It Happened One Day ...

My musical journey began with an empty cup, set in the backdrop of a gloomy day in the month of August , back in Shillong, music until then was regular doses of superhit muqabla and chitrahaar, trying to love whatever the National Channel or rather Bollywood vomited ... I would term the phase as my musical Dark age , plagued by the disturbing visuals of Govinda and the likes ... I had managed to save up seventy five bucks in cash , thanks to the make shift piggy bank created out of a discarded water bottle... I wanted to get something different from the regular hot wheels , and there I was in the PB of Shillong ... going through the array of cassettes, I came across many unknown names : Megadeth , Firehouse , Eric Clapton blah , blah . none of it made any sense .. I wanted something in Hindi , some "hits" collection or something , but then a second thought crossed my mind just then , how am I going to play a number like "sexy sexy sexy mujhe log bole " on the tape recorder in a home where my folks lived in a constant paranoia that the media would destroy their "dudh ka dhula" son, I mean sure why not ??? all the Nirodh ads and the Krishi darshans sure are meant to corrupt the young minds .... Whatever! I decided that I would pick up something that has a nice cover and has Western Hits and falls in my budget range ... Finally, after half an hour of scanning and boring the Marwari shopkeeper , I zeroed in on the "Pop Hits Of The Year" , it was a pirated one , apparently manufactured in Meerut by "SOANY MUSIC". I must take a moment here to describe the shopkeeper, a fat man in his forties with a mouthful of pan parag, he seemd to know everything about the current hits , "arey yeh lo , mast chal raha hain aaj kaal ,,. " was enough to establish his credibility as a music connoisseur. Thus, I had my first cassette , my ticket to a world unknown and unreachable until then ...
Unfortunately,the first song was corrupt and I could hardly make out something of the song that was titled "Paint My Love"...The other songs sounded boring to me then, it did not have the "dhin chak" that I was conditioned to love ....However, there was this particular song that I found quite catchy and it seemed amazing that somebody could emote his frustration in a comic outburst, thus I managed to get hold of my first real anthem ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMwADXEK0pQ

As I listen to the same cassette over and over again , mainly due to the lack of options , I acquired a taste for the songs and then came my second favorite from the collection , it was called "Da Bomb".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nETVIeygqjY

The second album was from Ace of Base (once again trusting the compulsive spitter of a salesman), a strange mix of songs with the hit called "It is a beautiful life", once again I developed a taste for it even though I could make no sense of the songs ...
I got myself a Kishore Kumar album to give a merry ring to my collection but as luck would have it I had managed to get the "dard bhara" album .. blame it on my microscopic knowledge in music.Man !!! with due respects to the maestro , the "sadness" kind of sucked , maybe because I could not relate to those suicidal numbers then ....
I was more of a gullible music buyer , a wannabe I guess... most of the musical decisions were heavily influenced by mutterings around me, it was like shooting in the dark , hoping to find that perfect tune someday ....
One morning while I was waiting for my school bus, I heard a song waft through one of the windows above me ... I loved it even though I could not make out anything from the lyrics. I bought more cassettes as part of the random experiment but none of them had the appeal of the song that I had fallen in love with ....
The musical evolution for most of the people especially in Western is a stereotype, something like MLTR -> Bryan Adams -> Back street Boys -> Bonjovi -> ... Its more or less a pattern among the people I knew. I would have followed the same trail if that song from the tiny window had not distracted me ....
Many months later, I heard the song again and this time coming from a cassette shop and I believed that this was a divine signal and before I knew it I had the cassette in my hands , my first original one ...The song still remains one of my favorites, and listening to it recreates feeling of nostalgia, of a kid waiting for the bus distracted by something nice , of my beloved Shillong on an early bright morning , of my first splash in the wonderful world of rock .....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQSkuDWhaAo