I always thought that I am one abnormal and weird bloke. Sitting on the sofa, minding my own business, suddenly there is a flash and I am teleported back to June of 1994. I am coming back from those damn extra classes which our (and I bet all the other schools) used to conduct for 10^th standard boards – the heat of the afternoon felt like Dante’s Inferno – and mind you this is the time much before the Uber, Delhi Metro or any other of the logistical comforts without which we now cannot even imagine how life existed on the earth.

I put on the TV at 2 PM in the afternoon – wanted to see what’s on MTV – and I see Green Day in a green coloured video, at a hospital riffing away to glory in Basket Case…I know, most of you millennials would say – MTV and music?? Isn’t MTV synonymous to Hindi curses on Roadies and soft porn on Splitzvilla? To give you some insight – MTV was the only western music channel that was available across the world (including in India) – The ‘M’ in MTV means (or at least meant) ‘Music’.

And I am talking about times when bands used to release Music albums out of which few of the songs were handpicked to be converted into videos which could be popularized across Music channels (such as MTV). And man there were some good videos in those times. From November Rains by Guns and Roses where the red roses bled out on top of a piano in rains to Mr Wendel by Arrested Development with few black guys dancing around singing about a homeless black guy.

I was never one of those outdoorsy guy and was not at all into sports. My sole goal in life was to watch MTV and gather as many albums as I can (with little or no pocket money we used to get). Now – to give you a perspective, I am talking about times before Google, Facebook, Spotify or Apple music – even before Napster, Winamp and MP3s were invented (Im sorry Millennials for you may not have heard of these ghosts – pls use google or this blog could turn into a book which obviously is a horror to most of you)… There were only three sources through which you could extract music – 1) MTV – where you were at mercy of the power companies and cable guys 2) One channel on FM radio – where they played some awesome music when you in a rush and 3) Tapes and tape recorders where you could control when and where you played music.

Those days, buying tapes used to put a heavy dent on your pocket – the albums which were 45 bucks in 1993-94 suddenly shot up to 125 bucks by 96-97 – Thanks to MTV – and 125 bucks was a lot of money those days (mind you a bottle of coke was only 5 bucks). So you had to improvise and innovate – at this stage – the music shop pirates helped a lot – they used to charge 5 bucks a song to record music on a tape which either you provided or they did – blank tapes were quite cheap – anything between 15 bucks (for a T Series) to 40 bucks for a Sony – and voila – we had mixed tapes. And I was the king of mixed tapes – making them for myself (and most of the times for the girls I trying my shot with). I bought a box of blank T Series tapes with 20 tapes for 300 so buck and converted them into mixed tapes in 2 weeks. Some of them were had those obscure songs which nobody listened to from REM, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Green Day or it was a mushy mushy compilation for my girl with Kenny G, soundtrack to Dirty Dancing etc. And obviously – 90s teenage cannot be complete without rock music creeping into your soul – so we had GnR, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Firehouse, Mr Big and the list goes on.

And as one wise man has said that it’s the journey that matters and not the destination, visit to the music shop in those days was nothing less than a trip to a music concert. And mind you this is before times we have dedicated music shops in the mall such as Planet M etc. My favorite music shop was 5 kms away from my home and me and my friend used to walk all this way without breaking a sweat. Most of the times I barely had enough money to buy one tape – but I loved asking the shop owner to pull out at least 30 tapes which I would love to buy. Gauging the threshold of the shop owner’s irritation, I used to put an end to my drill of pulling out more tapes and pay for the one I wanted to buy.

When I tell my son these stories he can’t even start to imagine that finding music was so hard which is so easily available now at the click of a button on your phone. But I think that struggle made it worthwhile. It’s fun when you know that all the albums that you ever dreamed of are now available at a click of a button – anytime you want. And it’s much cheaper and much better quality than those tapes…But I think after sometime, you hit a roadblock – what should I listen to now? And when it’s this dilemma for a man who has been listening to music 3-4 hours each day average for the past 20-25 years, then something is not right.

In the albums that we used to buy in those days, for obvious reasons, not all the songs were great or featured on a music video. And to add to the joke, these songs were placed as the last song of the album. The reason was that before you reach the best song, you could listen to the entire album. Although not all the songs were great but every album told a story and sometimes the pieces of these stories fit into your own life or situation like your child fits a piece of a puzzle into place. And there were times when you bought an album because you liked a particular song on MTV – you ended up with a favorite song which is not as popular or not turned into a music video. This struggle to reach to your favorite song always had the sense of excitement, the pleasure of delayed gratification which is somehow missing when you click a button to play the music. But as all good things came to an end – tapes graduated to CDs which further graduated to computer music and winamps and now we have Spotify – genie for instant musical gratification. Although I have gotten used to the new technology and ways of listening to music but there are moments when I look back and couldn’t help but smile – thinking about times when finding and listening to music was a project – when getting an album was not less than getting a gold mine – but all and all – we loved those projects