Namma Ooru transporter
Memories are a beautiful tool.
Sometimes they can be the best form of entertainment when you have no other means to relieve stress. Flipping the pages of an old photo album can rekindle so many memories that can make you forget where you are and what you do. It can free you from the limiting frame of current circumstance. Where imagination is limited, memory alone can relieve the mind, setting it free from the time space continuum in which one is eventually trapped. It is like a person on a boat flowing forward of its own accord, without an oar, resigned to the coarse, thinking of the days when he/she spent on the ground that were more ‘in control’. Memories can also help us reconnect with that child we used to be, devoid of any notions, unclouded by judgment, filled with curiosity. Years later we find ourselves trapped in a personality that has ‘grown up’, absolutely sure of things around us, yet not in control, not enjoying the moment like the way we used to. Among the things that cause the maximum pain of what we used to enjoy and now miss completely are the memories of people who we cannot see any more, sounds that we cannot hear anymore the way they used to enchant us. There are some creators of sound and music that have thankfully traveled with us throughout our life providing us not just with acoustic pleasure, but pure pleasure of reconnecting with a time (along with that smell of the times gone by) that we can never get back. One such co traveler in my insignificant life’s journey is ‘Raasaiyya’ well known to everyone as Ilaiyaraaja(இளையராஜா). I shall in this post establish as to why he is the ‘transporter’.
One song to sample the awesome skill of ‘transporting’ a listener to not just a different sonic era,but to a different world of reality in which the characters of the movie live and breathe without aging would be this GEM from the Mahendran(மஹேந்திரன்) master piece of 1980 ‘Udhirip pookkal’(உதிரிப் பூக்கள்) – a movie which I am yet to see completely – for fear of the overwhelming sadness that builds up a heaviness in my chest – something that only real life tragedies of my life have been able to create. This story of a simple life gone completely wrong is something very special to lovers of thamizh(தமிழ்) films. The child artistes in the movie have all grown up, the lead artiste of the movie , Vijayan breathed his last, the previous year. The director of the movie has made many more gems, yet failing to even make a cut closer to this one. The songs from this movie remain the hook for transportation – not just to the 1980s, but to the village in the movie, to the characters and specifically to their sadness. The strain of melancholy are not simply in the written lyrics. If I write down the lyrics of this song, they convey nothing more than a woman summing up her life with her children and her happiness as a result .’நம் வீட்டில் என்றும் சந்திரோதயம்’('Moon rise everyday in our house’) is a sample, however in the story she is suffering from neglect and abuse from her sadistic husband ( people going gaga over ‘Provoked’ and ‘Heaven on the Earth’ need to see this movie) and is slowly falling prey to a chronic illness within. Any typical music director would have composed to the lyrics and created a melody in line with the lyrics, however Ilaiyaraja, being a genius, treads a different path and composes a tune that is a melody alright, but a melancholic strain that tugs at my heart strings (How did he know that?). I heard this song on the radio first and did not see the visuals or the movie for at least 5 years since hearing the song first. However uniformly the song would make me feel sad and I used to wonder why this song makes me feel sad. Later on, the song would make me relive some child hood memories that I did not even know existed. Such was the power of Raaja’s music, that when I saw the visuals I could not escape the deep feel of melancholy that overcame me. I could only envy the director J.Mahendran who had the fortune of composing montage shots that conveyed only 25% of what the poor lady was going through inside of her and the montage had at the best only 2 or three shots where the poignance and sadness is shown, while Ilaiyaraja simply has cooked up the rest of the magic. The tribal flute wailing singly in the interlude with a weird percussion stirs up an eerie feel of sadness – never heard before. Here it is for your viewing pleasure – a gem of a song Azhagiya Kanne (அழகிய கண்ணே), sung by the sweetest voice I have heard S.Janaki, that is a time machine in itself operated by the artful ‘Transporter’ Ilaiyaraaja whose skills did not begin and end with music alone.
