No space on the loft and Steve Jobs is responsible..

Our language is English. Our religion is Christianity. Our grandmothers are Portugese. [ If you’re Goans i.e. ] . Our music ? If you were born Catholic every Non Catholic assumed that there two things you could do well for sure. That you could sing and that you could dance. Whatever you did music was some part of your day. The early morning when you tuned in to Radio Ceylon. Yes Sri Lanka now Ceylon then used to have more English music than all of India. So you had an antenna on your roof. Copper wire that went around the four corners of a wooden frame in ever diminishing squares. You put the radio on and waited two whole minutes for the valves to warm up. Static [ the crackle you got from shortwave radios ] interspersed the music to come up with compostions that improved on the original. On Sunday afternoons you tuned in to the Binaca Hit Parade. One of two English music programmes that AIR [ All India Radio ] broadcast all week. There was the odd broadcast of Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky at an hour way past bedtime when no self respecting Hindustani musician would be at the AIR studios. [Most regional broadcasts were live ]. Old Parsees tuned in for Tchai with their brun maska.The second programme was Saturday date. A request and dedication programme. Where you had to mail in your request which was always ignored but the dedication they read over the AIR. Too many request too little time. So Uncles celebrating wedding anniversaries were clubbed together with Joe Boys 16th birthday and both of them were made to listen to Your’e Sixteen you’re beautiful and you’re mine.
If you were from the privileged classes [ rich i.e.] then your Dad had a record player. With the logo of a dog singing into the gramophone horn. Only he was allowed to touch the player. And the records. Delicate stuff. One slip of the needle and the record was marred for life. So the music you listened to was the music he listened to. Soon the record player was on the loft. And pride of place was given to the cassette player. Cassettes onto which you could actually record your own voice. Cassettes onto which you could record music from someone else’s cassettes. Cassettes onto which you could record the Binaca Hit Parade and play it back whenever you wanted. But once in a while the tape from the cassette would get pulled out. You had to retrieve it. Cut out the wrinkled section. Then use your fevicol or Mom’s nail polish to splice the broken ends together. John Lennon would then have daylight saving time on A hard days night. You used head cleaner fluid to clean the tape head and vodka when you ran out of head cleaner. And debated endlessly whether vodka was a better head cleaner than gin. The coloured spirits were all out because they were supposed to leave a residue. And then came CD’s and the cassette player soon took the place of the record player which was handed over to the Jaripurana walla. But you still needed head cleaner , for the CD lens. But you could now use Smirnoff instead of Romanov.
Then Apple invented the Ipod and now the Smirnoff goes into a glass instead of the CD player and the Jaripurana walla does’nt even want the old cassette player . Which you’re getting rid of to free up loft space for the CD player.