Meet the musician who owns thousands of vinyl records

“Music has been an internal part of my life. After my graduation in 1978, I got a job in a bank in Karnataka and on the same day, I got my appointment letter from HMV, the gramophone recording company of India, in Chennai. I joined HMV and learned programming and recording techniques. I met artistes like MS Subbulakshmi, Lalgudi Jayaraman, Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, Palghat Mani Iyer, Zakir Hussain and many others. The interaction with them sowed the seed for me to become a composer,” he says.

Later, he left the job at HMV and moved to Mumbai to learn music under RD Burman. “With the blessings of Burmanji, I learned composing and other technicalities of recordings. I was his trainee when he was composing for Love Story, Rocky, Bond 303 and a few other untitled films. During that time, cassettes entered the music market and rasikas started collecting them. My father had a good collection of Talat Mohd, CH Atma, and KL Saigal records,” shares Pallavi Prakash.

His first purchase was music director Madan Mohan’s Jis dinse maine tumko dekha hae from the film Parwana. “From then on I began hunting for old records from Moore Market where they sell used records and other collectors all over India. Initially, my interest was to collect Hindi music. Later, I started collecting other languages also. Today, I have a good collection of records — Naushad’s Mela, Baiju Bawra, Dillagi, Dulari, Shankar Jaikishan’s Barsaat, Basant Bahar are the classics worth preserving.”