The Turning tide of the Blog world.

Today, Blogs are turning the tide all over the world. There are opinions every where, it is being heard, referred, analyzed and enjoyed. Lots of information being shared thoughts reviewed, a very healthy growth in general.

But this Blog freedom is bound to revive many monsters; it is starting to feed them with fodder that produces more fodder in the name of opinions. Evil ideas and thoughts that have been well contained in the past are opening their coffin and are lurking out in the dark. This seems to happen more in Tamil speaking Blogs.

When I left India, many people told me not to forget our culture and our tradition and history. Most of the Indians in the US, maintain our countries culture to an extent possible . But over the period of time one thing I clearly forgot about my country, it happened by itself. Yes! I forgot about my caste splits the politics I went through when I was Chennai.
How did this happen?, simply people, meeting people and talking to them Thanks to those potluck lunches, dinner parties, birthday parties, receptions which made me close to people whom if I had been Chennai I would not have bothered to talk to them citing various social, cultural and ethnical reasons.

I started to view people as "Indians" in general. Today, I really do not know the so called caste or creed of many of friends. We are well knitted as Indians. I simply do not bother about their caste; I see them as a human being which they reciprocate back with similar intentions.

For past few days I happened to read through few tamil speaking Blogs,most of them made me feel very uneasy. These are Blogs that spread hatred among my fellow citizens in the name of Blog freedom.
I really do not care the support or hatred for the Dailits or the Brahmins or the Thevars etc., After all we are now in 2004, India as a nation have progressed a lot, we Indians have come a long way to stand shoulder to shoulder with the world. Today, we are no way lower than anyone in the world. The entire world treats us with great respect.
We are proud people of our country; a recent statistics on the national patriotism puts Indians in Second place after the Americans. We simply love our country.

But after seeing this pathetic mean mind people in these blogs, who are still worried about an issue that happened much before most of the Blog creators were born, I am beginning to feel worried. Slowly we are being taken towards the old path of hatred by these groups. Smear campaigns directed at every caste is being cultivated around the information highway. This is not a good trend. I thought that the caste smear and caste contamination has been contained well within our borders

I wish I was born just an Indian Tamilian without any caste tag attached to me. Today I am afraid, tensed and worried for my future generation that this caste monster will start to lurk around in my people. I really don’t know about people who write about these stale caste issues don’t they have better job to do? God please bless them and please give us all a break from this nonsense.,

My New Tamil Song!....

New Song Release

Lead Vocals: Suren[Introducing], and Sundar Backing vocals : Sundar and Srikanth, Music : Srikanth Digitally recorded and mixed at Studio1234, USA Acknowledgements: Thanks to Ranga, Udhaya and Balaji for making me do this. Thanks to Arun and "Project Madurai" for the softcopy of the Lyrics.

After working with it for more than few months now, I managed to release my next song "kaduvelliChitar ananda kaLipu" I have passion towards Bharathi songs, the words used by him really drives me hard to work on it. However after experimenting with his works for about 3 years now, my “aratai” buddies Udhaya and Ranga suggested to take a break from Bharathi or may be give them a break, they suggested to me to consider "sithar pAdalgaL". After reading few lines of it, I liked it got into it at once, the sandam formation was quite interesting to me. Many of us know the line "nadavanathil oru aandi" but there about 20 other paragraphs written by “kaduvelliChitar”, yes he wrote this song and the famous lines "nadavanathil oru aandi", are part of his Ananda kaLippu".

I tried searching about kaduvelliChitar in the internet, nothing showed in Google, if someone knows kindly let me know.

Being a hobbyist, I say this because I have a 40hr/week stress filled consulting job in hand. Though me and my group matches every music professional out there, we are hobbyist, music creation should not create additional burden for us.
Hence I consider music and mood to be partners during work, there must be a good partnership between these elements. Otherwise you will be beating around the bush. Best practice is to cool off the mood by watching TV shows that makes you laugh really loud. Generally I start to compose after Jay Leno’s or Letterman’s monologues.

