With every obituary I read of Shammi Kapoor, with every remembrance, what comes across is that the 1960s were a memorable age for Hindi film music. A westerner reading these tributes and obits may think that the only thing Shammi Kapoor (like his colleagues Rajendra Kumar and Biswajit and Joy Mukherjee) did was luck into a great number of films with great songs that became great hits. It's like Elvis Presley and the films he made, which are remembered today only through the songs.

Let's not bother looking at whether today's hits will last as long as yesterday's – each generation carries with it, in its cultural DNA, its shared growing-up memories, and it's very likely that in 2040 a group of men with flabby stomachs and balding crowns are going to be lamenting, over beer, that no one makes hit music like Himesh Reshammiya anymore. The more interesting question is why these songs – these Shammi Kapoor songs, these Biswajit songs, these Joy Mukherjee songs – have lasted so long. Why are they often the first things that spring to mind when an actor dies and we scramble to recall his work?

One reason is that many of the films weren't good enough and we've wiped the plot and the performances from our memories and the songs are the only things that survived. But more importantly, the songs we hear while younger are always better than the songs we hear later in life because they are made not just of tunes and voices and instruments but also our nostalgia. We remember them in ways we remember a favourite uncle or a friend from school we spent every waking hour with but then lost touch with because his father got a job in a different city.

Also, film songs were and are our pop music – not just in the popular sense but that they are to us what pop music is to the US. We never had the tradition of bands recording albums in Indian languages – the film soundtrack was an album, its songs were the numbers, some of which would become hit singles and top the charts. Shammi Kapoor had a ridiculously long run of hit singles, and that's why we remember him, today, through his songs.

But above all else, in those days – and I mean the pre-liberalisation days, when India remained largely unchanged through decades; which is why we can talk music and movies (or heck, pretty much anything) with our uncles and our grandfathers but not so much with nephews and nieces who have grown up in a country that changes every couple of years – we had time to assimilate music.

We were not bombarded from all sides, like a hapless molecule in a nuclear reactor, with information, and we could listen to music without simultaneously scrolling through Facebook updates (where were the computers?) or while not driving (who had cars?). We would sometimes lie down at night with a radio, wondering what song would come next, and then listen to the song to the accompaniment of nothing but the hazy, dreamy images that formed inside our closed eyes. And when you've listened to music like that, it worms its way into you, it becomes a part of you.

And because there were fewer releases those days, the songs – the hit singles – would stick around a lot longer, and we wouldn't get bored because we wouldn't have seen these songs a few thousand times as clips on television. We remember Shammi Kapoor's songs because we could only see them on the screen (or if we came a decade later, we could only listen to them when the radio deigned to play them for our benefit, at least until we could afford to buy cassette players and CD players), and I think this limitedness, this unavailability, made the songs linger.

We did not tire of this music because we never had the opportunity to tire of it, and that's why the songs – the hit singles – of “An Evening in Paris” are as fresh to me today as when I first heard them, even if one of them had Shammi Kapoor in a helicopter wearing only a bathrobe that kept flapping open to reveal how much he was already tilting towards flab. The music was the thing that mattered.