Happy World Music Day!

Music is the most inexpensive time machine that can ever be. Merely listening to a song, sometimes rather accidentally, as a tune or a melody wafts in the air and reaches our ears, we can be instantly transported to a time that exists in our memories, deeply embedded in a corner somewhere within. Sometimes we can exactly land at the place or the situation that has an intimate and personal memory association with the song, sometimes our brain fills in the missing spaces in the continuum and colors them having almost no regard for the origin of association. 

Like most Indians, my associations have been with the songs, not just music, and that too with songs from films. Interestingly, the songs that we have an instant connect with are always pure, simple and magical. Songs and nostalgia are natural partners. Some songs are too sublime, we don't want them spoilt through cover versions (remakes being the commercial and widely acceptable term in Bollywood), nor do the triggering of responses change for the same (we don't want to). Such songs are our ticket, our passport to a lost time, as if all was well back then, even the tears we may have shed were pure and, hence, cleansed our soul, our very being was made pure - the actual scars left behind can't hurt us now. 

Postscript: The song I'm listening to right now, that opened the floodgates of memories for me, is the song "Jeene de yeh duniya...." from the soundtrack of the 1985 film called 'Lava'. The song (it has multiple versions, as was common in those days) was sung by Asha Bhosle and Manmohan Singh, penned by Anand Bakshi, and set to tune by Rahul Dev Burman. The film (which I must have watched on television some years after the release) starred Dimple Kapadia and Rajeev Kapoor, along with Raj Babbar, Asha Parekh and Madan Puri. 

(film stills below: courtesy old magazines)