Shiny pink disco

I was watching Frasier and I remember seeing a Walkman pop up in one of the scenes. I remember my first Walkman, a black, slightly battered gadget. I am not even sure if the memory of it is real or stolen from someone else's remembrances. It starts a cascade of memories of cassettes, of waiting for movie scores and albums to release, of wondering if my parents would give me money to buy a cassette, of listening and re-listening and re-re-listening to the cassettes till the spools wore out. I remember making copies of tapes (mix tapes were a thing of my teenage years, only I made them for myself)



My memory of my first CD player is real and vivid and that of a hot pink shiny circular object purchased for an inordinate amount of money from a local market (I didn't, my parents did). My happiness at owning the gadget equaled my despair at it never working. Well, it worked occasionally but never in the long shared cab rides from home to my undergraduate college. I blamed the CDs  but it was the player, born faulty (and probably in China). This was before the metro connected good old Nyoda with Delhi. I can't even remember who I was back then, stuffed with seven other people in a van, headed to college to get a degree. I had no idea what I was going to do with my degree. I do remember the occasional boredom of those long journeys along with the heady mix of heat and sweat in the summers. I remember the electricity going out and stifling afternoons in classrooms. It was the summer I discovered and fell in love with iced tea.

I vaguely remember owning an MP3 player at some point but I don't know where it came from. Soon after college I was working and traveling even longer (four hours both ways) in a cab that was even more full of people. The slow crawl home, the endless traffic jams, the lack of anything else to do drove me quite batty and I remember buying an ipod in my third month of work. I could not afford it, it was an expensive buy. But it was not impulsive. I had to find something to do in those cab rides and there were only so many people I could call (the number was low). That is how my tryst with ipod, podcasts and endless storage of music began. Over the years I stored a lot of music on it, found occasional podcasts, tried to enjoy audiobooks, and eventually wished that ipods came with a radio tuner.

Now I have an ipod that delights me, because I don't have to connect them to a laptop. The new generation ipods are wi-fi enabled and it is possible to download podcasts and work entirely without hooking up to a laptop. I like the less work (even as I know that I have lost something by losing that task). I started by listening to the On Being podcast and the NY Times tech podcast (it stopped a long time ago). Over the years I've been trying to find new podcasts that get me thinking and give me joy. Here's a little list of the ones I've been listening to these days:

On Being reflects on life, sometimes from a spiritual perspectives, other times from a religious basis, but often from a moral view on what it means to be alive.

The Splendid Table is a radio show on cooking and all things related.

The One You Feed is about feeding your good wolf.

Call Your Girlfriend (recommended by a friend) is a chatty show between long distance friends.

The Mental Illness Happy Hour should be pretty self-evident from the name.

I am still looking for a podcast that would speak to me as a brown woman traveling the world or as an international student or as an Indian woman in her late twenties. I haven't found something in that genre that I enjoy, but if you have any suggestions, send them my way!