Sing and dance your life away!

I can see what's happened. What?
And they don't have a clue. Who?
They'll fall in love, and here's the bottomline.
Our trio's down to two. Oh.

It doesn't take me much effort to try to remember the first time I heard these words as part of what I spelled then as 'Loin King' soundtrack. It was a dim white tubelight-lit room in my uncle's house in Bombay. I remember the tracks were recorded in a cassette that also held Aqua's tracks, with my own version of the actual Aqua cassette cover drawn on a white paper and inserted in the cassette's front cover. And now, almost 12 years later, I listen to this song on my (new!) iPod, my dream for three years finally in my hands, the delicate, engraved darling.

Listening to music in an iPod is lovely for a number of reasons. First, it holds more songs than any portable music player I have had. Second, the songs are simply awesome to listen to on this. Konjam Nilavu is thrilling, Dil Se Re's silent chals-chals in the interludes amazingly evident, and the acoustic guitar in New York Nagaram's stanzas beautifully travel from one ear to another. Third, I've just wanted it for so long that it feels exhilarating to simply hold it in my hands. It's just becoming extremely difficult for me to maintain my composure and not spread my arms and break into a dance in the middle of the road or in the canteen queue.

The random order in which the songs play just transport me back and forth in time to when I heard the song first or of opinions/ideas I had of it then. Listening to Anjali Anjali (Anjali) today, I suddenly grew surprised at the amount of clarity the lyrics held for me now - has my Tamil significantly improved, or is it the truth that I've suddenly grown up enough to understand so many things? Music always holds associations for me, and this is being reinforced here with the iPod.

iPod is damn smart too. There was one evening when it was rainy and everything, and by some weird coincidence, for almost half an hour, every song either began with thunder or was about rain!

Just when I get all pullarichufied thinking of music and everything, iPod smartly plays 'Thank you for the music' (ABBA): 'Without a song or dance, what are we?'