💬 Kal Ho Naa Ho is the one song I can play on loop and never get tired of

It's the Kal Ho Naa Ho title song for me. Sonu Nigam, 2003. Played it maybe 2,000 times, still not tired. On my last flight I had it on loop most of the way. The man next to me could hear it through my headphones. He asked what I was listening to. I told him. He said okay and put his own headphones on, very politely. Every other song I love, I get bored of in a month. This one just doesn't wear out. I've tried to work out why. It's not even my favourite film. I haven't watched it since college. I think it's the way his voice goes soft in the second verse, like he's talking to one person only. Or maybe it's just that I first heard it on a cassette in my cousin's Maruti, all 6 of us squeezed in. Everyone sang the chorus badly. Somebody always started crying by the end, usually my aunt. What's yours? The song you never skip, no matter how many times it comes on. Mine is probably going to be playing at my funeral, so my family better get used to it.

I think it is rarely the song itself, more what was happening the first dozen times you heard it. Mine is tied to a bus route I used to take for tuition classes, the song would play from a shop near my stop and now hearing it anywhere brings back that exact fifteen minute walk, nothing to do with the lyrics really.

An old Kishore Kumar song does this to me, my father used to play it on long drives to Vizag when I was small and now I cannot separate the song from the memory of the backseat window and the smell of the car. I have tried newer songs with similar melodies and none of them land the same way at all.

Funny, my answer is a Sonu Nigam one too, Sandese Aate Hai from Border. My uncle was in the army. Every Independence Day he played it on full volume and nobody in the house was allowed to talk.