Tuned in

What is your favorite genre of music?

I don’t remember when Dad got the TV, but I have these vague memories of a group of kids sitting on the floor and watching the TV in my living room. We used to come in around 5.45 pm to watch the start of the 6 pm broadcast, that started with the Doordarshan moon. The wailing keening tune they had set for the formation of this moon on the screen was something all of us looked forward to. It was a signal to get our things in order because the telecast would start soon. I was maybe five or six years old and this tune and that visual of a group of kids is very clear in my head.

The news was the first order of business. I didn’t know what glamour was or the importance of grooming, but watching the pretty newsreader in her impeccable pleats on a bright sari draped neatly across the shoulder and her fresh lipstick always made me feel like I was witnessing something very important. Doordarshan as the broadcasting service was called back then, was the first Indian channel and they had a timetable for the series they would telecast every week. This included soap operas on most evenings with Chitrahaar being scheduled for Wednesday evening, a Hindi movie screened on Saturday evening, and a local language movie screened on Sunday evening. In the early days, there used to be a movie screening on alternate Sundays, followed by the World of Sports at 3 pm. I remember staying up on Sunday afternoons to watch the world of sports, especially after I started practicing gymnastics because this was the only channel where I could get to watch gymnastics screened on television. The only issue was that I had to watch the entire episode as they never announced what sports would be covered in that episode. Dad never had a problem because it was one of the more interesting and informative series on television.

Every serial that played on TV had a jingle or some kind of introductory music. Most of these tunes lasted a minimum of 5 minutes which gave us time to wrap up our work so we could sit and watch the telecast. I don’t remember if the earliest broadcasts had advertisements or not, but when I used to watch, there were a lot of advertising jingles, like the Hamara Bajaj, or the one for Nirma washing powder or the one for national integration – Mile Sur Mera Tumhara. For me, they were songs, music that would distract me from what I was doing. Music that would entice me to lift my head and watch the screen. I never paid attention to the actual series, and probably never understood the dialogues, but loved to watch the jingles. Before the TV came into the picture, Dad owned a radio and a Vinyl player that we used to listen to when he came home early from work. We only had 7 or 8 records, but that was 7 or 8 records more than anyone else on the street and that gave us an edge as far as music was concerned.

So between the shortwave station of Radio Ceylon that Dad had set the tuner on the Radio to and the Chitrahaar that was telecast on Wednesday evenings, we used to have music constantly playing in the background. The first time I heard mourning music was when a politician was assassinated. I remember getting one of those rare, super moon, kind of offs from school announced at the last minute. Truth be told, I used to love these off because the teachers did not have time to pack our day with holiday homework, and we would actually get the day to fool around. On one such day, I stayed back assuming that the radio used to play songs all day long and Dad only tuned it for late into the night. But, the radio static made me realize that during the day, while we were in school I missed nothing, and the telecasts were all made only in the evening and night hours.

I grew up listening to old Hindi Bollywood songs and I still find them very melodious and memorable. I love listening to pop, and enjoy a good boy band now and again. For me, music is what you listen to when you are happy and ecstatic and what you feel and experience when you are sad and dramatic. For instance, the song, Bhooli hui yaaden, mujhe itna na satao will always remind me of Dad and elicits the same response as listening to the song Memories by Maroon 5.

And the romantic in me loves listening to all the numbers sung by Mohammed Rafi in Hindi cinema. At a time when MTV and Channel V were all the rage, our TV had broken down and I had no way to catch up with the bands playing then. But, I did listen to mix tapes that my older siblings brought home, and the songs in those tapes are the genres of music I like. So, while my days started with the religious undertones and MS Subbalakshmi, they usually ended with listening to a mixtape of songs from the Beatles, Simun and Garfunkel, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, and Wham!, among other one-hit-wonders.