Raaja's speech from writer Jeyakanthan's paaraatu vizha

I am not familiar with Jeyakanthan or his writings but if Ilayaraaja is saying something, I gotta listen to it. Here is the entire video of his speech. Thanks to Sivakumar for the link.


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Memoirs from Ilayaraaja's musical journey

Chinmayi is an upcoming singer in TFM. By her own admission she was superlucky to have accompanies Ilayaraja's on his Musical Journey in Italy last year. She has shared some of her memories from the trip on her blog. BTW the CD of the concert should be available in the USA this week at RERusa.com.


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Nayagan - all time 100 best movies

Nayagan has made it to Time Magazine's all time top 100 movies. The other Indian movies which made it to the list are Pyaasa and the Apu trilogy. Nayagan would have been my choice for the best Tamil movie ever made if not for its similarities to Godfather. Otherwise it is a near perfect movie - a flawless screenplay, excellent camerawork, wonderful performances and to top it all - great music.

Nayagan is Gnaani's 400th movie (according to the title credits) and it is one of his best efforts - songs and BGM. The songs were instant classics. Nila Adhu Vaanathu Mele is an anthem. Thenpaandi Seemaiyile was the recurring theme - I liked the one in Raaja's voice the best. Trivia - the tune of Nila Adhu was originally composed for the Thenpaandi situation. Musically the best song in the movie was Nee Oru Kaadhal Sangeetham, inspite of Mano. SPB's Telugu version is much superior I hear.

The background score of Nayakan is easily one of the best and probably the "densest" by Raaja in the sense that there are few frames without music. Though there were an abundance of motifs in the movie the one I like the most is the theme that plays when Kamal meets Saranya. I found a frame-by-frame write-up about this scene. The realaudio link does not work though :-(.


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Athu Oru Kanaa Kaalam

Athu Oru Kanaa Kaalam is Gnaani's latest album...the movie is directed by Balu Mahendra and it is not really important who *s in it...Gnaani's last album for Balu Mahendra was Julie Ganapathy which had a couple of good numbers but suffered from extemely poor recording and mastering...anyway the pick of this album is Kaatu Vazhi sung by Mottai himself...a very simple folkish melody, i liked the careless way it has been delivered by Raaja...i liked the interlude too...other songs were a let down especially after an exceptional Mumbai Express...


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Missing attachments

on the phone:

"Hi....This is yada yada yada...I had sent you an email yesterday...yada yada yada"

on the other side:

"Yeah, I got your email. But I didn't get the attachments you had mentioned in your email."

Bummer !!! I am sure this has happened to all of us several times... Would'nt it be cool to have our email software scan the text of the email, and let us know politely "Ahem...Excuse Me...I think you were supposed to attach something to this email...Dumbass..."

Of course it is not surprising that I found a piece of software (thank Google for God) which does exactly what I described...Attach by KMGI...The only problem is that it works only with Outlook...


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Expandable posts hack in Blogger

The Blogger hack for creating expandable posts has this annoying drawback that it displays the "continued here..." text on all posts, irrespective of whether the post is actually continued or not. Here is another simple hack to work around it. Just include the following HTML code
<span style="display: none;"> at the end of your post. This will do the trick.


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Ilaiyaraaja's Musical Journey

For the ignorant, Raaja had what you could call his first real concert in Italy last May. It was part of the Angelica music festival. The concert has finally been released as a CD.



Here is the track listing. Can't wait to get the CD !!!

1. Aya Kalaigal 2.18
   
2. Pavanaguru 5.44
   
3. Sunu Oh! 3.33
   
4. Mayil Pola 4.28
   
5. Janani 8.08
   
6. Music Journey (Lullaby And Games Of Tamilnadu) 10.33
   
7. En Ullil 5.21
   
8. Ilankathu 6.52
   
9. Three in One (Introduction) 3.36
   
10. Three in One 3.29
    
11. Asaiya Kathula 4.40
    
12. Veetukku 9.24
    
13. Orchestra (Mood Kapi) 7.51
    
14. Mathacha 0.51
    

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Klogs

I have always been inclined to see blogs as a knowledge management tool (there is even a term for it - klogs) and not as personal journals. It is essentially a non-traditional way to disseminate information over the internet. I guess a regular website can do the same but the blogging format is just more convenient. And since the usefulness of knowledge is usually time/date dependent, the inherent choronological format of a blog is just perfect. Here is more stuff to read about klogs.

According to the scriptures one of the duties of a brahmin is to impart knowledge of the brahman by teaching the vedas and upanishads. To do some justice to my brahminical roots I have decided to use this blog/klog as a means to do something similar. Since one can only transmit what one knows, I'll stick to the Seinfeldian concepts of nothingness.


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