One of the (probably unintended) highlights of the movie was Javed Akthar’s poetry voiced by his son Farhan Akhtar. This one is on the final scene, and is thus a concluding piece for the entire philosophy of the movie.
Within the movie Iruvar, this song is picturized as a movie within the movie. The lyrics and the music is an appropriate rendition of a battle cry. Shot in black and white and in a style appropriate to the period that the song is depicting, I should agree that it is, on the whole, befitting and well done even though it is not among the top list of picturizations by Maniratnam. He also tends to use the same shooting locations multiple times - I don’t exactly know where this stone structure is, but it has appeared in almost every movie of his and still he has made it appear different and fitting to the situation each time.
The lyrics and music are again very pertinent. Less of a rendition and more of a passive aggressive screaming my Aravind Swamy, the entire song is a rallying cry with ample touches of violence against the enemy.
my body will be claimed by the earth, but my life I submit to my country
thamizhukku literally means for Tamil, which is the language of tamilnadu. I've seen a few states and countries that are very proud of their language that they refer to it synonymously with their country, the French being another. They tend to have a rich culture around their language and are willing to fight even political battles for it, resisting the imposition of other foreign languages and having a rich heritage of prose and poetry.
Ithai Urakka Solvoam Ulagukku
and I shall proudly and loudly shout that
Inam Ondraga Mozhi Vendraga
so that our races unite and our talk is of victory
Puthu Vaelai Eduppom Vidivukku
we shall do what it takes to get us our freedom
Nam Vetri Paathayil Narigal Vanthaal
if wolves appear on our path to victory
Virunthu Vaippom Vinnukku
we shall make a feast of them and serve them to the gods
in Hindu culture it is normal to conduct small rituals to feed and appease the gods and also ancestors who have the power to bless one. Here, the context is more violent and is proclaimed more as a sacrifice.
Pirantha Pillai Nadanthu Pazhaga
so that the new born learns to walk
Kaiyil Velai Koduppom
we shall hand him a sword
I.e. We shall make every child a warrior from the time of his birth
Pirantha Kuzhanthai Iranthu Piranthaal
and if a child dies
Vaalaal Keeri Puthaipoam
we shall bury him with a sword
Yutha Satham Kaettal Pothum
when we hear the call of battle
Mutha Satham Mudipoam
we shall end our lovemaking
Ratha Kulaththai Nirapi Nirapi
we shall wade in lakes of blood
Vetri Thaamarai Paripoam
and pick our victory flower
Engal Mannai Thottavan Kaalgal
the feet that touch our soil
Engal Nilathil Uramaagum
will be buried in our soil
Engal Pennai Thottavan Kaigal
the hands that touch our women
Engal Aduppil Viragaagum
will become firewood in our hearth
I liked the intensity of the challenge in this entire song. It is much more tangible than and hardcore than 'we are going to defeat you'.
Guna is a mad love story. A mentally retarded man is fed the idea that there is a special girl for him. Guna is able to pick locks very well, and a crooked uncle needing to break into a temple treasury randomly points to a girl saying that is Guna’s Abiraami - a name that they have created. Following a botched robbery and chaos, Guna ends up taking away Abiraami/Rohini to a remote mountain top. Guna is ardently and honestly in love. Abiraami on the other hand reacts as a scared kidnapped person would. Over time though, Abiraami seems to understand Guna. To say that Abiraami loves Guna is a stretch, but she does begin to accept him.
Again, one of Kamal’s amazing power packed performances. Classic Ilayaraaja music. And a girl so pretty, that some of us when in school scaled the hostel walls and ran off to see the movie again for a second time with money we hardly had. ha ha. Ridiculous! But was fun then - a short term school kid obsession with a film actress.
In the context of this song, Guna has moved themselves to some hidden caves. There he is attempting to write a letter to her.
Wounds on me automatically heal. I don’t know what it is or what magic it is, but nothing happens to me. Write this also. And in between put my dear, my darling and all. See, whatever happens to me, my body will take it, but will yours? No, it won’t. Abiraami, [my] abiraami.
