I got an i-pod as a gift recently. After much trial and more error, I managed to put some of my favourite music in it — Amir Khan’s Hansadhwani, Mallikarjun Mansur’s Nayaki Kanada (with Mero piya rasiya), Rashid Khan’s Maru Bihag, Kishori Amonkar’s Bhoop, thumris by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Girija Devi, ghazals by Begum Akhtar, Farida Khanum and Hariharan, some Gulzar-R.D. Burman compositions, and a few songs of Tagore by Sanghamitra Gupta, Ashis Bhattacharjee, Kanika Bandopadhyay, Geeta Ghatak and Rajeshwari Dutta.

And then, one day, encouraged by the sight of an i-pod-wielding teenager, I self-consciously switched on mine in the Metro. A little too self-consciously, perhaps, because I was soon asked by my fellow i-pod-holder — a sweet girl of about sixteen — what was in my box. I gave her a curtailed list, but found her looking at me expectantly still. “And what bands do you have?” she asked, as if I had deliberately omitted naming them. When I told her I had none, she gave me a sweet (‘kind’ would be my description of it) smile, and that was the end of the conversation. I had a strong suspicion that the generation that wears its i-pods as easily as tattoos and dangling earrings does not take kindly to people like me, whose favourite music-makers are either dead, or have not changed in the last ten years. Did the girl feel like taking my i-pod away? Did she think that people with my music taste were not entitled to an i-pod?

I have not given up my i-pod. Far from it. I’ve loaded it with some more favourites — Parveen Sultana, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Debabrata Biswas, Manna De, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. But I have had to give up other things. Watching musical talent hunts on television, for instance. How a young singer’s talent can be judged on his singing of a Himesh Reshammiya composition, I will never understand. Listening to FM is another, because the Hindi songs of today are mostly of the HR variety, and the Bengali ones have awful lyrics. And nobody — AIR, being the state station, does not count — thinks that classical music is fit to be aired on FM radio.

If it sounds as if I spend most of my time resisting ‘new’ music, then it is farthest from the truth. I go to Someplace Else to listen to young bands playing covers of the Beatles, or Nirvana. I do not run away from current Hindi film music, or Bangla bands either — although that, to use the famous one-liner from Don, would have been not merely difficult, but impossible.

It is fairly simple. Nothing ‘new’ has passed through my ears in the last ten years which I have felt like storing in my i-pod — in other words, listening to over and over again. But there is a more important question that I ask myself. Even if I were to take a serious liking towards a new musician, would that mean that I have to discard one of my old favourites to accommodate the new one? For me, the answer is no. There isn’t a game of musical chairs going on. I can always listen to Raahat Fateh Ali Khan after I have finished with A.T. Kanan’s Jog Kosh and then put on Nick Drake’s “Bryter Layter”.