Music & ..growing up down south of Vindhyas

It often amuses me when my north indian friends express amazement at my knowledge of hindi songs...particularly those old melodies..those ever green songs made immortal by starwalts like kishoreda, rafi, hemant kumar, mukesh, manna deyetc.For even though born and brought up south of the vindhyas, we had to learn during our growing up days in school,what was ostentiably the "national language" of india - Hindi.
When you are 6 years old and at an age when you dont rather like going to school at all, you dont really spare a moment to think what exactly are you taught at school. You just learn (or try to learn!) what they teach you at school. And so i learnt hindi (which was not my mothertongue) for a total of 6 years. Back then, it was just another "language subject" in which we had to get 35 marks to pass and that was it.Of course being in CBSE syllabus helped because we had an option to choose between hindi and sanskrit in class 5 and i happily chose sanskit. No, not because i didnt like hindi, but because supposedly it was easy to score marks in sanskrit for the board exams! (yes, this was indeed proved correct when i managed to get a 99 in sanskrit in my CBSE board exams - excruciatingly missing that magical number by 1 mark..losing that top honours to a pretty girl in my class who managed to score a full 100 in sanskrit and who got a special prize for the same whereas your truly, inspite of being the batch topper was not even awarded a plaque...sigh!)
Anyways..coming back to the point, we down south were blessed because we learnt not just our mothertongue, but also the language which is spoken by majority of our north indian brethren. Even today, this gives me a kick, a rather childish satisfaction, that i am comfortably able to have a conversation with my north indian friends in their language whereas they would never be able to claim the vice versa!
And for music lovers like me, this forced multi-linguism was a blessing. Becuase not only were we lucky to have grown up listening to the southern legends like yesudas, jayachandran, suseelamma and janakiamma, so were we swayed by the magical voices of legends of the north.
In fact some of my earliest memories from childhood of songs being hummed by my dad and mom were actually not malayalam songs, but hindi ones. Like "tere bina zindagi mein koyi" was/still is my mom's favorite whereas my dad was/is rather fond of "kabhie kabhie mere dil".And not just the popular ones, the tastes were eclectic...sample this - "badi sooni sooni hai". Where Rafisaab's voice tugs at and makes your heart ache when he sings an "ehsaan tera hoga", Kishoreda's voice gives you goosebumps and for those 5 minutes, you live a different life! I mean these were and still are some of the best songs ever writen and sung..evergreen in their appeal and expressions.
Not to say that malayalam classics were overlooked. An "alliyambal kadavil" was played as many times in my house as a "tum itna jo muskura rahe ho". Some of my really nice childhood memories include sitting on the porch at home watching my dad and uncle playing carroms and the radio playing "bina ka geetmaala / cibaca geetmala" in the background.
Those were the years....and sometimes when i am really down, playing one of those timeless classics brings about a serene calm and i am at peace again....