Art – Aakash's Blog

Raaja Paarvai

As I write this article, I’m listening to “Yennule Yennule”, wondering how do I describe the legend’s music. Should I start with the musical technicality or more on the conveyed emotion. Although I know, by the time I was born, Rahman had already superseded Raja with his western touch of Hip hop, Rap and brilliant sound design. It can be surprising for us, the younger listeners, to understand the complexity of Ilayaraja’s compositions, even with a western music sensibility. And how he managed to effortlessly create thousands of them. It is not at all an exaggeration to call him the Mozart, Beethoven or Bach’s counterpart in India.

Ilayaraja composing

Solace, resurgence and hope. Can you think of any other art form which can convey all these dissonant emotions together? Well, Raja did. In the song, Nalam Vaazha Ennalum from the movie Marubadiyum, directed by Balu Mahendra. Pardon some technicality here, perception of the scale is seemingly B minor…Or wait..is it? Music now taunts you with some D major(relative major) and even G major. Now you are clueless because it makes perfect sense to ears. It conveys the mess the protagonist finds herself in. His music is as closest as we can get to ourselves. We are all those, complex, dissonant and paradoxically simple 🙂

I do see one reason Ilayaraja’s music doesn’t reach across to younger listeners as much as we’d like it to. The videos. Every time I tell someone to look a song up, they’ll go to YouTube, and end up watching terrible film footage of a couple in eye-blinding clothes executing weird dance steps. Once you’ve seen those images, it’s hard to take the song seriously.

Another hurdle could be the sound design. Sounding seems fine for the speakers of 1970-80’s cinema theatres and halls. But with today’s headphones and post-Rahman-era, one can see that Ilayaraja’s sound engineers let him down on several occasions. I sometimes wish someone — perhaps Ilayaraja himself — would remove the rough edges from his songs and re-record them to make, say, the trumpets sound less strident, the tabla less metallic, and bring some high-low balance between instruments so that they don’t all sound like they’re crouched in the same decibel range.

With this post, I’m sharing my closer to the heart songs and compositions of Ilayaraja. Here is the Youtube playlist.

Man up..Tamil Cinema!

A beautiful girl walks the street, you look at her, and you instantly “fall” in love with her. As some might call it, love at first sight. Now, what do you do next is the real question here.

If you were a normal guy from a decent background, you would go up to her and confess your love respectfully and in a dignified way and walk away from her if she says NO, and if you weren’t and your Instagram bio reads “cinema paithiyam” or “xyz veriyan””, then you’re going to probably do everything within your reach to “make” her fall in love with you. I dedicate this post to you, my friend. You think I’m typifying you? You’re thinking who is this guy blogging from some corner of the world? What does he know about love?

I’ll let you in on a little secret, I know you a little too well than you think I do! You’re in for a ride. First off, you are a movie freak and an ambassador of Hero Worship. You take movies way too seriously in life and you manipulate yourself into believing that incidents in your life are also loosely based on cinema. You listen to a lot of “Senjitaley” and strongly feel that “tholla pani alyaama theriyaama kedaikura kaadhaley venam venam”. Well, definitely you have a Facebook account (psst) where you add strangers and send them inappropriate messages until they have no choice but to reply. You’re a non-believer of this lame concept of “consent” that everybody seems to be talking about. Your idea of love is a type of conquest and if you loose, your fragile ego is going to be oh so butthurt. Poor thing! Portrayal of unrealistic women characters who do give a nod after continuous harassment and stalking has etched into your subconscious memory and asserted your insecurities with ” Yenna maari pasangala paaka paaka dhan pudikum”. I worry you will die single, if you don’t do these stunts. Hello, nice to meet you. Aforementioned actor has also confessed his bad dialogue/movie selection, he has also told he won’t do any more. But he failed to tell you that.

I wouldn’t blame the entire Tamil cinema. In fact, we do have great personalities like Ajith, AR Rahman, Maniratnam, Vikram, Suriya, Selvaraghavan who have gone on public record to say how badly Tamil cinema is taking shape these days and how fans need to be educated. Actor Ajith had gone to an extent wherein a scene in Vedalam he advices “Ponungala Vaazha vidunga” to a guy following his sister.

The intention of this post is to not to reprimand you, our Tamil Cinema movie makers, or anything, it is just to tell that these directors and actors are just playing their role in the movies. Their motivation is to make money and cinema is business. It is not a story with moral, and cinema isn’t meant to teach what’s right and what’s wrong, your upbringing should. So the point is my friend when a girl doesn’t comply with you, kids cry, adults pursue, and legends respect her emotion and walk away.

Have a great day. Peace.