Female: athuvum ezhuthanuma.
Should I write that also?
Male: Heh heh. Ille … athu kaathal. yen kaathal yenna yennu sollaamae yenge yenge azhukeya varudhu. aana naan azhuthu yen soogam unnae thaakkudumo enru nenaikkum poothu, varuka azhugai koode ninnurathu.
Heh heh … no … that’s just my love. I’m unable to express my love, and because of that sadness hits me in waves. But when I think that if I cry then you will also feel sad, my sadness also stops.
Siva’s wife, half of siva is you, do you understand that?
From what I see there seems to be relationship between the name Abirami and the God Siva, but I don’t know what that is. Abirami is a common name Tamilnadu. An early search connected it to Lakshmi, which might not be right, as Lakshmi is lord Vishnu’s consort.
Hindu philosophy holds that man goes through a series of rebirths based on one’s karma until the time he transcends mortal life and becomes one with God. To aid this series of rebirths, Hindu culture requires the son to cremate his parents. Ancestors are one’s ‘pitr’ (pronounced pithr). But if a son does not do the funeral rites of his father, the dead soul cannot ascend to heaven or descend to hell, as his karma might be, so that the cycle of rebirths may continue. Instead, the soul is stuck for eternity in a state of ‘pit’ (pronounced pith) - the worst that could happen.
Pitamagan - means the son of such a soul. Vikram and Surya the main protagonists play one of their career best roles in Bala’s violently earthy film. Vikram is abandoned as a child in a graveyard and is brought up by a man who takes care of the graveyard. In order that the abandoned dead may continue their cycle or rebirths, Vikram performs the funeral rites and cremates them. He meets Surya, a petty conman, who befriends the unsociable, mentally unstable loner. He also meets Surya’s girlfriend and another rough and tumble woman, Sangeetha, who is selling hashish on the sly.
In the context of this song, the hostile, antisocial Vikram is slowly experiencing a new world, opening up to friendships for the first time ever, and receiving a somewhat pitied attraction from Sangeetha, which he also seems to respond to in his own oafish ways. Ilayaraja has been overshadowed by Rahman off late in the music scene, but pieces like this bring back his greatness.
Set against the ethnic conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Tamilnadu, Kannathil Muthamittaal is a touching story of a little girl and her adoptive parents in search of the girl’s real mother. An idealistic father, a girl who has become increasingly distant from her adoptive parents after learning that she was adopted, and the mother who provides equal love are scripted in various dimensions by Maniratnam. Along with Vairamuthu and Rahman, they produce another relevant masterpiece.
The setting for this song is in Sri Lanka. The Tamils are being driven away again by conflict. The song is granted to a person with a coarse voice - a fitting choice that gives a certain authenticity. The singer is heartbroken in being separated from his homeland. He bids his farewell but distantly hopes that one day, maybe, he’ll be back again. The song is of two parallel stories - the separation of a child and her mother as much as the separation of a man and his motherland, both separated by conflict.
“You are so beautiful, that you make me sing”. Or maybe a few other different interpretations. Whatever it is, I doubt if English can ever do justice to this song. Director Hariharan and writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair have frequently handled light movies with a melancholy theme, and produced some of malayalam cinema’s all time classics. This story is about teenage love among two poor kids. The girl is working as a servant in a rich household. The boy comes there to be a servant too, but gains a little more respectable work with the family when they learn that he is educated. Set in the 1980s, there is a certain purity to the entire movie, the kind of feeling that makes you want to reach out to it, but really can’t.
The third point in the triangle is the rich family’s only daughter who is born deaf and dumb. In India, women, especially in times earlier, become less ‘valuable’ if they have ‘defects’. Knowing that the girl won’t find a suitable husband of their own level and class, and seeing this new mild mannered, well educated boy who has done well for himself, the elders decide to get them married. This song is as the deaf and dumb girl imagines - she assumes that the boy is in love with her.
p.s. this song is so simple and yet has stuck in my head for ever. I tried to translate it but I didn’t like what I had come up with. I didn’t want to ruin the song, so I was thinking of trashing the effort. Then I saw the video which had subtitles and I liked that better than mine. So I’ve pretty much put that now.
