About
About Desi90
Last updated
Desi90 is a free radio for the 90s Hindi songs that play in Indian working rooms. Not a curated nostalgia list. The actual rotations, printed with the songs named.
The idea
Walk into a barber shop in Kanpur and a truck stop outside Nashik and a repair shed in Kochi, and you will hear roughly the same few dozen songs. Nobody planned that. It happened because cassettes were cheap in the 1990s and nobody ever replaced them.
Every other page about this describes the feeling and stops there. Desi90 prints the tracklist and plays it.
The five rooms
| Room | What it is | Songs |
|---|---|---|
| Deluxe Salon | The barber shop rotation. Slow, bright, familiar. | 43 |
| Truck Wala Music | Highway and dhaba. Slower, sadder, built for night driving. | 36 |
| Bus Driver Playlist | Daylight, forty passengers, a few Govinda songs to keep everyone awake. | 54 |
| Raju Mistri Ki Playlist | The workshop. Half Indipop, louder, more beat. | 57 |
| 90s Songs | The general decade playlist. Where to start. | 24 |
How it works
Each room streams a fixed list of tracks from YouTube through a hidden player, wrapped in a custom cassette-deck interface. There is no account, no sign-up and nothing to install. Press play and it runs.
Every song name and film on this site was checked by hand rather than scraped straight from video titles, which is why the deck shows Chura Ke Dil Mera · Main Khiladi Tu Anari instead of a forty-word upload title with four pipes in it.
Who made it
Desi90 is built and maintained by Vikram Shetty. The artwork is original illustration commissioned for the site, one scene per room. Questions, corrections and song suggestions are welcome on the contact page.
Something wrong?
If a song is misattributed to the wrong film, or a track has stopped playing because the upload was removed, tell me and I will fix it. That kind of correction is the most useful message you can send.