When I started to work on this song, I was in a dilemma which path to take, the traditional good old Melody and Raaga approach or go with the modern fusion trend in music. Finally I followed my instinct and went on creating a score that would fit today’s trend and the mood I conceived for this song. Now, I would request you hear my song download it from here

I will continue posting the story of making of this song, which I am sure will be quite interesting to read.

Life Rolls
My Fear

During my school days I had fear on various things, I would attribute this is films. Let me go one by one.

Railway Track Switch fear: I use to go to school by electric train from Chromepet to chepat. To reach the road we took a short route by crossing a rail road track at 2 major points. These 2 major points had track switches where trains often change tracks. But After seeing the movie “Yadon ke barath” I literally avoided rail way lines for about 3 years fearing I would be stuck in the switch. I use to take the steps about an extra mile walk.

Cow Fear: This fear came to me after watching the movie “komatha engal kulamatha”. I started to believe cows to be a very intelligent being. I came to this strong conclusion after seeing the cow stopping a train by carrying a red signal lamp in the movie; also cow in that movie had great interrogation ability even Mossad or KGB or CIA failed to posses. It was able to find bad buys by just looking at them, it would nod its head left to right with its bells jingling, and so when ever I saw a cow, I was worried it would find the bad guy in me.

Quick Sand fear: In 70s and early 80s there were tons of movies which often ended a villain’s or heroine’s life in quick sand. They will be buried into the slimy slush with some mind blowing strings and shenai musical sections. The last thing to go in would be the hands. in madras during rainy season pot holes were quite common. I feared all this pot holes to be quick sand. All of them looked to me as though there were waiting to gobble me in no time. In fact my school back pack had a small sized rope, just in case if I fall in one of them I can use it to come out. I used to drop a wooden stick to first check if it is quick sand, I would jump over pot holes of any size. I must have pursued my jumping ability at that time to be another “Annavi”.

I had many fears during my school days. At a point of time I was more or less like Tenali, “mAdu bayam”, “train track bayam”, “pothakuzi bayam”, “pAmbubayam”, “nattuvAkiLi bayam” etc. However as time passed I was able to over come most them.

However, There was one more big fear that is yet to be cured but well contained; I was not like every other kid when it came to "speech".

Much More to come…

My Comments on few Recent Rahman Songs that I liked very much

"chinamma chilakamma" from Meenaxi music A.R.Rahman
Though musically a simple song, the song construction is simply mind blowing. It is very well constructed. The song opens with a flute kind of "palayam poo mudchi" with a hip hop groove and a Telugu chorus "chinamma chilakamma”, a hindi song gets this chorus, which I feel something good. As a musician this song made me think more about this composition. I feel the goal to reach the "rahman” standards are a simple and a clean construction of a song. Thats all he does in this song, It contained very well constructed chorus, backgrounds, drum grooves and loops, bass parts , good usage of arpeggios and simple lead vocals. Musically the purists might consider this to be a simple but their placement makes the song what it is. The elements I mentioned above come and go at right time and portions; this makes the song very interesting. Chinamma Chilakamma is getting on to me.

In the song ‘sandakozi’; the lead loop in the song has been reused from "Egiri kuthithen" from Boys, same drum loops with a slight change in the pitch. I wish ‘thalaivar’ had changed the loops for this song. This loop come from a loop library called Roots of India by Big Fish Audio. [You can download the sample mp3 and check from seconds 22 to 24] There were also few other songs in which I felt too much ‘Acidification’, meaning constructed totally using 3rd party loops like Roots of Middle east and Roots for India. I think Rahman should not take this path in future. Simply, he is talented enough to compose them himself.

