Musical Journey of a 90's Kid - Part 1: The Cassette Era

Lockdown and work from home has brought out many hidden talents. Though I found out no hidden talent in me, I have been more punctual with my music practice . Thanks to Tabla and Karaoke apps. As a listner , YouTube has never left me unentertained

Recently, while reading something about the boons and banes of  drastic advancement in technology in the past couple of decades , I just thought I should write about my journey ( and probably every 90's kid's journey) with music both as a listner and music student. 

This may not be as crisp and interesting as my other blogs for I am not taking special effort with the choice of words. You may not have had exactly the same experiences as me as a child, but I am sure you will have similar experiences and will feel nostalgic :)

My life as a child began listening the small cassette collection that parents had . Chitramanjari on DD1 was a major factor in introducing us to new songs. I also remember going to a few movies just to listen to the songs( Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam is one such movie) . Gradually as me and my friends started developing our own likes, we started pestering parents to buy cassettes for us. 

Parents came up with a cutoff % and number of cassettes per year. 85% + in mid term exams qualifies for 1 cassette and 90% + in final exams qualifies for another. Now that there was a restriction on the number of cassettes, we started giving more attention to the movie songs and started shortlisting 2 movies where most songs are good. We friends also realised that we can exchange each other's cassettes and thus we used to hold a long discussion on who should buy which cassette. 

Rajendra Radio house in Dharwad was the only place where we would get cassettes. They were kind enough to introduce us to mixed audio cassettes which would have best songs from different movies. In a few days, we also started getting empty Cassettes where we could record from Radio or another cassette or even TV. A blank cassette literally felt more valuable than a blank cheque. Afterall you can record anything from anywhere. 

Meanwhile, unlike today's karaoke era, practicing singing would be a pretty blank experience unless you had a harmonium or tanpura at home. My home had none initially. A friend of mine came up with an idea of using a blank cassette to record Harmonium sound on A side and Tanpura on B side continuously so that we could practice. We thought this was brilliant .But, while recording somebody in the neighborhood coughed loudly and the coughing sound was recorded. Something is better than nothing and thus singing practice continued with intermittent coughs fearless(Covid wasn't there those days so nobody really got scared of coughs) 

To Be Continued......