FM mania

The bus I was travelling to Mangalore in yesterday had FM playing in it and brought memories of my PG days back to me.. but thankfully, only the good ones. I guess a year gives time for your mind to forget bitter memories of a person, place or thing and lets you remember the sweet ones without the other kind tainting your reminiscences..

And it had been exactly one year since I'd listened to the mindless yet soothing chatter on the familiar FM stations. Although I loved listening to the radio as a kid and still do, I'm not exactly a willing participant in the FM mania. I can listen to that inane chatter and those sometimes tasteless songs for say an hour, tops.. Beyond that it gets on my nerves.. but there was a time when I used to listen to that drivel up to four or five hours at a time.

The fondest memories I have of this 'noble' pursuit are those of writing records. A bunch of us would sit in the common room, all of us armed with record sheets, required stationary and a personal music player of some sort. Since writing records was no-brains-required sort of a job where you just copied your observation book but in a neater form, everyone of us would have earphones stuffed in our ears. Sometimes all of us would tune in to the same channel and comment on the songs or each would go a separate way until a particularly ridiculous song came on upon which the 'lucky' person listening to that channel would be like, "Hey tune in to XYZ you guys.. This is damn funny.." and we would make fun of those lyrics or the actors to death.. Good times :D

The other time we would crave for some mind numbing chatter and music was during the practicals. The shortest of experiments would last half an hour and if you had to repeat, you would be stuck in the lab for half of the day or on not so rare occasions, the whole day. Since these practicals were unsupervised, anytime the faculty were not around, we got the music players out. That thrill of doing something that you are not supposed to do is something else isn't it? The proof- I can now listen to FM all I want but my player has been in hibernation for a year.. Oh, to be a student again :)