I miss Abhijeet Sawant

Active vs Passive Listening

Indian Idol Season 1 finale premiered on 5th March 2005. I was there sitting in front of my tiny BPL TV hoping my favourite Amit Sana would take the victory, but in the end, the trophy and the contract for the debut album were given to Abhijeet Sawant. This was a heartbreaking moment for many of us, and over the years, we have tried to move past that hurt.

In Patna, where I lived, we had one Planet M store that had all the new and old music CDs. It was quite far away from my house in SP Verma Road which was the road that had all the major computer stores in the region. My father had bought an HCL Beanstalk PC, and that was the first home computer that most of us saw. I still remember people coming into our house only to see that thing operate. We did not get internet for the next many years, but we had a blue and white inkjet printer that came with a CD of songs and a Parker Pen. This was a compilation CD of songs that were hits around that time.

this was the exact CPU that we had.

7th April 2005 saw the release of Abhijeet’s debut album titled “Aapka... Abhijeet Sawant,” which had 10 tracks, including the song that made him win the Indian Idol “Mohabbatein Lutaunga”. This was the first album that I remember being bought by my sister and at that time it cost a whooping 250 rupees. The album cover had Abhijeet with brown highlights along with the most amount of face retouching I had ever seen. If you ask me, they did him dirty on the photoshop bit.

This album was played on that HCL PC on repeat every morning and evening by my sister. I woke up to this, and this was my sign of coming back home from the terrace in the evening. I forgot about Amit Sana as Abhijeet rose to stardom in our circle and my favourite song quickly changed from “Mohabbatein Lutaunga” to “Lafzon Mein” particularly because of its intro tune and the music video that showed Abhijeet in singing it in front of a helicopter and also introducing me to Tamanna Bhatia.

I gave this song another listen while I was writing this, and I must tell you that it still holds up. The music video is everything I expected from that era, but the song still had the power to get me back to the Planet M days in SP Verma Road. I felt a bit sad listening to this because I do not remember what happened to Abhijeet’s career after it, but this comment on Lafzon Mein music video summed it up for me.

Until I found a reprise afrobeat version that was released just nine months ago.

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I wanted to write this not because of Abhijeet’s music but more of the idea that listening to an album from start to finish has completely disappeared from our lives. As someone who has recently put out one, the idea behind making an album is something that every musician holds very dear. It serves as a picture of a full story, and when the era of listening to Daylists and Playlists came, all of us collectively moved from listening to the whole story to only listening to the “good bits”.

The good songs do not come about without the anchor of the others in the album. There is a reason there are interludes and intro and outro tracks in an LP: because the musician wants you to go on a journey. Passive music listening has become the norm now, and Active is nowhere to be found. I have been dealing with this myself because just as watching 60-second reels made my attention span deteriorate, similarly, listening to playlists took away the curiosity of learning the whole story behind a full-length album.

This post marks a change that I am bringing into myself. I will continue listening to playlists that the Spotify algorithm curates for me, but I’m also going to follow my intuition a bit more where if I tend to like a song from that said playlist then I will listen to the whole album and maybe even write about it. I’m also opening myself to suggestions - Do you have an album that you love from start to finish? Send it to me and tell me why you love it so much?

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till next time,
tijbed.