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"Janagana mana" from Aaiyutha Ezuthu, Music:A.R.Rahman.The song opens with a kind of blues with a good bass arpeggio. The notes formation is very new to Tamil music, so it will take some time for people to pick up this song. This is one of best song from Rahman in near times. His voice is kind of cool. This contains typical rahaman chorus eg:’oh yuva yuva’. We need to remember a song is not always a melody, there are various song styles and this is one such where the tune goes thru blues scales quite well. Rahman voice has never changed over the years, I also liked this song for the format, there is no first background or second background, and it is more constructed in the western format. In this song and in other songs I also heard various sounds from Roland VSynth. VSynth is new technology that is around for about a year+ now. Rahman has exploited it quite well. Frankly, this song is a great inspiration for small time composers like me. Hear the song Dol Dol, where the voice chorus is being stretched and changed, The Vsynth allows to manipulate loops in any way.

LIFE Rolls

Thank to everyone for their overwhelming [summa solikalame] response, my story continues.

I was booked in the "D" section. We continue in D section until 10th or until we drop out in the middle, which ever occurs earlier. D section, I made friends on my first day, Venkataragavan, Vivek., Srini and many more most I don’t seem to remember. May be if I strain my brain a bit more, I might get some more names. This by any means will not add value to this story.

Thanks to A.R. Rahman

Many of my American friends have seen Bombay Dreams . They now seem to have a very clear view on Indian music and entertainment, until few weeks ago they have been thinking we are a bunch of musicians who play monophonic music with a sitar and shenai, ., it is about time Indian music goes international, we cannot be ignored anymore. Thanks to A.R. Rahman

First two guys were very sharp in subject and very bright. I was a total a misfit in this group however for some reason I hanged with the nerds. I did not have the guts to join the cool guys. I call them cool guys because the non-nerdy gang often went out during the noon break to the front entrance to have ice cream; all of them had an account with the ice cream man. For some reason I felt having an account with an ice cream man is kind of cool.

Since my school band music was not helping me much, our 60 minute lunch break was mere waste of time. [Please don’t assume the rest 7 hours were spent well]

One fine day we started to play cricket in the afternoon. The features in school lunch time cricket are called "ABCD". (a) Azuvuni , (b). Bullying (c) Cunning (d) Domination. A person should be a specialist in all these in order to gain popularity among others. I was one. I was dominating mostly in 6, 7 standards.

We use play "test cricket" for 5 days. An innings goes on for a week, to get the 100% domination power I started to carry my cricket bat to school. By this even Steve Bucknor cannot rule me out here;

If someone tried to rub me on the wrong side I would simple walk out with my bat, the person who owned the stumps was by buddy, he would walk with me. Poor guys had to face me and my unforgiving acts.

I made sure I am in the team which always won the toss. Though I bat naturally in the middle order, I would be the opening batsmen. I batted almost for 3 days in a week. And you guessed it right; I would bowl for the remaining two days.
One guy by the name "Yuvraj" got a keeping glove for our noon cricket.

That’s it; from that moment I became a wicket keeper and started to imitate Kirmani in every aspect. I pretended as though I was a natural wicket keeper,
However I kept like Duck Patel, slips and deep fine leg had to cover me for every ball. I gave lots of byes. Still not willing to give away the new keeping gloves, I decided to place a second wicket keeper; few yards right in behind me and gave him the inner gloves. I don’t know if anyone knows this rule in cricket, if there is fielder other than the wicket keeper standing straight to the stumps with a protection like a gloves etc, it can be called as a no ball. This rule was popular in my days, so the umpire guy called no ball, this No ball call started a big street fight that matched every other feature of a "koza adi sandai", so much words were flying even the mordern day langauge beepers on TV would have crashed.
Jerry springer show was quite polite when compared. I bullied my way through, But I had to agree to this finally.
My ego did not permit me to remove the second wicket keeper, poor fellow I had to take off his inner glove, I wore that too. For next few months, I did not give up keeping; I went on to the keeper until the glove began to stink.
My acceptance to the No-Ball decision few months ago was the first sign of my downfall from the class cricketing empire, my over confidence missed it completely and I will pay for it and everything will change drastically in days to come.