A picture has been doing the rounds on Facebook for many months now, showing an audio cassette and a pencil next to each other, and the accompanying caption reads, ‘Future generations will never understand their unique relationship.’
Even though I consider myself a nostalgia specialist, I never felt compelled to share or forward the picture, mainly because of two reasons. One, the younger generation, leave alone future generations, already does not know what an audio cassette is — forget about its intimate relationship with the humble pencil.
Two, I couldn’t care less.
For people born in the 1970s and 80s, which includes me, the audio cassette was the sole source of music for most part of our lives — discounting Vividh Bharati and the weekly Chitrahaar on Doordarshan. We went to the nearest cassette shop, took a good look at the shelves (provided the shopkeeper was patient enough) and bought a cassette or three, depending on the money we had in our pocket.
Ah, the joy of peeling the flimsy plastic wrapping of a brand-new cassette before inserting it into the ‘two-in-one’ (radio-cum-cassette player). Every once in a while, the tape got jammed, either due to faulty winding or indiscriminate use of the ‘rewind’ or ‘fast forward’ buttons — and we stuck a pencil into one of the reel holes and rotated it till the tape loosened up. At times, the tape got coiled around the pin and we used the sharp end of the pencil to deftly extricate it from the entanglement before rotating the reel-hole to wind it again. Not to mention the periodic cleaning of the ‘head’ with a piece of cotton soaked in after-shave lotion.
The kind of things we did just so that the cassette could play! Once, the tape of one of my cassettes (a combination of Disco Dancer and Himmatwala ) snapped and I rejoined it with Fevicol — and it played just fine. But the cassette did not have my favourite Disco Dancer number: the Bappi Lahiri solo, ‘Yaad aa raha hai’. Likewise, for the longest time, any cassette (and not just mine) of the 1977 film Hum Kisise Kum Naheen did not have the much-celebrated four-song medley which made the music of the film immortal. Sometimes, the cassettes of certain films would not be available at all, even though their songs frequently played on the radio. Only a die-hard fan of music understood the pain of being unable to find a song playing in his head.
The dark days are over. Today, songs from 1,000 cassettes can fit into a device that’s as light as a pencil. There is no song that you cannot find — if not on CD, there’s always YouTube and numerous other sites. And even while you are listening to a rare or long-lost number on YouTube, the site will throw up a matching list of equally rare songs. Digitisation is ensuring that no piece of recorded music remains unheard.
Sometimes it is good to discard the old for the new, especially when the new promises to enhance the old. Therefore, while I will never invest in a Kindle reader, I will continue buying pen drives and new speakers to preserve and promote old songs. Having said that, I also preserve my collection of music cassettes — they are in the loft, packed in a carton — simply because it embodies a chunk of my youth.