You have that inner beauty that makes a poet of anybody
Aathma/aathmaavu means soul in a literal translation - so a soulful beauty could word as well. ‘Gaayakan’ is actually a singer, but poet works well too in the context of the movie.
Namra sheersharaay nilppoo nin munnil, Thamra nakshatra kanyakal }2
the stars stand before you, their heads bowed in humility
the skies sing your praise to the sound of heavenly bells
Thamburu/Tanpura is Indian stringed instrument, but the translation has skipped the name for smoothness. However, isn’t the tanpura more of an accompanying instrument and not necessarily a lead instrument like maybe the veena or the sitar? It ought to be fairly rare to find a song being played for a lover on an accompanying instrument.
even the fledgling on earth, and the breeze that hums in the bamboos
Innithaa nin prakeerthanam ..
Aa..aa..aa..aa.
Ee prapancha hridaya veenayil
Today we hear your praise
In the heartstrings of the universe
’Hridaya veena’ is a veena of the heart - these are the kind of things that make no sense when you translate, but it sounds so right in its original language. Definitely better to completely skip it in the translation and put a phrase that would be somewhere in that same zipcode.
This song from the movie Bombay is hardly of note in the movie and I don’t think it pictured in the official soundtrack. But it’s simple and relevant. The setting is after the riots in Mumbai, following the Babri Masjid demolition, have subsided. Arvind Swamy the Hindu husband and Manisha Koirala playing his Muslim wife, already having found out a little earlier that both their fathers died during the riots, have been searching for their missing sons Kabir and Kamal. The song starts at the point where they catch sight of each other across the street after a frantic search. At the same time there is a spontaneous outpouring of people of different religions onto the street forming a human chain of solidarity. For a scene like that, I could have gone “pffft, what over-the-top-jingoistic-feel-good-drama” … but somehow that didn’t happen. I still continue to be moved by this song. The father wails in relief on seeing his children, while the mother rushes forward to gather them. And in that meeting of different religions and families … that union is what is depicted and yearned for in this song.
The tune of this song is however super famous as the theme music for the movie. I was also pleasantly surprised to see it being used in the Nicolas Cage movie, Lord of War.
Girish Puthencherry’s award winning lyrics are set to charming music by Vidyasagar and sung by Yesudas. The song is sung by a lover who is eagerly but patiently awaiting the coming of the girl of his affections. The actor, Jayaram, plays a station master at a railway post in a hill station. And that’s why there is also the theme of a train running through the song as she will be coming by it.
or it could be the sound of the fluttering wings of love on my eyelids
In kerala, when your eye twitches, it is said that somebody who loves you is thinking of you. I think the writer has here personified it, or rather pigeon-ified it and likens it the twitching to a fluttering bird.
Iruvar, loosely translated to 'Duo' in English, narrates critical periods of Tamilnadu's political history accounted around a friendship that became and later broke. It is based on the relationship between the late actor MG Ramachandran who became the most popular political leader and chief minister of Tamilnadu, and the writer/poet Karunanidhi who has been the chief minister of Tamilnadu often. Technically the film is more than just the lead pair; it is about an ensemble of brilliant people: Maniratnam's direction, Rahman's music, Vairamuthu's lyrics, Mohanlal's acting - one among a line of outstanding actors, Santosh Sivan's camera work. I remember watching it for the first time, loving it for everything. I must admit that the heavy set, literary Tamil spoken in sections of the film was above my head and I probably didn't understand quite a bit of the nuances. Though I was overall enthralled by the movie, I was hoping against hope that it would be a huge commercial success too. That it probably wasn't, but almost every person I've ever discussed this film with has described it with much respect. Oh well, it's one of those things. :-)
This song - more a recital than a song - is in the setting of a poet who is passionately in love within an extra marital affair. The rendition itself is by Arvind Swamy in a voice shaking with passion against a rising crescendo of Rahman's music. Maniratnam chooses an austere, single scene shot, and yet the setting is raw and sensuous. So much in two minutes.
