вЂњSure, there is a вЂcoolвЂ™ aspect to collecting vinyl, and there is a certain attraction towards anything thatвЂ™s seen as vintage right now, but the main reason you are going to get into records versus any other cultural artefact that you could also hipster out over is because you are into music,вЂќ says Mehta. He recently submitted an undergraduate dissertation on the вЂњconsumer psyche behind buying recordsвЂќ. A growing obsession with vinyl also propelled him towards studying music marketing-the now 22-year-old Mehta is a student of MumbaiвЂ™s Whistling Woods International Institute of Film, Communications & Creative Arts, where he is studying for a bachelorвЂ™s degree in business administration, specialising in media management. He started haunting The Revolver Club, an independent record store in Mumbai that started in 2014, joined their online communities, and even got a part-time job there. But owning a record for the first time and listening to it on his friendвЂ™s Audio-Technica turntable pretty much changed his life, quite literally.

Mehta had always been into music, gravitating towards indie rock, noise rock, post-funk and folk in his teens and gradually developing a fascination for physical music formats like CDs and audio cassettes-partly out of a love for retro stuff and partly a desire to вЂњfeel closerвЂќ to the music he liked. When Rohan Mehta was 18, a friend gifted him a Long Playing (LP) record of American folk musician Father John MistyвЂ™s 2017 album, Pure Comedy.

Vintage turntable