Rewind. Stop. Play.

Shrutideep Majumder

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Some of my fondest memories from childhood have a lot to do with a SONY tape player/recorder that sits in the living room of our house now.

I remember my mother holding a mic to my face and recording random stuff (there was one instance in which I was listing out the dishes I so happily devoured at an invitation) and flipping the recorded tape on the other side to record something completely different. Sometimes, she would put in a blank tape and record music off different cassettes to make a mixtape.

As a kid, I was not an early riser (it’s no different now!). That cost me listening to the live airing of ‘Mahisasurmardini’ on the auspicious day of Mahalaya almost every time. However, to lessen my woes, a two-cassette set of the famous A.I.R program was bought by my parents to be played on the cassette player after I woke up at ‘ungodly hours’. Besides this, I was given a healthy and varied selection of music to choose from. Cassettes of Bhoomi and Chandrabindoo were my go- to. Although I was not allowed to listen to certain artists, the radio channels would air such ‘forbidden music’ at times for me to be acquainted with musicians such as Suman and Rupam Islam.

Today, in 2024, cassettes are a distant memory (often a painful one if you have encountered a reel being stuck in the cassette player) and the advent of digital music streaming seems to have brought about the demise of physical media altogether. Even the compact discs that replaced cassettes overnight seem to have bitten the dust. All in all, one can assume that cassette tapes have become obsolete in today’s world. But it wouldn’t be so true to have a similar assumption for the Majumder household – for its youngest member (yours truly) scavenges around the streets of Kolkata to find second-hand cassettes.

At present, I house around 400+ cassettes in my room with three cassette decks and a Walkman at my disposal. Often, my parents would get annoyed after they watch me enter the house with yet another bag of dusty cassette tapes requiring considerable care before they can get played. But there are times when they would hear a familiar tune coming from my room and they would get really cheerful about the whole situation.

The search for cassettes took me through the dusty cupboards at my maternal grandfather’s house in Durgapur – where I chanced upon quite a few ‘forbidden’ Suman albums on cassette. The backstory to those is quite interesting as well for I came to learn that my mother and my uncle would save up money to buy these cassettes when either of them got a chance to visit Kolkata. Among other things, what caught my eye were six cassettes with paper cutouts of Satyajit Ray. Upon cleaning them and playing them, I realised that those were recordings of interviews that my uncle had managed to make with a cassette recorder. One of them even contained Ray's Oscar acceptance speech that was televised in India.

Cassettes had been an integral part of my childhood. They continue to be so even in adulthood. At present, I house around 400+ cassettes in my room with three cassette decks and a Walkman at my disposal. Often, my parents would get annoyed after they watch me enter the house with yet another bag of dusty cassette tapes requiring considerable care before they can get played. But there are times when they would hear a familiar tune coming from my room and they would get really cheerful about the whole situation.

There’s a lot of fun involved in hunting around for cassettes. Furthermore, I have a personal attachment to them that I cannot seem to shake off easily. In preserving these cassettes, I not only get the joy of owning a physical copy of the music, but I also get to preserve memories – of tales told and untold.

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Author bio

Born and brought up in Kolkata, Shrutideep Majumder has completed his bachelor's degree in History from Jadavpur University. A sucker for pop culture, he likes to attend music events and fests, spend time in an old bookstore, or go record hunting.

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