vinyl records are like catnip to shailesh shinde the 44yearold mechanical engineer from nigdi who has revelled in several genres of music since his childhood is passionate about his formidable collection of analog sound flat discs while he has smartly catalogued his stash to produce on demand an lp longplaying or ep extended play record in seconds he admits to having embarked on a few failed missions to count his possessions his best effort was counting around 10000 records and there were still a lot more staring at him from the numerous cabinets and cardboard boxes in his housebut that doesnt stop shinde from purchasing at least 10 to 15 records every month even now his stockpile which straddles the english and hindi music spectrum is fed by pickings from his contacts at juna bazaar online retail sites and whatever his knowledgeable suppliers at fort and lamington road in mumbai fetch himshinde digs his collection of double live albums from the 1960s to 80s especially thin lizzy live and dangerous and life scorpions live in tokyo the allman brothers at fillmore east the who live at leeds wishbone ash live in chicago deep purple made in japan iron maiden life after death rory gallagher irish tour and the platinum bestseller frampton comes alive he has hundreds of such double live albums his collection of jazz and fusion is vast too with entire album discographies of stellar artists like stan getz johnny hodges joe pass allan holdsworth and steve morse he has a particular affinity for miles davis with 60 albums of the jazz musician adorning his shelvesalternatively his musical armoury features albums of bollywood music soundtracks of vintage regional films from the 1940s to the 1990s as also the renditions of bhimsen joshi ghulam ali shobha gurtu pandit jasraj and his eternal favourite mehdi hassan he aspires to acquire hassans entire discographyshinde began his hunt for records around 10 years back vinyl had long made way for audiocassettes and compact discs two shops who had negligible sales and were hence engaged in transferring music from records onto cassettes collectively sold him 7000 lps and eps in mint condition for just rs 60000 he painstakingly collected another 4000 records over time from juna bazaar buying them for a maximum of rs 50 then he recalls picking up the ijaazat album composed by r d burman and sung by asha bhosle for a mere rs 11 today it would fetch a price of around rs 20000 but shinde isnt sellingshinde says goodcondition vintage records are hard to come by these days and some rare ones never sell under rs 3000 eachshinde isnt partial to vinyl alone he also has around 5000 original audio cds an equal number of audiocassettes and even around 2000 original movie blurays dvds including satyajit rays rare criterion bluray edition of apu trilogy pather panchali aparajito and the world of apu which he procured from a contact in brazilbesides shinde owns an assembly of 20odd record players