In the summer of 2001 I was starting the 10th, and everyone, from my parents to just about anyone else I met, told me it was the year that would set me on the right track. Focus on your studies now, they said, and life will be easier later. Life is never easy, I know that now, but at fifteen I was naive enough to believe it. I doubled down on studies and cut back on cricket, both watching it and playing it.
Indian parents always want a little more. Sometime in September or October, just after the mid-semester exams, my father made me an offer. If I scored more than 80% in the boards, he’d get me a CD player. He knew I’d wanted one ever since Abhinav got his. I agreed.
Abhinav was my best friend at the time. He lived in the house opposite ours and was about a year and a half older than me, which meant he got everything first and I got it after. The first time I ever played an 8-bit video game was at his place, and afterwards I begged my father to get me one from Mumbai, where he was going on a work tour. He came back with one. The first CD player I ever saw was at Abhinav’s too, and I’d go over sometimes to watch films on it with him. Later it was motorcycles. His father got him a bike when he started college, and I got mine the year after. A CD player of our own meant I could watch a film or listen to music whenever I wanted, instead of whenever I happened to be at his place.
The results came out in the middle of May 2002. I scored 83%, and I was happier about winning the bet than about the marks. That may not look like much next to today’s scores, but back then it was a great score, and where I lived it was a big deal. In June, my father kept his word. The CD player was silver, most likely Chinese or locally assembled, and cost around ₹3,000 or ₹4,000. I don’t remember the brand. It was nothing fancy.
The 11th brought another change. I got a room of my own, where I could study till late and then sleep on the bed next to the table. The CD player sat beside my study table, wired to the two speakers from our old record player, and it kept me awake through Organic Chemistry and Calculus. Songs played in the background at a volume barely loud enough for me to pick up, while I tried to understand the concepts.
MP3s were big then, and one CD could hold hundreds of compressed songs. One of them, MTV Best, did more for my taste in music than anything else I owned, but MTV Best is a story of its own.
Most weekends, on a Saturday or a Sunday, I’d go to the CD library nearby and bring home a film. The CD player sat on a small rectangular steel table, so I’d pick up the whole setup, carry it out to the TV, put it down in front of the bookcase and plug it in, and all of us would watch the film together. A few times Abhinav came over and watched with us, which for once was the other way round. Once it was over, I carried everything back inside and plugged it into its speakers again. The CDs were usually pirated, so the print was often shabby, but back then it was whatever floats your boat. My father didn’t have the time to take us to the movies, so the CD player it was. So many Sunday afternoons and evenings went like that, and most of the Bollywood films I saw in those years, Lagaan, The Legend of Bhagat Singh, Chalte Chalte, Swades and Don among them, I saw that way.
By 2007 the CD player had made way for a desktop in my room. It held on for seven or eight years in all before it broke down, and it was replaced by another silver one, which mostly became my mother’s, for her music and bhajans.
The second one didn’t survive either. When I moved back to Bhilai from Jamshedpur, I brought my Panasonic LCD TV with me, along with an Airtel DTH connection. Until then we’d had cable, which was getting more unreliable every passing day. I set the new TV up above the bookcase, plugged in the DTH, and everyone at home was mesmerised. Nobody needed a film in a shabby print when there were so many HD channels to choose from. After that, the CD player came out mostly once a year, for the ten days of Ganapati Pooja, to play Anup Jalota singing Jai Ganesh Deva, and sometime around 2016 or 2017 it gave up for good. My mother didn’t mind. She still likes her transistor radio more than anything.
