Just Like That: A mellow ode to the gramophone and vinyl

Hindustan Times

04-05-2025

How many of the younger generation are familiar with the magic of the gramophone? For most of them—and rightly so—it is a collectible antique, to be used for display. But very hazily, as a child I remember that gramophones were the magic that allowed you access to music apart from the radio. My mother had one, and it was still in use when I was born, mostly by my elder sisters. The machine consisted of a simple turn table, a sound system, inbuilt or enhanced through that wonderfully shaped tulip-like speaker that ballooned out of the machine, popularised for later generations by the logo of the HMV label. Then, all one had to do was to place the 78 RPM (revolutions per minute) record on the turntable, put the handle on it, and voila, the music you wanted to hear would play for four and a half minutes.
The gramophone did not need electricity or a battery. It was powered by a hand wound spring, which you wound before playing the record made of a brittle substance—shellac resin. My family's gramophone still plays, but, of course, is almost never used. On a visit to Islamabad with the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, I bought another one. This had the showy brass amplifier. For some time, it adorned my study, and was quite a conversation piece, but is now lying on my farm, forgotten and forlorn.
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The gramophone era was replaced by the vinyl era. Music was available on LPs or its smaller version, EPs. I still vividly recall the excitement when a Philips system came to our home, with the turntable and two speakers. My first LP record was of the classical music maestro Kishori Amonkar's ethereal rendering of raag Bhoop. Every night, before I slept, I used to put on this LP. In the mornings, while doing my yoga, I used to hear an LP of Lata Mangeshkar singing select verses of the Bhagwad Gita.
The present generation cannot imagine the romance associated with the vinyl period. LPs came in beautifully designed sleeves, and were lovingly stored in many homes on especially designed shelves. My study had such a section where LPs could be stacked genre wise. I recall that when the song Kabhi kabhi mere dil me khayal aata hai, from the film Kabhi Kabhi, had just come out, I wanted my wife to be to hear it. I had to send one of my staff to buy an EP of the song to play it for her.
The vinyl era was followed by that of cassettes. The compact cassette was revolutionary for its portability, its ability to record, re-record, and share mixtapes turned music into a deeply personal expression. The cassette was the first true enabler of the playlist culture, long before algorithms took over. But tapes wore out, they tangled, and their sound quality degraded—a small price for the freedom they offered.
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The compact discs promised perfection—digital clarity, skip-free listening, and longevity. The CD era marked the zenith of physical music sales, with albums achieving platinum status based on sheer volume. But the illusion of permanence was shattered when digitalization made CDs seem cumbersome. Why stack shelves with discs when music could float in the ether?
The transition from analog to digital was not just technological—it was philosophical. Music was no longer a physical possession but a string of ones and zeros. The MP3 format changed everything. Compression technology shrank files without obliterating quality, and suddenly, entire libraries could fit into a device no larger than a deck of cards. Napster, though controversial, exposed the hunger for instant access. The iPod, with its sleek design and '1,000 songs in your pocket' promise, became the emblem of this new era. If the digital revolution made music portable, the streaming revolution made it omnipresent.
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Why own when you can access? With cloud storage and offline modes, music was no longer tied to a device. Your library lived everywhere—phone, laptop, car, smart speaker. I myself installed an expensive wi-fi sound system in most rooms of my house.
And then, something strange happened. With music everywhere, omnipresent on the touch of a button, I found that I was listening to my choice of music much less than when it was a manual task, putting a disc on the turntable, inserting a cassette, loading a disc. But now I have found a solution that simplifies the complex wealth of technology at our finger tips. I carry a small and simple blue tooth speaker with me, anywhere and everywhere. I have a mobile that can connect to it, almost anywhere. And I listen to my kind of music whenever and wherever I want.
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I think that as we plummet headlong into the web of advancing technology that infinitely increases our options, the best option is to keep things simple, and eliminate the confusion of choice. In my book, Yudhishtara and Draupadi, there is a couplet:
A pebble thrown into a ripple-less void
Choice is the beginning of sin.
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