feel like I was floating in the air (and filled me with pride just because we shared the same name), and when Asha Ji's “Tanha Tanha” made me love her voice all over again!
I realize that it's not the songs or the tapes, but it's the memories associated with them that bring me such joy. So, no matter where life takes me next, my cassette collection will always come with me, much like these cherished memories of my past.
Sunita Upadhyayula blogs about her experiences and emotions related to growing up in India and her current life in the U.S.
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