Thank you for the music (Theme Reveal for A to Z April Challenge 2016)

Nothing can take you back to your childhood, your youth, your glory days, or so I’ve heard it said, as the songs you enjoyed listening to back then.

Those songs are the auditory markers to the landscapes of our happy past, and we navigate our times-gone-by on the strength of those songs.

Those times when we were innocent, naive, before cynicism settled on our hearts, before our shoulders began to stoop ever so slightly under the burdens of our cares.

Even today the faintest memory of those long-ago melodies wafts past my ears, and it is as if the intervening years never happened. It’s like an unexpected shower that washes the dust off everything it rains down on.

Today I can remember very few telephone numbers by heart, and I’d be hard pressed to recall just what I had for dinner last night, but even if you mention the names of one of these songs, I will remember every last word of these songs, and will be able to match the singers, word for word, cadence for cadence.

Many of these songs came to me through the medium of Saturday Date, a weekly one-hour show at 10 pm on Saturday nights which Dad used to listen to. 

Understandably, many of the songs were recorded even before I was born. They were my dad's favourites, and in time they became mine too.

I learned to keep my Saturday date, tuning in regularly at 10 pm every Saturday night. I remember how upset I used to get on the rare occasions when All India Radio (AIR) replaced my favourite show with something else.

Saturday Date was very popular with the English-music-listening-crowd back then, starved as we were for avenues where we could listen to English pop music. We used to request a song via the humble 15 paise postcard. 

It was the only time I used the postcard, and I had stacks of them for use for this express purpose. Since the postcard didn’t allow much writing space, I learned to squeeze in as much writing as I could, writing to AIR with my request, and following it up with the names of those to whom I had dedicated that number.

Ah! What joy I would feel when I heard my postcard being read over the airwaves. Simple joys indeed.

And so today, through the medium of the A to Z April Challenge, I would like to look back with delight on those half-forgotten tunes. Some of them brought pleasure in themselves, while some taught me something, and still others inspired me to stand a little straighter, pushed me to grow. 

Sometimes truths are hidden in song.

Here it is, then, the sound track of the better part of my life, against whose background score I’ve done my growing up.

As ABBA, one of my favourites from the yesteryears, used to sing:

Thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing. 

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing. 

Who can live without it? I ask in all honesty, 

What would life be, without a song or a dance, what are we? So I say Thank You for the music, for giving it to me.

I hope I'll see you around, all through this Challenge. I also hope you'll be impressed to walk down your own memory lane.

Hasta la vista!