Pause, stop, rewind
The Hindu : In a multi-lingual film “Lucky”, sharing the lead along with the actors, a South African AIDS orphan and an old woman, is a compact audio cassette. For the boy, the only remembrance of his mother is her lullaby recorded in the cassette. In the end, as the lullaby from the cassette fills the air, the old woman rocks the boy to sleep on her lap. And, he gets a new mother.Building bonds is nothing new to the no-frills audio cassettes. And, playing cupid? It comes so easily. In “Dil to Pagal Hai”, when Pooja is still undecided about expressing her love for Rahul, magic happens in the form of her recorded message. And, the love story ends on a happy note.Fond memoriesCaught in a world of e-sounds and the paraphernalia of i-pods, MP3s and CDs, audio cassettes are now a thing of a past.But for music lovers, listening to audio cassettes is a different trip down memory lane. Call it old world charm or nostalgia, they love it. For young music director Dharan, the first thing that comes to his mind at the mention of cassettes is “Pudhu Vellai Mazhai” from “Roja”. “What an extraordinary composition. After ‘Roja’, I don’t remember listening to any songs on cassettes,” he adds.Along with Dharan’s collection of some 1,000 audio cassettes of old English country songs, classical, jazz, blues, and the Bee Gees of the 70s and 80s, there are a whole lot of cassettes with tunes he composed and recorded on a Sony tape recorder in his school days. “Though I have transferred all the music to CDs, listening to my raw compositions on cassettes is a different experience,” he says.Music lovers say the fading out act of cassettes was gradual. But, in the last three years, it has been drastic. “Today, the takers are just a handful of the older generation and homemakers who find it difficult…More
