waiting for a bus on a cold winter morning, with crunchy snow and sounds of birds stirring in the bare branches above, and it starts snowing gently and quietly, wispy white snowflakes, and one lands right on your extended tongue…

Now here’s something I haven’t done before. I mentioned that I was going to make a mix-tape. Shruti, (who drops in every now and then on the blog, hi Shruti) left the intriguing comment above when I asked her for an idea – a mood or a theme. It did sound like a lovely frame of mind to weave a bunch of songs around. Except –

My familiarity with snow is next to non-existent. Real life snow, that is. I encountered snow for a total of 3 hours in my life, and most of it was – well, that’s a story for another day. What I wanted to say is – my experience of these white fluffy thingies falling out of the sky has been based on December issues of Archie comics, Shammi Kapoor films, Yash Chopra heroines and Christmas movies set in New York. Snow in real life, most friends tell me, is not as mysterious, romantic or human-friendly as all of the above make out to be. Or maybe it is, and my friends are too jaded with life to know better (snicker). Actually no, I totally get it. I am from Assam, a state in India known for a phenomenal amount of annual rainfall – as a result, I cannot stand rain. At all.

So this mix-tape is more of a romanticized view of how an outsider perceives a snowy morning. If this sounds like a half-assed excuse for a poor selection of songs, I apologize. The 13 tracks are about a random winter morning, not a particularly cheery one, but not melancholy either. Just that I feel the cold in my bones, I need to touch my ears every now and then to warm them up, and I hold my iPod very tight in my pocket because clenching my fist over the battery makes it feel a tad warmer. And the snow, when it begins to fall, takes my breath away. There is a very clear story playing out in my mind when I listen to the tracks in order. The lyrics, as with most of my musical choices, are not important.

All cliche, pretentiousness and lack of taste are completely unintentional.

You can download the zip (ID3 stripped) from here.

Also, I intend to do this more frequently. I have a theme for the next one already, thanks to a recent conversation, and that will turn out to be much more upbeat than this.