Back to this page after more than a year ! Motivation – my son’s presence at home and a request from my niece from Thiruvananthapuram recently .
Yesterday , we were downloading the popular “Gaana ” apps for my wife’s I Pad . A great app with many features indeed!. We immediately selected some of our favorite Hindi movie songs like “Woh shaam ” from Khamoshi. At the same time, I could not help but go down my memory lane right back to the 1950’s – the golden era of Hindi film songs . Even before I was introduced to Hindi songs, I was very fond of listening to songs mostly in Tamil and then Malayalam . The only facility available back then was the nearby movie theater where they used to play songs through a loud speaker half an hour before the shows. Occasionally , I could also listen to my favorite songs when some one organized a public function or a meeting and songs through loud speaker was an inseparable item before the start of such events basically to attract a crowd.
My grand father had a gramophone at home and whenever we used to visit his house during summer holidays , we used to listen to discs from Beethoven , K L Saigal , etc. It was a HMV [ His Masters Voice] make and we had to change needles frequently . Subsequently , in the late 50’s , we owned a radio at home and we were very happy to listen to our favorite songs from Radio Ceylon. The Binaca Geetmala program anchored by the famous Ameen Sayani was a sought after program. The All India Radio [ now Akashvani] did not have any commercial program then. By public demand but with great reluctance , AIR started a 30 minutes songs program called Vividh Bharathi sometime during the late 50’s. This was on a listener’s request format like they used to do in Radio Ceylon. This is now one of the most popular program with Akashvani.
The late 60’s saw the advent of TV in India and the Black and White TV programs of Door Darshan was an instant hit and for the first time we could watch song sequences in video format . At the same time, inexpensive plastic and even paper discs replaced the old conventional discs for songs and portable audio systems were available thanks to the advent of transistors . We had many choices now. I was the proud owner of an AIWA music system in 1972 !. Color TV and CD’s/DVD’s of the same technology followed.
The period from 80 onwards ,saw rapid technological advances in audio and video equipment and we got the audio/video cassettes followed by the Compact Disc [ CD] and then the DVD. The advent of Internet brought the I Pod [My son gifted one to me].Soon the mobile technology revolutionized the user experience . The last few years , moved all these equipment to the background with the advent of cloud technology on which “Gaana “functions where we have live streaming of music on demand without any storage inside the device.
We still have a few gramophone records, some cassettes , CD’s , DVD’s at home as Collectors items reminding us of the ages music delivery traveled over the last 70 years or so.