MTV Best, the ₹20 bootleg MP3 CD from 2003 that introduced me to Bryan Adams and English music, and the copy of it that survived in a friend’s Google Drive.

The CD player my father promised me if I scored over 80% in the 10th, the pirated films the whole family watched on it every weekend in Bhilai, and how it finally lost out to DTH.

Orange County is the happiest sad song Gorillaz have made, with a Damon Albarn vocal that sounds like it's coming from another room.

Taal, A.R. Rahman and a white Ambassador on a family holiday to Hyderabad, winter 1999. The last cassette I remember, and it wasn't even ours.

A personal look at ghazals, Jagjit Singh, Ghulam Ali and Urdu poetry, and how songs like Koi Fariyaad and Yeh Dil Yeh Pagal Dil made the timeless beauty of ghazals part of my life.

Ramin Djawadi's score for The Long Night is the best thing Game of Thrones ever did. Eight minutes and fifty seconds of piano that carries the whole scene.