SPB The God of Playback Singing...In Ten Episodes

WHY DID I WRITE THESE BLOGS? "You are going to get sick couching in that sofa, watching all those sad videos of SPB, and crying like a baby. Find another past time," my wife had scolded me several weeks ago. You can't say that my spontaneous outpouring of grief was the reaction of a puerile mind uninitiated to agony.  I have been fairly conditioned by my share of tragedies. But Balu's passing away , that too on my birthday, made me feel as if a part of me was gone, like it happened when my father or my sister passed away. It was a deeply personal loss. There were so many memories associated with him, right from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. I was filled with this baffling guilt because I felt that I had somehow drifted away from being the ardent Balu fan that I used to be. There was a permanence about his presence which was reassuring. But maybe due to that, I had perhaps taken him for granted. I had skipped his recent New Jersey Tamil concert during the ...

The year was 1992. The First Gulf War had ended and the world was cooling off after a thirty-five nation coalition, led by the United States, handed out a decisive defeat to Iraq and its supreme leader, Saddam Hussein. The situation in Bosnia was rapidly deteriorating due to an ethnic conflict between the Serbs and Bosnians. A hundred thousand people, predominantly Bosnian Muslims, would be massacred by the end of the conflict. India had just managed to avert a balance-of-payments near-miss that had brought the country to its knees and to the brink of bankruptcy. The government had to air-dash sixty-seven tons of bullion to European banks to secure a $600 million loan so that we could pay our monthly bills.  It was a historic low-point for the country.   The situation forced the then Prime Minister, PV Narasimha Rao, to announce sweeping economic reforms that would open up India's economy and eventually pull three-hundred million people out of poverty. Just when things were lo...