An early teenage memory takes me back to a radio travel programme, the theme song of which had Bing Crosby crooning “those faraway places with strange sounding names are calling, calling me.”

There are numerous songs about distant places, and it is a great feeling to visit them. Recently, I went to Istanbul where I kept humming the old number: “Istanbul not Constantinople, Why did Constantinople get the works? That’s nobody’s business but the Turks!”

Remember Eartha Kitt with the sexy voice singing ‘Uskudara’ — a song about a Turkish lady falling in love with her male secretary? The song came alive when I visited Uskudar, a suburb of Istanbul on the Asian side of the Bosphorus.

On an earlier trip to Italy, songs were my only guide. ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’, led me to the Trevi Fountain in Rome to make a wish. With my wife it was ‘That’s Amore’ in Napoli, and although it was not ‘in the Isle of Capri that I met her’, I did take her there for her birthday! All too soon, it was time for ‘Arrivederci Roma’.

Moving on to ‘Gay Pa-ree’ (in the old sense of the word!), I was overwhelmed with an avalanche of melodies, the most memorable one being “I love Paris — in the winter when it drizzles... in the summer when it sizzles... every moment, every moment of the year”.

Sighting Dover from the ferry, Vera Lynn haunted me with “the bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover” till I got to ‘London Bridge’ with Jo Stafford. In Scotland, my priority was not Loch Ness but Loch Lomond. I just had to see the lake that my school teacher, good old Father Mackessack, introduced in our singing class. I had a lump in my throat remembering “Where in purple hue the highland hills we view, And the moon coming out of the gloaming!”

... contd.