As you age, you realize how much things are fast receding into the past. You love old songs, love to hum them. So when people younger than you ask you to sing something from these present times, you are at a loss. And why is that? Because you feel songs these days do not have the kind of depth that permeated music of the 1950s and 1960s.

Think of Mukesh's dil jalta hai to jalne de or Saigal's babul mora. Where do you get such lyrics, indeed such singers? In an era that places much stress on turning people into celebrities rather than into artistes, it is only proper that songs will come to have no meaning. You might be offended, but when you hear Kumar Sanu or even Udit Narayan, you spot that absence of versatility in them. Their tone and tenor never vary. The style is always predictable. But go back to Hemant Kumar's jab jag uthe armaan or jaag dard-e-ishq jag. You know then how powerfully songs can pierce your soul.

There is much band music in the country and around the world. The trouble is band music is never permanent. You do not remember it after sometime. The ubiquitous song programmes aired on all those television channels in Bangladesh give you much hype, much showmanship but hardly any song that bores its way into your heart. Where can you get a song like Abdul Jabbar's orey neel doriya or Shyamal's gaane bhubon bhoriye debe? When you sit back and reflect on Ferdausi Rahman's amar mon bholano chokh jurhano ei oporoop mori mori, you realize once more why old times are always good times.

We live on music, at least most of us do. There are all those moments when we think back on lost love, or no love at all, when we recall Kishore Kumar's aasha chhilo bhalobasha chhilo. In aaj dujonar duti poth, Hemanta gives us the pain of loss in love that we feel vicariously. Without meaning to be unkind, we ask the question: where do you get such searing pain in songs these days? Try humming Rafi's toote hue khawabon ne and you will know what pain is. Or remember Talat Mahmod's phir wohi shaam wohi gham wohi tanhai hai, to recall the loneliness you have been through when the beloved went away.

There is beautiful pain in the sadness of music. Ranu Mukherjee's tumi amar kachhe tobu onek duure tumi makes pain rise, drop by drop, in the heart. You are there for her. And yet you are far away. Which is when Hemanta comes back with keno duure thako shudhu arhal rakho.

And there we are. There is always poetry in all the summers that have gone by. And the present is a winter of discontent. Elvis Presley's Last Farewell makes you feel young all the time. Michael Jackson's Beat It pushes life into a state of the cacophonous. (The Daily Star)