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Rabble Rousing Random Ramblings by S Jagadish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
"K TV" telecast 'Mouna Ragam' last week. I love watching it every time it shows up on TV, but unlike some of my other favourites, I don't actually watch it to discover something new all the time. I always do that with say 'Michael Madana Kama Rajan' because I'm absolutely sure that despite having watched it more than 50 times, I will still find something new to laugh about.
I watch 'Mouna Ragam' because I can track a sort of metamorphosis in me.
I may have first seen it when I was 11 or 12 years old, around 6-8 months after it was released in 1986. Despite liking movies, our parents weren't the sort of people who would make it a point to catch all the new movies that showed up in the theatres.
So it is quite possible that we saw it on video tape or when Doordarshan showed it on TV around a year later. Contrast this to today's TV channels that scream out "திரைக்கு வந்து சில மாதங்களே ஆன புத்தம் புதிய திரை படம்" warning viewers that they would be telecasting a movie that 100% of the Tamil movie watching public was blissfully unaware of.
As far as I can remember, the first aspects of 'Mouna Ragam' that blew me away were the frivolous and fun-filled nature of the Karthik-Revathi romance scenes. For evidence, see these clips.
Over the next few years, whenever I saw the movie, I went 'wow!' at Karthik's wooing style and Revathi's cuteness. "If ever there was a way to fall in love and express it, this was it."
I suspect a lot of the [then] young boys and girls who saw it also felt the same way.
Sooner rather than later, the focus gradually shifted from 'falling in love' to the music.
'Mandram vandha thendralukku' and 'Pani vizhum iravu' blew me away, especially the usage of the violin, guitar, flute, trumpet & drums in 'Mandram vandha' and 'Pani vizhum iravu'.
Finally, I settled on the background score, and am tempted to call it the most awesome one ever.
Labels: film music, ilayaraja, mani ratnam, metamorphosis, mouna ragam, movies, tamil
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This is a sort of update to my longish post on my Facebook account early February in relation to 'Thumbi vaa', 'Sangathil paadadha kavidhai', etc.
A new Hindi movie, Paa, scheduled to release sometime next month, has Amitabh Bachchan, born with a progeria condition, playing Abhishek Bacchan and Vidya Balan's son. The movie is directed by Balki, who made the extremely enjoyable 'Cheeni Kum' a couple of years ago. The music, as was the case with 'Cheeni Kum', is by Ilayaraja, a perennial favourite of mine.
As with Cheeni Kum, mottai has liberally used / borrowed from tunes he had previously created 'down South'. "Mudi mudi", especially the starting bit, sounds very familiar to a humming I've heard him do at a concert shown on TV. The song, if I remember right, starts off with something like 'Paada cholladhum paatu dhaan'. 'Halke se bole' is 'Puttham pudhu kaalai' from Alaigal Oivathillai.
The interesting part about this album is how he has re-introduced, in Hindi, 'Monday tho' (Aur Ek Prem Kahani - 1996) as 'Gumm summ gumm'.
The tune, by itself, has a fair amount of history. The tune first showed up as 'Thumbi vaa' in Olangal (a Malayalam movie *ing Amol Palekar & Poornima Jayaram, which was remade by Shekhar Kapoor as Masoom). The music was by Ilayaraja.
Olangal got dubbed into Tamil (not sure what that movie was called). So there was a Tamil version of "Thumbi vaa". Later that year, the same tune was used for Aakasam enaatido in 'Nireekshana', a Telugu movie *ing Archana.
Nireekshana was dubbed into Tamil at some point of time, and we got "Neer veezhchi thee mootudhe" (I haven't found a video online). "Auto Raja" (*ing Gabtun) was made sometime in 1983. Auto Raja's music was scored by the Shankar-Ganesh pairing. But the director got Ilayaraja to create 'Sangathil paadadha kavidhai', a song that you watch at your own risk.
A couple of years later, Balu Mahendra remade his first ever movie (Kokila, a Kannada movie *ing Kamal Hassan) as "Aur Ek Prem Kahani" (*ing Ramesh Arvind, Heera & Revathi). That movie had the 'Monday tho' song in it!
Maybe 10 years later, the same tune would have travelled across half-a-dozen more Indian languages, and we'd see a Malayalam version of the original!
Update on 25 June: I located what I believed to be the original of "Mudi Mudi" - Paada pirandhadhu paatu dhaan.
Labels: film music, ilayaraja, paa, tamil
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