Dear reader, good morning. Today’s is a special edition, in that our lead story is a Summer playlist!

It’s been a while since we put out a First Principles playlist. The last one was Spring, in mid-February. And boy, do we have a huge playlist today. We’ve gone from 18 songs in our very first playlist to 21, 24, 50, and today, 91 songs!

Why did that happen? I think it’s because summer is our most evocative and memorable of seasons. 

Think about it. What seasons or times do you remember most from your childhood? From your college days? From your first days working in a new city? Which season is associated most with holidays and vacations? And partying and dancing? Or just bumming it out with no purpose? 

For me, and I think for most of my colleagues at The Ken, it’s summer. That’s why when we started crowdsourcing today’s playlists inside our company Slack, the songs came flying. 

“Summer wedding + sweaty Margaritas and Micheladas + good food. This song brings back the memory of a May 2022 day,” said Raveena, one of our Desk Editors, for “A Todos los Rumberos”.

Nathan, a staff writer with us, said he always tries to listen to the song “Beqaboo” on the Mumbai Sea Link. “It’s the perfect song for cruising speeds.”

I envy folks like Raveena and Nathan who are able to not just remember specifics from their past so well, but are also able to correlate it to songs and moods. 

My own summer memories span decades. The 1980s were hot Delhi summers, three-day train journeys, Kerala backwaters, mixtapes and MTV (launched 1981). The word I’d probably use to describe it would be torpor—“a state of physical or mental inactivity; lethargy.”

The summers of the 1990s for me were about exams, college life, hostels, new cities (I met and fell in love with Bengaluru in 1994, met Kolkata in 1999), new friendships, and newfound independence. Summers were either the energetic dance-y kind (think Bally Sagoo’s “Aaja Nachle”, Shaggy’s “In the Summertime” or the still-incredible “Urvashi Urvashi” from A R Rahman) or the languid and chill types (think Lucky Ali’s “O Sanam” or Silk Route’s “Dooba Dooba”).

I won’t bore you with more decades, but you get the picture.