Skip to main content

Starter Taste

Stars on 45 came to mind on my way back from the gym. The instructor, L is a good bit older than me and extremely fit. I like his classes because he shows us what is possible with effort and he plays music I know and love. Lot of disco, some Eurythmics, Kraftwerk and the occasional Beatles. Even what I don't recognize is in well within the range of what I enjoy. That afternoon he played something that sounded a lot like Stars on 45 but it wasn't. Listening to that album takes me back instantly to thirteen years old. It was a birthday gift I chose for myself from local cassette shop in town. My parents wanted me to get something I liked from that store and I chose this after some consultation with the owner who was used to helping kids like me find their way around the music they had passing familiarity and were curious about. I knew some Beatles songs but was not able to decide on a specific album. 

So this guy wisely pointed me to a medley that he said would help me figure out which songs I liked best and maybe next time I could buy the album that had the most of them. To this day, I remember the exact moment one song transitions to the next in Stars on 45 - that is now much I played this tape. I came to have my favorite songs over time and then albums. There was this miraculous feeling of escape into a world far away from mine in every way imaginable. It was not the music my parents had any interest in but they learned to grow familiar with it and even recognized some tunes. 

Many years later when Pandora started the music genome project, I was able to understand how formative that one tape was in my life and how far it shaped my taste in western music. The guy who sold me that tape on my 13th birthday had transformative influence on me. Imagine he started me off on Black Sabbath or Kiss that day, my trajectory could have been quite different. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more