Charu, My Heart Bleeds When You Snub Ilayaraja…

Dear Charu…

I hope the tears you shed on watching Rehman being awarded those Oscar trophies might have dried out now. I too have come a long way away from the few drops I shed clandestinely on that Monday morning. We, such sentimental idiots, never run dearth of tears. Your review on ‘Naan Kadavul’ in ‘Uyirmmai’ is elaborate as usual. I wished I had seen those foreign movies whose names kept bulking along the review. Nevertheless they hardly hindered me in getting your standpoint on the movie. It’s an honest review even though you have gone overboard while deploying some prenominal phrases. The other day I was awed when going through an article by one Bharadwaj Rangan in ‘The New Indian Express’. He had stated that Ilayraja has struck form and has returned to his hey days in ‘Naan Kadavul’. When I went to watch the movie I could only find some faint traces of what Rangan had claimed. Ilayaraja is not at his best in ‘Naan Kadavul’ yet, Charu I would like to say that he is not that bad as you state him to be.

As the begging Amsavalli sings an old number it is not only jarring to hear the instruments in toe, it deprives those sequences of its reality too. It is one place where the Maestro could have had a second thought, though the tambourine in Amsavalli’s hands asks for something to go along with her singing. But Charu, all these years in our cinema, we have born, grew-up, kissed, made love, laughed, cried, plotted against each other, fought and died with some music playing in the backdrop. We have had our golden silences too. Though golden, how killing were the silences and how we grew restless and intolerable to it, and how we yearned for the suffocating silences to end and wanted a bit of a harmonium or a violin or a mridangam or a tabla to come to our rescue. When Shakespeare ends one of his plays as ‘The rest is silence’ the gloom that fills one’s heart is immeasurable and how one’s hands got itchy to scribble something in the next line to make it void. May be the Maestro has saved us from a heart-break by not ceding silence its due.

You have talked about a sequence in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ where Rehman wisely has kept himself away from his instruments. The ‘Jai ho’ man is wise and he masters the instruments and he knows when to play them and most importantly when not to. Does wise men’s music make us wise? I listened to ‘Jai ho’ more than a few times and tried to extract something which made the Academy to tilt to his favour to hand him the Oscar, unfortunately I found my ears not so wise as of the jury and Rehman’s western masters- Danny Boyle and company.

Here we can talk about the man who doesn’t master the instruments but instills something into them; in return gets the soul-stirring stuff called music. Fortunately Ilayaraja is his own master. It is inevitable that unquestionable mastery goes with some questionable incongruity. Charu, I just want to put it that your Oscar man is a wise composer who can produce just music but the man of the masses is a faulty genius who devours you with his unbounded flow of eternal euphony.