Of radio and music

During my childhood days, there was a Telerad radio box in our house. When you open that box, it will have funky looking setup with all kinds and colors of capacitors and other electrical related stuff, half of which i don't know by name. When it gets repaired, the repair person often will solder something in and it will being to sing. Nalla maatukku oru soodo illaio nalla radiokku oru solder was quite true!! It never played FM for it must've been the prototype used by Marconi. That radio was probably the oldest thing in our house and my grandpa was in his sixties at that time!! Forget about FM, even vividh bharathi was a luxury to hear from that box. For some reason, it rarely worked when good songs where being aired and will only play news and that too in the dullest drab voice possible. But when it comes to playing ads, it will be in full josh. Be it Gopal pal podi, Rathna fan house shiva complex pondi bazaar (for long i thought it was the full name of that shop!!), bison baniyan jatti, and several other notable note and quotable quote of ads became memoriter for us more than songs.

Most of the times were hectic and hurried in those days, with everything happening in super fast motion, music was more of a distraction and was almost inexistent in my daily routine. When was in my post graduation, one of my classmates was humming about a famous son then which had more english words than tamil. I mistook it for some other language much to the fun of the rest of the class. He said, the song plays almost always and daily in FM. He was more skeptical than surprised that i was play acting dumb wantonly to portray myself as "padips". We never had any radio at our house was something they found it hard to believe. During my first job, when i was sent for training to a different city, there was a guy who was listening to songs on walk man, literally every step of his way. He was gracious enough to share it with me and i was enthralled by the sound that played only for my ears. After listening for few minutes i gave it back to him. It didn't play as the batteries had worn off! He felt, my two minutes of listening had taken up all the charge in those cells and never even looked in my direction. Fun times.

Even today, we don't have a working radio at our home and though most of the mobiles, come with a radio, hardly get any time to listen to them. When i used to travel for long hours to office, mobile radio was my companion, but soon lost interest with the amount of ads that occupied the air waves. Once when radio mirchi played a song that i had requested on their service site, they even mentioned my name as the requestor, i felt a sense of thrill and joy which was solely mine for no one else would've known the requestor. The feeling that my song of choice is being played all across the devices tuning to that channel was a different sense of happiness. Now that we've Spotify and Saavn, i have begun curating songs and albums, from 70's and even earlier, that are mostly one hit wonders. My playlist resembles pazhaya paper kadai of 3 decades back or kaayalan kadai, where at times you stumble on precious things of the past. The only difference being, almost all of the songs had their moments in the sun during their hey days. Will share that list and the story of how i ended up with each of those songs  -  a different post for a different time.