Lasting Rose

Hello Shalu,

I have a surprise for you today!
I heard you say that we can never listen to the same GRAMOPHONE show again! I wanted to prove you wrong. You can do that here.

I keep listening to the messages of your passionate listeners around the world, which you read out even more passionately, adoring your GRAMOPHONE as if it is something they love more than anything else in their life.

To many of your listeners, the two hours magic spell they fall in to with GRAMOPHONE, through your sweet voice and soothing words and endearing songs of yore you play on their requests, taking them through memory lanes, is like the precious moments they get to spend with their sweet heart, on secret rendezvous!

For each of them, the first encounter with GRAMOPHONE brings nearly the same sweet surprise when one gets that first glance, quite unexpectedly and unwittingly, when something tells you that you are made for each other, that this is where your heart will rest in passion, peace and joy!

Then there is the frantic search to find each other again, eagerly and anxiously searching all over the place to find that lovely radio station, hiding that sweet heart who has got in under your skin. At last you feel lucky you found a lost love and heave a big sigh of relief when you hear that sweet strains of GRAMAPHONE.s music agin on the air!  After a couple of listening sessions, the desire to meet and be with each other again like two people in love grows in to an obsession. Days and weekends are spent restlessly and impatiently just for the brief two hour rendezvous, where you blissfully forget the rest of the world.

Day after day, you wait in sweet anticipation for GRAMOPHONE to arrive, wondering what will be the colour of the dress, the hair style and the mood. At last you behold the arrival with immense joy and relief that it is here and real, eagerly devouring each beating of the eye lashes, movements and expressions on the face and the occasional Jingle of the bangles with the gentle movements of hands.

As you settle down, you wonder who you are going to talk about, what sorrows and joys will be shared, which corner of the world your mind will be taken to wander about, what music your ears will be feasted up on.

Then slowly but surely, as the dusk slips in to a silent nightfall, you are taken in to a most wonderful and romantic experience, gently fondling hitherto untouched corners of your heart and psyche, like an unwritten classic you never read, like the colours splashed and pasted on a canvass by a master before your eyes.

Beats of a guitar and notes of a piano come in from somewhere a like a passing breeze, gently moving the silk and spreading the sweet smell of perfume, reminding the presence of someone by your side. Even the jingles and pronouncements pass through the ears, without offending, like little intrusions of a woman selling jasmine flowers or like the little boy pedalling warm peanuts on a beach. You even welcome the breather, to wonder what little piece of joy or sorrow will be shared with you next.

You forget everything, you don’t even dare to get up or move lest you miss a word, a note or melody, like a child looking out of the window of a train moving through a wonderful landscape.  Slowly, you start to feel the elation, the fulfilment with joy of a lazy wanderer who has no desire to stop but must rest somewhere!

Then, sadly but surely, you are reminded  that it is time to part, however much you  wish it didn’t end, only to be consoled by an assurance to meet again soon.

Thomas Edison wouldn’t have in the wildest of his dreams, imagined that the wonderful GRAMOPHONE he invented will one day come to represent tender feelings of love and romance of the entire world in this way!

You can listen to GRAMOPHONE at http://goo.gl/zkl9 between 10 and 12 PM Dubai time, in which SHALU FAISAL magically gets in to the deepest corners of human minds with her soothing words and elicit the most secretly guarded talents from her listeners, to open up and bloom in expressions of pain, love, affection, pangs of separation and loneliness, in most wonderful snippets of poetry and words!