Happy Diwali!

Happy diwali everyone. Its the festival of lights that eradicates darkness from our heart and sows the seed of happiness and light. Its time to celebrate. I had a joyful and quiet diwali with new clothes, sweets, joy,family, prayer but sans crackers. there is a reason behind this. Ill tell u something my friends told me. I met these two directors in a studio the day before diwali when i had gone for a recording. We were talking about various things whem we wished them Happy diwali. Bang came the reply " we dont celebrate diwali". we asked them why. They replied that they happened to go to sivakasi, the hub for fireworks sometime before where they had an opportunity to visit the cracker manufacturing factories. They were alarmed and shocked to see the hands of thousands of children who were employed there.They told that their hands were disfigured with full of boils and wounds and terribly damaged. As result of this, they cannot even eat food with their own hands. what a pity?

Here, in chennai well to do parents buy tons of fireworks for their children for sheer pleasure and to show off to their friends. what is the point when thousands of children destroy and sacrifice themselves and another section enjoy and burn their money on these useless fireworks? Dont we educated class of citizens have any heart or consideration at all? where is the world heading to?

Not only this, just go outside and take a look on the following morning? dont you see clouds of smoke? This is polluting the environment with poisonous gases. It is all a lie that they print on the cracker boxes saying that they are not made using child labour. but even today child labor is being involved in fireworks production and unless we citizens boycott crackers completely and sacrifice this cheap pleasure, the other section of cursed children will never see daylight again and will continue to live in darkness no matter how many diwalis come and go!! so think..do we really need to burst crackers?

Dutch Film Festival

Recently, i had the privelage of inaugurating the Dutch Film Festival organised by the Madras Film Society. This function was held at the south indian film chamber, chennai. Mrs.akhila srinivasan of Shriram chits limited and Tamil Maiyam trust was the chief guest while i lighted the Kuthuvilakku was the guest of honour. I went in a traditional red saree with ethnic jewellery. Just take a look at the attached link of the article that appeared in THE HINDU. some great films are being screened through out the year. I watched this dutch film called Yohan. It was super cool and so different. So its high time we chennaiites took notice of such good and classy films made abroad and not just stick to the masala tamil and hindi flicks........so think!
click here to see the article

S for Shankar Mahadevan!!

K..now I'd like to tell u all about my spectacular gig with Shankar Mahadevan ji. Basically i am a die hard fan of his and melt on listening to every one of his songs. I happened to meet him in bombay some months ago. Now for the present.. He called me one fine day all of a sudden and asked me if i could sing with him in a show that happened the very same day in chennai...i was like woaaah! this has got to be what is called Divine Intervention as Dan Brown puts it. I had just 3 hours to prepare the songs that he told me on the phone. I rushed to the venue and gathered myself .

I couldnt believe that i was actually going to SING ON STAGE WITH SHANKAR MAHADEVAN!! I sang Urugudhe with him as my introductory song and went on to rock the crowd with Manmadha Rasa and then with kajra Re from Bunty aur Babli as the finale song. We were accompanied by Raman Mahadevan and Anusha Mani from Mumbai!..so here is a press clipping of the show that appeared in Deccan Chronicle the following day..I still consider it the best day of my life..Shankar ji rocks!!!

HI! This is my first blog people!

Hi everyone! Well, I have just started blogging. So, im trying to figure out a couple of things right now from templates to pictures to how to post my songs. So, here i am. Hi to all my friends and fans out there. i am basically here to share my songs, experiences, audio stuff with all of you. I will keep updating my blog atleast twice every week. My recent song is Valayapatti thavile from Azhagiya Thamizh Magan for A R Rahman sir. Let me share my experience while working on this song to start with.



I am a big fan of ARR. He called me for this song. The first portion that i recorded was the swara portion beginning with saraswathi in the first BGM. He gave me hardly five minutes to prepare and told me to set my creativity on fire!! I chose three different romantic ragas like Saraswathi, behag, bageshree and did kalpana swaras in these ragas. Sir liked it very much. I have never attempted anything like this in my film songs though i am classically trained and considered it an honour to debut this style for THE GREAT AR RAHMAN. So here is the song for all you good people:)