Goodbye my old Friend. VHS Tape.

There is no more VHS Tape. It’s officially died today when last manufacture of VHS tapes ship its last shipment out.

VHS used to be one of my valuable friends who showed me new things for the first time. Not just Rambo and Lion King, it showed me much more vital things for human race, such as human reproduction procedures and Amitabh Bachan’s movies. Sometimes I wonder, if not for VHS, there may be a generation of people out there right now not knowing how to engage in reproduction business and the whole human race may be wiped-out from this planet. Alright, it may be farfetched, humans survived past thousands and thousands of years without those educational materials came in VHS. But if Pope can farfetched in his talk, when he talking about how homosexuals can wipeout human race from the plant, why not I fetch the truth a little bit. I think you get my point, we learn Important things in life from VHS tape. And we did that with utter most secrecy and pleasure.

There was so call Video library in every little town in Sri Lanka. Even though we called it a library, it is a small shop with bunch of movie posters in front, mostly the posters of girls wearing racy dresses or just Samtha Fox. Those posters did not gave any good reputation to those shops. Sri Lankan woman normally do not go in to those places, even when rains. Whenever they feel like watching a Hindi movie, they call her husband, brother or any other human male, whom willing to go to the town to fetch the tape.

Rent a movie for a day or two costs somewhat around 10 – 20 Rs. But if you want an adult movie, which goes by the unholy name of “blue film”, you have to pay little bit extra, because in Sri Lanka it is illegal to sell, rent or watch anything that shows human genitalia. And anything illegal is expensive. I didn’t know anyone who has a membership with those “libraries”, never seen a library card or something like that sort, but if you personally know the owner, they will lend you the VHS without a guarantee of returning it. If not, they are all happy to hold your national identity card until you return the VHS tape in good condition.

Depending on the type of tape you rented, you have to decide the time to watch it. If that is a Hindi picture or a Disney movie, then you have to wait until everyone is ready. Sundays are better. Wise men make sure to forward the first few minutes and make sure there aren’t any bit and pieces of phonographic movie clips lefts in that VHS tape from original movie in it, before the library recorded that Hindi movie from the television. If it is type of a movie that you may possibly go to jail by watching it and be mentioned on the front page of the Sinhala newspaper, then you must wait until you get an opportunity to be alone in the house. If you lucky enough to be alone and happen to have an R rated VHS tape with you too at the same time, it is perfectly alright to invite your friends to witness the spectacle.

The generation after VHS, do not have to do any of that. They don’t have to worry about the tape getting stuck in the player while you are watching a girl on girl scene or your parents finding the VHS tape under your mattress. Or plan a week ahead and visit your friends’ house while his parents on the way to hospital to visit sick grandparents, so you can watch pizza delivery to a lonely housewife or a blond girl engaged in pleasurable job interview, all in VHS. Now it is all digitized, encrypted and secured. Common and free. But we grow up differently, we grow up with VHS. That is how we found the wonders of Forest Gump and that is how we learned the detail of human reproduction.

Goodbye my dear friend. You always be remembered.