78, 45 & 33.5

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In response to the post: Aasthey Ladies, Pratik sent me the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DK_qqDC1VE

Listening to the song sent me back to my 1960s decade of our youth and exuberance in the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP. We are the Beatles, Hippies and Mahesh Yogi generation...indeed a very senior professor of Architecture who was eating for a day's lunch as a guest when his wife was safely away stunned us by his declamation: "Hippies plus Mahesh Yogi are the only solution for all the troubles of mankind"

But of course, Harry Belafonte was different...he was the King of Calypso.

Those were the years when All India Radio Calcutta (no one then dubbed it Akashvani) used to broadcast the latest hits of Western Pop and such in its Lunchtime Varieties during week days and Musical Bandbox on Sundays. I was never a musical man, but Bidhu Mohanty, who was a soulful crooner used to croon Matilda and Come Back Liza so well and so often that even I recall those after half a century.

And Pratik's mail sent me back to my school days when we had a lesson in our science book taught well by my Father on the recoding and reproduction of sound. I never saw a gramophone till then and wondered how could it be possible that a purely mechanical device stores and reproduces hit songs of our Telugu films. That of course was explained sadly by our First Paper in our B Sc (Hons) at our AU which was: Mechanics, Heat & Sound. Lots of heat answering the weird questions of that Paper, such as the use of horse hair for a violin bow...later known as 'stick-slip'.

It was a mind-blowing experience to watch a regular HMV Gramophone in my Uncles' place at Nellore when I was just out of school. He was enormously proud of the latest gadget he bought and liked to be surrounded by kids by the dozen asking him to play one more song please! He would dust the box that contained the whole instrument sans the pins that came in another matchbox clone. And open it and hitch up the lovely speaker that grew to become twice the size of the box that hid it...like the tail of the Himalayan Langur that is twice as long as its body. And insert a groovy disk that was the size of a masala dosa and gingerly place it on the rotating table. And take the head piece by hand and twist it and insert a pin delicately into its mouth and place it at the periphery of the disk. And attach a crank-like Z-shaped handle to the machine, and wind it counting thirty turns and say: Go! And out of the horn came the lovely song: 'Eruvaka Sagaro' that was danced by Waheeda when she was just a school kid like us. And when the head piece slowly came to rest traveling radially inwards, he would gingerly pick it up and change the needle...the thing worked on the 'pantograph principle'...pin must be made of a softer material than the disk so that it is the one that wears out rather than the record.

And of course the HMV puppy listening so intently to His Master's Voice faithfully.

By the time I joined our AU, the other Uncle (MD) who was hosting us bought what was famously called: Radiogram. It was electro-mechanical and had provision for a stack of a dozen records inserted at one go and switched on. It had an automatic arm that dumps the disk that has been played out and inserts the next one so that you just relax for half an hour and listen to the choice songs you wanted.

The masala dosa-records were later called SP (Standard Play) and rotated at 78 RPM and could take only one song of 3 minutes each. By the time I became rather solvent in our Faculty Hostel, I bought the latest HMV Star Player that came with 3 speeds: 78 (SP), 45 (EP for Extended Play) and 33.5 (LP for Long Play). The EP was like a thin Uthappam, half the diameter of the SP, but the LP was twice as big as SP, like a Rocket Dosa. EP ran for 9 minutes, I guess, while LP ran for a good half hour.

Since I didn't have cash for more than 3 SPs having some Hindi film hits, after running them for a fortnight again and again, I used to run them at 45 and 33.5 speeds and enjoy the fun!

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P.S. 1: The latest news is that our blogs are acting as tranquilizers for expectant fathers. Bravo!

P.S. 2: Aniket Aga just now sent me the following link to: An Elegy to the JEE:

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?279807



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