My new found love...

Who or what is my new love? For those of you who guessed it as who am sorry people I am yet to find someone.I am single and ready to mingle. So what is it? Its carnatic music. So what brought about the turnaround?What made me shun A.R.Rahman, Illayaraja etc.. and start listening to Sesha Gopalan,Sanjay Subramanium, Bombay Jayshree, T M Krishna etc. I just dont have an answer.May be it has got something to do with my genes. To those of you who don't me, my family has a rich heritage of music and many of my forefathers were musicians by profession. My grandfather used to tutor a quite a few number of students in my childhood and may be its influence is slowly rubbing on now. Though I did learn music for quite a few years I was never really interested in it.I was coerced into learning music to keep the heritage alive and running but the interest never really kicked in. Whatever learning I did was to satisfy my parents' wish and never took it seriously, naturally once the pressure of academics started to trickle in, I never ventured further.

The turnaround came around a year back and I would like to thank my job for facilitating it. Since I was into a production support type of work I had a lot of time to while away at work. Since we were also working on macs, we enjoyed unhindered access and could install or download etc...I casually borrowed a few discs from my uncle to listen to in my work in addition to the zillions of arr,illayaraja songs which I had managed to collect through my college days. The music was so exemplary and it got me hooked on to it instantly. The few discs soon became many and I also started collecting from various other sources and soon I had a decent collection of songs.Film music no longer impressed me.Listening to film songs didn't quite invoke the same feel as a kambhoji alap or a kalyani ragam thanam pallavi.

The challenge to identify the raga was so immense and this drove towards listening to more and more compositions.I would even create play-lists of one particular raga and listen to it till I got a grasp of the raga.

The Chennai music season arrived at just the right time to further my interests. This presented me the opportunity to move away from listening to recorded music to listening to live concerts. The experience of listening to musicians live was stupendous and I ended up attending most of the concerts in music academy. This was again made possible by my job. I was in bench then and faced with no proper alternatives to spend time I decided to go sabha-trotting to attend various concerts and to taste the myriad dishes that were being served.

This whole experience has rekindled my interests and I am contemplating to learn carnatic music in the near future.I may not turn out to be a Seshagopalan or a Sanjay Subramanium or a T M Krishna but it would definitely help me in understanding this heirloom heritage better.