Image by Kevin Yezbick
Published here
I am about to complete 25000 scrobbles on Last.fm but that definitely does not reveal my journey in the sea of music. There must have been at least another 500000 scrobbles which have not been recorded. As nothing can be done about the bygone days, I’ll put them in words. 
As it generally happens, I was introduced to music by my Dad. He loves Old Hindi and English songs. Some artists that I remember my dad likes are Mukesh, Kishore Kumar, R. D. Burman, S. D. Burman, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle and the other legends. In english he liked ABBA, Carpenters, Yanni. I just listened to the various cassettes (CDs came much later!!) whenever he played them..
I used to watch music channels on TV and listen to new songs..but I never thought of buying music until my dad took me to a music store. The first album I bought was Aquarium. There were days when I used to get embarrassed to mention this fact to anyone…hehe. It was also my first album that got stolen! Then onwards I started buying the Max series by Sony. I collected all of them till 10!
From the Max series I selected artists whom I liked and started buying their Music, they were artists like Michael Jackson, Ricky Martin,Los Del Rio.. I’ll put the rest of them when I get hold of that collection back home..
It basically set the way I searched for music I liked. My mom used to go crazy when I played english songs all the time…(we did not have the privilege to buy earphones or headphones that time!!). My first brush with Rock music was somewhere in my Xth Standard when, my friend Anand Kumthekar gave me his music collection. As for many the first band that I liked was Linkin Park. But not until I got into engineering that I started looking for more. Once I bought my desktop and had the power of the Internet at my hands, I was unstoppable. I learned how to download songs, I started reading about my previously favourite artists, I interacted with a lot of music fans here in my institute at Mumbai. And then last summer I hit Last.fm.. and I must admit that it has been only joining Last.fm that I have really started to develop taste in music. What I had earlier was just a hobby I followed erratically but Music is my lifeline now.
The one thing I appreciate of my dad is that he never forced to me leave music aside. I always had a music system wherever I went, may be a huge 5 speaker surround system in my home or a 2 kg portable misuc player or the latest Pocket PC…he always indirectly encouraged my listening to Music.
SD Burman had given landmark songs to Lata also in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s film Chupke Chupke in 1975. the film was based on the story portrayed in Uttamkumar’s Choddobeshi,