Remembrance of things past

I am a sucker for nostalgia. Almost everyday I come across something that triggers some fond memory from the past. Or maybe I have way too many fond memories.

A couple of days back I came across this video on youtube. Don 2 came out when I was in Iraq, in class II or III. We used to stay in these really small houses, with four houses joined in a row and really thin walls in between. If it was too hot outside and I was forbidden to go out in the heat, I would talk to my friends in the neighboring house through the wall of the living room. The sun used to set very late - sometime around 8:30-9 pm - and we used to play from around 4 in the afternoon till the time the sun set.

We used to get lots of video cassettes from India in the colony library and I would watch one Hindi movie almost everyday. The night we got our Sony TV from Kuwait - and it was the first time I had a color TV at my own home (we had a B&W Sonodyne TV in India before that) - I saw this movie called Avinash starring Mithun Chakraborty. It was too violent and my parents stopped the movie midway. For the next two days I saw three movies each day. I can't recall names of all of them but one of them was Mohabbat Ke Dushman starring Raj Kumar and Sanjay Dutt. The day I realized that the Iraqi channel also showed Hindi movies on weekends, I ran around the colony telling everyone to watch the movie. That movie was Aasha, with Jeetendra, Reena Roy and Rameshwari. I saw the trailer for Don 2 in one of the video cassettes. What is Jeet Upendra upto these days? I last remember him seeing in this serial by Danny Denzongpa called Ajnabi on DD Metro. And even as I write this, the beautiful theme song from the serial is playing in my mind. How one thought leads to another!

We had a small Philips two-in-one that was used to play songs from Maine Pyar Kiya, Dil and Aashiqui for the longest time. Hasan Jahangir was a rage then and we had one of his cassettes as well and this song reminds me of sitting on one of the couches in the living room, getting done fast with my home work, reading Hardy Boys, with the smell of my mom's sambhar (she makes some amazing sambhar) wafting in from the kitchen. Heavenly.