There are more gems from Ilaiyaraaja who is my key to the time portal to be in the days when I was not vile and corrupt – just an innocent boy struck in awe listening to those awesome melodies pervading the ether around me from the simplest of electronic device called ‘Transistor’ or Radio to be more precise.
Tags: Ilaiyaraja, Mahendran, Tamil Films, udhiri pookkal
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
true….true…..true….true…..
if anyone is ever able to write in words exactly what raasaiyya has made us felt in all these years that will be the heights of writing….
Now life or memories without raasaiyya is unimaginable…..
Jaiganesh,
I was wondering how somebody else got the same feeling I got when I listened to the song first…I too hadn’t seen the movie for 6-7 yrs after I listened to this song first.
In fact, I saw the movie for the first time when it was telecast on a late-night show in DD…I was in 6-7′th std back then…This is the only movie that’s made me weep. Never before, never after, have I felt the same way watching a movie.
The list of songs that made me feel in the same way are few – but most of them are Raaja songs. Other songs of the same period or even now are great – but Raaja’s songs have the habit of sneaking past the ear and getting into my being – in one way or the other. Another song which disturbed me to no end that explained itself when I saw it was ‘Metti oli kaadhodu’ and when I saw the movie itself years later I could not move for a while – it was such an arresting realization as to why that song was so sweet – yet so uncomfortably melancholic underlying. I recently read in an interview of Raaja that more than the director, producer, eventual fame or money – it is the characters that carry the music inspire him to give his best. He has produced hits for duds, but some songs like these make the whole business of classifying into hits/otherwise a meaningless exercise. It shows us how far/deep Raaja is ready to go along with the characters while scoring music for a film.
Jai, moving piece. Beautiful writing, too. Azhagiya Kanne – yet another victim, here, in me!
There have been many instances of melancholic melodies carrying the tales of hope-deflated characters – Kati Patang for instance, the tune oozes the depression of the character and yet is a fine melody – but it is doubtful if anyone has been able to capture feelings in every movement of the song as Raja has done here and elsewhere.He paints the screen with emotions with every bass note in his music. It is hard to explain, you can only experience.
In Baradwaj Ranga’s spaces, this is a feature of Raja’s music and BGM that I have tried to articulate as his unique calling card – the fact that he understands the characters’ psyche and scores from that perspective rather than generic goos-pimple evoking “patriotism”, general romantic feel etc. I dont think there is a peer to IR in terms of understanding the directors’ vision and the character graph of the script’s people. These days I hear of MD’s transcending genres, or brining in several genres of music in one movie – which is totued as an alternative way of BGM -I can understand that but when it comes to feeling, there is nothing to beat plain old-fashioned emotion-invocation like Raja does. Really he is a last man standing as far as BGM goes – I mean,when all you can think of is about using a particular unexplored genre of music as a song or BGM for a particular situation, what fidelity you are having towards your director’s subject and vision? In a film score, shouldnt the music be tied around the emotions and the theme rather than trying to explore new paradigms in pop-music. If you are using a movie to explore the boundaries of pop-music, then how do you expect to be completely fidel to the movie’s theme? Doesnt that take a back seat there? And this business of orthogonal BGM(a term that i coined for Rahman’s vision of completely subverting what the viewers sees on screen by providing music that is perpendicular to whats on screen – for example, he talks about how he offerred to Danny that the stark images of SDM be complemented with optimistic music so that the stark impact is reduced, and the Rang De Basanti case where he sought to dilute the impact of the visuals with his music – and that he outlines as his vision. I am not able to buy into this vision.
Maybe, this is a topic for tfmpage we should explore there
@Plum – SDM’s images might be stark, but in its heart it is always a cheerful ‘feel good’ movie set in an Indian slum for the best part – I think SDM’s BGMs serve that purpose – making the squalor on screen sound palpable to a western ear.
This (udhirip pookkal) is for our people – there is no need to shift the emotional tone or to make it appear light – hence the songs and BGM of Udhirip pookkal are a different beast. Please do recount other numbers of Raja that drag us out to a different time zone – I am sure there are quite more than handful of such numbers.