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...

Two hundred years from now, when our descendants read their history books, 1989 will come in for special mention as a year of seminal proportions. Here is why. The world went through a Visu-caliber drama from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution when Communism found a home in Soviet Union till Karl Marx's grand philosophy that had fanned across the world, collapsed like bicycles parked in a Chennai cinema cycle stand. That collapse happened in 1989. It was a "red-letter" year not just due to the death of a philosophy, for that kind of creative destruction of ideas happens all the time. It was the fact that the  United States and Soviet Union were on a path of mutually-assured destruction and in the process were taking the whole world along with them. If it were not for Gorbachev's pet project, Perestroika , which caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union and a cluster of Eastern Bloc countries, and brought them western-style freedoms (such as McDonald's burgers and L...

The term "Golden Age" has its origins in Greek and Roman mythology and is perhaps maligned in its casual overuse, especially in the filmy context. Many a superannuated artiste and film technician have tried to usurp that moniker for the era that they had peaked in. The Greeks had referred to the Golden Age to mean a mythical age of harmonious utopia, where everyone lived a virtuous life like MGR (of his movies). The gods and humans freely co-mingled and were often indistinguishable. Hindu mythology had an equivalent for it called the "Satya Yuga". When scribes and historians ascribe a certain period as a golden age, they are probably thinking of a few things: convergence of talents, great partnerships, and memorable creative output that stands the test of time. For example, the 1950s and 60s are called the Golden Age of Hindi Film music because great music composers, singers, lyricists, actors, and directors descended into Bombay at almost the same time and produced...

The year was 1979. The hippies were drifting away. The universalism of the sixties and the seventies was wearing off with them. Democracies had stabilized and military dictators were bringing a semblance of uneasy calm to their territories. India was making a valiant attempt to come out of the gloom of the Emergency. The world seemed to be heading to a better place. Two events, though, would perhaps inextricably change the world for several decades to come. A popular movement by students, maulvis, and leftists led to the overthrow of the Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran, installing the US-backed Ayatollah Khomeini as its supreme leader.  Towards the end of the year, the Grand Mosque of Mecca, considered to be the holiest place for a billion Muslims, was besieged by armed militants with a goal to dislodge the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Their motive was to return to the "original ways of Islam" and repudiate everything perceived to be western - TV, sports, music, and mate...

Balu's first two numbers in Tamil were smash hits. It was not just the songs that were hits. The singer was as well. What people loved about Balu was how artfully he plaited his fulsome voice with what would become his trademark  musical gimmickry, thus far unheard of in the South. There were the detractors - some felt his singing was too "light" while others argued that his style was too overstated. Till then, the singing stalwarts in Tamil were, without exception, classically trained and sang right from their lower stomach. Seergazhi Govindarajan's booming voice emerged from his naabi and reached the listener, without a microphone or a radio, my cousin used to say. It was a back-handed compliment, to indicate that most yesteryear singers lacked finesse. I didn't say it, my cousin did. I will tell you this though. What Balu brought into vogue was his voice acting; a type of emotive, nuanced singing that had a tinge of Rafi, a whiff of Ghantasala and the timbre o...

Let us start from where it all began. SP Balasubrahmanyam was born in Konetampet (present-day Tiruvallur district, Tamilnadu), a year before India’s independence, in an orthodox, Telugu brahmin family that hailed from Nellore in Andhra Pradesh. His father, SP Sambamurthy, was a Harikatha exponent and his mother, Sakunthalamma, looked after the bounteous family of three brothers and five sisters, that included SP Shailaja, who would go on to become a popular playback singer later in life. A TWIST OF FATE Growing up, in the early 60s, SPB had a typical Indian, sub-urban dream: to become an engineer, qualify to be a khaki-clad gazetted officer in his native Nellore, and ride around in an official Jeep eliciting salutes from his subordinates and the public. He was definitely artistically endowed. He sang and won prizes in music competitions, acted in school plays, and even formed a music band of his own, but had never taken his talents seriously. He enrolled into Jawaharlal Nehru Technical...