On Sunday evening, I saw Sonali Kulkarni in Maymadham<\/i>, singing about December flowers falling in her lap. Manisha Koirala and Arjun in Mudhalvaney<\/i>, wrestling with computer-generated snakes. And the songs from Iruvar<\/i>, Narumugaiye<\/b> in particular.<\/p>\n
All because of this pack of Tamil DVDs I borrowed from al_lude<\/a> 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?”<\/p>\n Did you know that Iruvar<\/i> was originally titled Anandam<\/i>? 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<\/i> – but nobody knew anything about it. They tried to palm off Aasai<\/i>, which was produced by Mani Ratnam and had music by Deva, as Anandam<\/i>. Nothing doing, sir.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Bingo.<\/p>\n So when I finally found Iruvar<\/i> , 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 – <\/p>\n “Narumugaiye<\/b>” drove me crazy. For one, it had Unnikrishnan, who I was enthu about ever since “Ennavale<\/b>“; 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) <\/p>\n 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>, I never knew she was in Iruvar<\/i>) dancing to it, along with a lot of other bathing beauties. I believe the setting is a recreation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala<\/i>, where the king visits the ashrama where Shakuntala stays, and sees a bevy of nymphets. One can hardly blame him for breaking into song. <\/p>\n And I still don’t know what the lyrics<\/a> mean.<\/p>\n\n