keep this
toss that
spring
~Carolyn Hall
Clearly, it’s time for spring cleaning. I didn’t know but sometimes, I get a nudge. Or like now, a prod.
I have been wanting to declutter my room. The bed takes up too much room, and significance. Under the bed, I have... why, yes, stuff. So yesterday, the cots went. And I have been wringing my hands all morning over the stuff that used to lie under them. Music Cassettes.
A particularly clingy form of the past, these tapes. Old selves sticking to us like small bits of sticky tape that won’t let go unless they cling somewhere else. These boxes – some six of them – were the refined lot. We threw out a much bigger haul a few years ago but these were the precious ones.
Children today will never understand the trouble we went to to acquire our music. We couldn’t buy everything we liked. When friends and relatives had tapes we wanted, they were borrowed and copied. I remember standing two tape recorders face to face, switching off fans and other whirring machines, closing doors and imposing strict silence, while one machine played and the other recorded. Then technology improved, and we got our double-deckers that recorded internally. I made collections for Shweta, for myself... some filmi, some ghazals, a lot of classical music and qawwalis.
This morning, I hunkered down to paw through them and shook my head again over the whimsical coot I used to be. Never truly artistic but I liked pretty things. And I went to work at it with quite a lot of enthusiasm, even if no great talent. The album covers for my favourite music were never good enough for the ambience they created within me, so I would go about trying to creating the right ones. I had a bag full of greeting cards, which I would cut to size and fit into the covers. They had to match. Afternoon ragas got afternoon light and lazy pastoral scenes. Ghazals got flowers, bowers, peacocks; Talat Mehmood got a mountain and a river... and Lata Sings Ghalib got a royal, gold Mughal motif.
A few years ago, we bought a music player that was also a music ripper. I could play my tapes on it and it would store a digitised version on a USB drive. This was a god-send, and I managed to prioritise my ‘save-first’ music and convert something like a 100 cassettes of music before the player started to misbehave. I’d exhausted my drive and that’s how that stayed. Unless I got that fixed, these half a dozen boxes were just lying there, waiting for me to do something about them.
I considered it deeply. And then came to the conclusion that I would have to let them go. I might have changed my mind, but the raddiwala came right away to take the newspapers and I knew it was time. In compassionate silence, he paid me Rs 3/kg: Rs 54 for 18kg of music cassettes.
And oh, they were priceless.
toss that
spring
~Carolyn Hall
Clearly, it’s time for spring cleaning. I didn’t know but sometimes, I get a nudge. Or like now, a prod.
I have been wanting to declutter my room. The bed takes up too much room, and significance. Under the bed, I have... why, yes, stuff. So yesterday, the cots went. And I have been wringing my hands all morning over the stuff that used to lie under them. Music Cassettes.
A particularly clingy form of the past, these tapes. Old selves sticking to us like small bits of sticky tape that won’t let go unless they cling somewhere else. These boxes – some six of them – were the refined lot. We threw out a much bigger haul a few years ago but these were the precious ones.
Children today will never understand the trouble we went to to acquire our music. We couldn’t buy everything we liked. When friends and relatives had tapes we wanted, they were borrowed and copied. I remember standing two tape recorders face to face, switching off fans and other whirring machines, closing doors and imposing strict silence, while one machine played and the other recorded. Then technology improved, and we got our double-deckers that recorded internally. I made collections for Shweta, for myself... some filmi, some ghazals, a lot of classical music and qawwalis.
This morning, I hunkered down to paw through them and shook my head again over the whimsical coot I used to be. Never truly artistic but I liked pretty things. And I went to work at it with quite a lot of enthusiasm, even if no great talent. The album covers for my favourite music were never good enough for the ambience they created within me, so I would go about trying to creating the right ones. I had a bag full of greeting cards, which I would cut to size and fit into the covers. They had to match. Afternoon ragas got afternoon light and lazy pastoral scenes. Ghazals got flowers, bowers, peacocks; Talat Mehmood got a mountain and a river... and Lata Sings Ghalib got a royal, gold Mughal motif.
A few years ago, we bought a music player that was also a music ripper. I could play my tapes on it and it would store a digitised version on a USB drive. This was a god-send, and I managed to prioritise my ‘save-first’ music and convert something like a 100 cassettes of music before the player started to misbehave. I’d exhausted my drive and that’s how that stayed. Unless I got that fixed, these half a dozen boxes were just lying there, waiting for me to do something about them.
I considered it deeply. And then came to the conclusion that I would have to let them go. I might have changed my mind, but the raddiwala came right away to take the newspapers and I knew it was time. In compassionate silence, he paid me Rs 3/kg: Rs 54 for 18kg of music cassettes.
And oh, they were priceless.
1 comment:
18kgs! oh!and so much light and lightness in my heart is from them ...
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