An Era Passed Away?

Last weekend we had been to our college friend L's new place and I was stumped by how lovely she had kept her house. It was no surprise for she had always been a stickler for neatness. After coming back, I carried a bit of the "clean bug" with me, I suppose, and looked at disgust with the dust laden shelves under the TV which contained an un-used DVD Player and a grandfather VCR ( I am not even sure anybody remember those anymore) and decided to declutter. 
So out went the DVD Player and the VCR on OLX to be sold for a paltry sum. I had a bunch of VHS Tapes that came into sight. We had to destroy them somehow, so Jr.M and me sat and pulled the tapes out and snipped them into pieces. She found this particularly interesting having never seen a tape before. It took me back to old memories of using this VCR ... and my association with Video tapes and I thought .. Ek Post tho Banta hain :)


My first recollection of video tapes were I think when I was in class 6 or 7. We had this shop near home where we could rent the VHS and the tapes for a period. My parents would rent the VHS and some movie tapes for the weekend and soon we decided to buy our own one - as buying one turned to be more economical than the renting. My dad researched a bit and we bought a VCR and our first VHS tape on which we could record movies from the TV. I still remember the enthusiasm I felt when we got it all hooked up and set up the VCR for recording and recorded our programs. There started the awesome journey of recordings ... We soon learnt the magic of timed-recording, which helped us record movies and programs when we were out of home. Late Night New Year programs, missed episodes of Chitrahaar (remember how excited we were to be shown the 1/10th of a new song that would be released another month later), sunday morning cartoon shoes on DD... all of these would get recorded. Funny, we were never a "serial" loving family else we would by now have had zillion tapes containing all the episodes. 

Then came the phase when I bought my first video recorder in 2003 and recorded the entire of New York for my parents. They were so enamoured by it that my dad had got it transferred to 2 or 3 VHS tapes so that they could play it again and again in bits and pieces. Amma and me are great fans of 'Heidi' - so when I went to the USA for the first time, I bought her the original movie where Heidi is played by the famous child actor Shirley Temple.

One well loved 'dog-eared' VHS tape I found was of Tom and Jerry cartoons - I did have a super collection of those well loved shows which was a great source of entertainment in days when we did not have YouTube and could play almost any episode whenever we wanted. 

As I snipped those keepsake tapes and dumped them into the bag, it felt as if a part of my life was being lost .. indeed an era has gone by leaving just memories to cling onto... 

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