JUNGLE IN MY HEART (BAD BOYS BLUE)

In fact the jungle is just  outside my room here in Jorhat, Assam

 

Everyone says  don’t live in the past,  live in the present ,  well I  also  say that  and believe in .  But sometimes old fashioned me just can’t get the hang of it or should I say loose the hang of me. So these days I am reliving the past by listening to my   old  cassettes   collection.

 

I used to listen to all of them one by one once in a year or two and in the process  would  discard the ones which had gone bad .I had loads  of them , the number  crossed four hundred ,from Rock to Ghazals to the various mixes by the then  ,early nineties ,very  famous  Music Centre of   Dehradun called Venus Music Centre. I would have spent a lot of money on them. In fact a substantial part of my salary  and time would go towards  discovering  music. There was a joy in process , it always is . 

I had a decent music system ,my life lie , which would always be  on when I was home alone . To supplement I had two Walkman, pride possession of  young officer in  all field postings . One of them was Sony and other was Aiwa, which had auto reverse feature.  There has been numerous nights when I would sleep with the Aiwa Walkman on at night after a binge and wake up next day with music  still on. The sequence of songs in my favorite cassettes was  embedded in my mind to the extent I knew which song would come up next. In fact this sequence stayed for a long time in my mind and still it sometimes comes as a flash.

 

Those were the days when one aftershave   and a handkerchief was  meant only for cleaning the head of the cassette player . Many of you would scoff at me for indulging in this activity at this age and stage in life when the cassettes have  already,  officially, been  declared dead. I think that was two years back in 2009.In fact when I went with  Amit, a good friend in Pune , a year and a half back, to pick a new music system; I wanted it to have  one with a cassette player and he gave me strange looks.

 

I started this exercise of listening to all of them quite a few days back, this time around it was after many years, and lo and behold it opened the flood gates of memories .It also  brought back all those memories of  parties that we organised as youngsters in Doon , those unsuccessful ruses to get the babes ,dancing on ' Dirty Dancing,` ; nothing  beats that I guess .

 

 I can not  forget the cassette that I bought when Rocky was born ,’ Pyromania `by Def Leppard,(cassettes I recorded keeping Rocky's music interest in mind .He loved Rabbi’s “Bulla ki Jana Main  Kaun”, ”Azadi “  from Bose and ” Jine Mera Dil Luteya” by Jazzy B.

 

 

 

Every single cassette that I play these days has meant something  to me. I like to believe  I have  a reasonably good memory and   most of my  cassettes also have a note about the time and place when they were bought.

 

 Yesterday  it was Nirvana's' Nevermind` which was bought when I met Rocky for the second time after his birth , he was only two months old and in Delhi.

 

Some of these songs which have run in my head for such a long time now sometimes come out as my status on Facebook which only few understand and sometimes ,as design deficiency, they ring in my mind just out of nowhere. They take me to those beautiful moments which I spent with  myself in some beautiful early mornings , some very late evenings and once in a while to times when I had someone by my side with a drink who would understand, or at least try to act so, what this music  meant to me.

 

 

I want more , in fact  all I want is everything (Deff Leppard )

 

WRITTEN :2011, Jorhat . That was the last time , I did something like that . Later when I bought a Bose had to dispose all of them in one go and  they said "Good Bye cruel world "