On Sunday evening, I saw Sonali Kulkarni in Maymadham, singing about December flowers falling in her lap. Manisha Koirala and Arjun in Mudhalvaney, wrestling with computer-generated snakes. And the songs from Iruvar, Narumugaiye in particular.

All because of this pack of Tamil DVDs I borrowed from al_lude on Sunday. Some of them did not have subtitles. No matter. What was important was that this made me feel really nostalgic and gave me this glow of self-satisfaction that said – “There. One more hurdle crossed. Happy now?”

Did you know that Iruvar was originally titled Anandam? It was hyped a lot because of Aishwarya Rai. Because AR Rahman had gone on record about his “minimal acoustic” orchestra in his compositions. Because Vishwamohan Bhatt was supposed to play the mohan-veena for the album. I spent quite a few months hounding the few music stores in Guwahati that bothered to get Tamil cassettes about Anandam – but nobody knew anything about it. They tried to palm off Aasai, which was produced by Mani Ratnam and had music by Deva, as Anandam. Nothing doing, sir.

Then Siddharth Basu, in one of his Quiz Mountain episodes, played a song clip that had a menacing voice chanting in Tamil, with an outrageous violin-scrape in the background, and asked the participants to identify the film. The answer ( which nobody got) was Iruvar, and Basu mentioned that it was Arvind Swamy’s voice, and oo-la-la, Aishwarya Rai’s first film.

Bingo.

So when I finally found Iruvar , I was in Delhi, rummaging through a tiny shop in Palika Bazaar. I was there after my twelfth boards, but that’s another story. It took quite some time for me to listen to it, mostly because –

• New ARR albums were tough to come by, so you would generally “save” an album for later.
• I also bought Muthu and Minsara Kanuvu and the telugu version of Kaadhal Desam along with Iruvar
• There was only one walkman being shared among three individuals of varying musical tastes.

“Narumugaiye” drove me crazy. For one, it had Unnikrishnan, who I was enthu about ever since “Ennavale“; what was more important was that it also had this female singer with the odd-sounding name Bombay Jayasree, and a voice that gave me this idiotic grin everytime I heard it. I cannot deconstruct the song and the flow of words and music that make it up. No one can, it’s that good. I associated my own visuals with the song – when it played, I could really see an ancient temple, a tranquil place where no one is around. The sound of the mridangam would echo as the camera wove its way around the ancient pillars. And then the statues would come to life and dance to the Mohan Veena. (Aishwarya Rai used to fit in somewhere in that scenario, but no more, I am afraid)

The way Mani Ratnam finally shot the song differs a lot from the way I envisioned it. It’s in black-and-white, and near a waterfall, and with Madhu ( the lady from Roja, I never knew she was in Iruvar) dancing to it, along with a lot of other bathing beauties. I believe the setting is a recreation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, where the king visits the ashrama where Shakuntala stays, and sees a bevy of nymphets. One can hardly blame him for breaking into song.

And I still don’t know what the lyrics mean.

This is where you can listen to Narumugaiye, and the rest of the songs, if you haven’t already.

Another sign that things are not as bleak as they seem. The soundtrack to Black Friday, Anurag Kashyap’s second film ( technically speaking, his first, because the first film he made is….well, let me put it this way, if I am really lucky, I might just get to see it before my grandson is born) has just been released. The film itself will be in theatres on Jan 28th, and there are plans to make it a five-episode TV series after it has completed its theatrical run.( Information courtesy rediff) Pretty good, I must say, especially if there is a well-packaged DVD release in the offing.

And why is it a good thing that the soundtrack has been released? Because the score is composed by this group of gentlemen who call themselves Indian Ocean. Yes, Yes, Yessssss. The CD is priced at 195 INR, I have already bought it, yes, and the first three tracks are original songs ( though the third song, I suspect, is a redone track from their first album ), and the rest are instrumentals. Paresh Kamath, lead guitarist of 90’s bands WitchHammer and Krysys, plays the electric guitar on the album, and boss, let me tell you, an Indian Ocean song takes on a different dimension altogether when the electric guitar kicks in.

The lyrics to the songs are by Piyush Mishra, and it took me quite sometime to figure out whether the lines have a communal edge. Apparently they do not.

I haven’t listened to the instrumentals as yet, but the fact that it’s not just the standard IO-lineup ( vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, tabla and drums is augmented with the saxophone, recorder, the electric guitar. Thankfully no electronica) makes me very gung-ho about the pieces I shall shortly hear.

Find of the Day: the score of Bulworth, by Ennio Morricone. Bulworth was a political comedy of the late nineties which I remember solely because of the Pras D/Wyclef Jean song “Ghetto Superstar” that aired on DD2 for some time, and which, I later found out, was a reworking of the Bee Gees track “Islands In the Stream”. The movie soundtrack features the track I mentioned above, and loads of hip hop tracks by the likes of Dr. Dre, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, and the Black Eyed Peas ( I didn’t even know the Black-Eyed Peas were *this* old). However, the score, the one I bought, has two tracks, each spanning 20 minutes, and with music composed by Il Maestro, and with vocals by Edda Del’Orso, the lady with the operatic vocals in the Once Upon A Time In America and other Morricone tracks. The best part, I got this CD for just 125 INR. Yeah, baby!

Woo hoo. Last Friday (which I have christened White Friday, just to make up the snazzy title of the post), I found and bought my first Takashi Miike movies. Audition and One Missed Call. Also bought DVDs of House of Flying Daggers, Hero(finally!), Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and 2046. Picked up a DVD of Lagaan which turned out to have a seventeen-minute long deleted scene.

Certain people I know turned out to be right, after all. Francois Ozon’s See The Sea ( Regarde le Mer) was really good. A film with a screentime of less than 50 minutes! The DVD had a bonus short film by Ozon called Summer Dress, which has this outrageous sequence featuring two guys doing you-know-what with someone singing a French version of “Bang, Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down”. Though I didn’t like Sitcom too much. Ozon’s Swimming Pool is up next, most likely this weekend.

The last book I read last year was Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and The Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones, a splendidly written, very unbiased look at the foundations of the Comic book industry in America. It’s the perfect real-life counterpart to the world Michael Chabon wrote about in Adventures of Kavalier and Klay.

The first book I read this year was Andrew Vachss’s Batman: The Ultimate Evil – and I must say I did not enjoy it as much as I had hoped I would. Personally, I found it very hard to equate Vachss’s morally bleak, take-no-prisoners-and-shoot-to-kill attitude with Batman’s black-and-white world.

[A lot of people might think that Batman is this tortured character with shades of gray, but I disagree. Bruce Wayne might be a driven individual,obsessed with his crusade against crime, but sixty years of corporate emasculation (It’s DC Comics I am referring to, folks, not Wayne enterprises. A corporate entity that refuses to tamper with the status quo, and paints anything controversial and un-Batmanlike as an Elseworlds story) has finally convinced me that there cannot be anything grey about a character who refuses to kill, regardless of the ramifications his coda brings to the people around him. Batman, unless something radically different is done to the character’s personality, is the embodiment of a man who spends his life hitting his head against a brick wall. ]

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Superman, and Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s Batman and Robin.
About Frank Quitely