And then iPod came along.

Looking back now, it would have been hard to imagine the kind of impact this little device would have on our lives back then. I mean this little pocket-y thing made music personal again.

It did something else too. It made enjoying music a lonesome activity. Now I don’t know about you, but my household has always been about playing music in the living, even if we didn’t really like each other’s taste for music. My father would much put up with Michael Jackson in the same way I would listen to M. S. Subbulakshmi.

While the digital music trashed all my tapes, and much of our vinyl records, the iPod went a step further. It nearly trashed all our music CDs.

But we are not fashion bots. We are just people caught in this gadget frenzy world that is churning out new devices with a vengeance. While the iPod brought about a change in the way we’d listen and organize our music, it also brought a few challenges. Isolation. The need to convert, index and re-label. And after many such, we’re like “Oh bother.”

And so in this choice of conversion v. convenience, the latter won—that we’d play our CDs (conventional, and compressed) as compiled. We found a system that could play conventional media, as well as play from a generation of new devices.

It’s a simple media player. It can take audio input from any device via a simple 3.5mm (male to male) stereo cable. (We use it for Sneha’s iPod Nano, as well as for enhancing our home theater experience.) It can play MP3, WMA music files from a data CD, in addition to playing conventional music CDs. (So I get to keep my CDs.) It comes with a digital radio AM/FM tuner. (I’m a radio guy.) The best of course is the USB memory input. Stick a USB drive with your music files, or the iPod Shuffle, and it can just play music files right off it; and you get to control the selection through its IR remote. All this at a fraction of the cost of some of the choices (below), which we discarded in the end:

• Airport Express—for streaming music. (Oh bother.)
• Mac mini, together with a subwoofer speaker set. (Perhaps an overkill, since we already have a DVD player; a cable, and a satellite system for our television.)
• Bose Sound Dock. (Can’t play CDs, and can’t play from my iPod Shuffle; and way too expensive for a speaker. Oh bother.)

Of course, getting a good geared bike is paramount for cycling in a country like India. Or else, it doesn’t take long to shoot your Vastus lateralis beyond flagging levels, thereby rubbing your enthusiasm the wrong way.

My visiting parents are awed by the way the Dutch cycle—not just the young, but old, and some very old folks indeed. A couple in their 60s and 70s riding together is truly inspiring. While unsure of their balance, they promised they’d try after all these years.

What’s needed now, and direly, is some infrastructure. If every town hall in every town, and city could take the initiative to construct uninterrupted cycle paths and amend/reinforce some safety laws helping cyclists, then there’s no stopping people from having fun, saving money and get some exercise in the bargain, while helping ease the oil burden on the state.