Memories Within Reach

YouTube has made indulging in nostalgia a little too easy. Bands and songs I remember from my adolescence can be recalled in as long as it takes to type the words to search them with. I had this large mixed tape collection - several of them were made by me but a lot were gifts too. Then there were tapes bought to celebrate a special day or given to me to remember a person or memory by. I lost almost all of them in my many transits across continents and cities - they had become the unintended jetsam of my nomadic existence.

I mourned their loss for months because I had long wanted J to have it all - it was a wish much older than J is. But YouTube has stepped in to more than fill the void left in the wake of my misplaced mixed tapes. I just need to recall music in my memory and J can listen to it right away. We start with one song and it reminds me of several others. J has no idea what is going to play next so she is often surprised and delighted.

I have stopped missing my collection of mixed tapes - it had never been so effortless to go from Neil Diamond, to Doris Day, to Anne Sophie Mutter, to Osibisa, to The Ventures by way of Manna Dey, Abba,Duran Duran, Kanika Banerjee, Yo-Yo Ma, Ron Goodwin, Ananda Shankar, Rashid Khan, Bee Gees, Kishore Kumar, The Three Tenors and the songs from Roja all within an hour. Such is the tangled web of musical memories that is effortlessly unraveled by YouTube.