New Delhi, June 20 -- If I could, I'd pay serious money to travel 20-something years back in time to experience Nirvana's ground-breaking album, Nevermind, for the very first time again. Having borrowed a cassette from a schoolfriend, I found an opportune time to go to my parents' room and use the two-in-one music system-a "deck". This wasn't a parent-friendly record; on Smells Like Teen Spirit, the main guy, Kurt Cobain, screams about his libido repeatedly. While I'd heard one Nirvana song-Come As You Are, via a stray MP3 on someone's CD-I had little idea what was coming next: a sonic thunderstorm that would blow my teenage brain right out of my ears.

All of this today sounds like gibberish. "Two-in-one"? "Cassette"? "MP3"? In the early...