NOTES OF NOSTALGIA
Head to this seventy-year-old shop in the city to find the rarest collection of vinyl LPs.
While walking down Mirza Ghalib Street towards New Market, keeping strictly to the left, it is hard to miss the Instagram-worthy gramophone propped up on a podium placed on the footpath, right in front of a tiny shop called Vibrations. The shop sells inexpensive clothes and fashion accessories but it was not always a garment shop. And the gramophone is a vestige of it's far removed past. It stands as a reminder of the times when the septuagenarian shop was thronged by the city’s music lovers.
Love Lost
"The steady decline in demand for cassettes and records forced us to wind-up the original business," says 32-year-old Md Shah Nawaz, whose grandfather set up Vibrations seven decades ago. However, Shah Nawaz continues to sell an interesting assortment of vintage vinyl LPs from a dingy stall a few steps away.
Treasure Trove
For Shah Nawaz, the record stall is not merely a token from the past, it is his bequest. “This shop is our feeble attempt to keep alive our family legacy,” says Shah Nawaz, whose personal collection of vinyls boast rare numbers like a 78 RPM Jana Gana Mana record from the early sixties, an Iron Maiden limited edition Picture Disc (a collector’s item) from the 80s and hard-to-find vinyl of RD Burman’s Pantera, his only international album recorded in San Francisco in 1987.
Eclectic Notes
The stall, nothing more than a few racks mounted on the crumbling wall of an old building with rickety wooden doors, caters to a niche audience mainly comprising backpackers who throng the hotels in nearby Sudder Street, casual collectors who pick up a few LPs and a few serious vinyl junkies who come for the sound of analog recordings. The collection is an eclectic mix of Eastern and Western music—Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brother share a shelf with Pandit Dulal Roy and Himangshu Biswas, and Mozart’s Piano Concert, stands next to the vinyl LP album of German Electronic music band Kraftwerk’s 1978 release The Man machine.
w AT Near Mirza Ghalib Street Fire Station