Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – an outside-in perspective of the Western liberal’s guilt complex

August 2, 2026

I watched Christopher Nolan’s latest, The Odyssey, last week in theaters and since then have grappled with a strange dissonance – a distinct feeling of having enjoyed what I saw sitting alongside a feeling that something about it all had left me unsatisfied. I could point to a few aspects like his dialogue writing or his somewhat cartoonish rendering of the villains like the Cyclops. But there was something deeper.

I stumbled upon what it was as a reaction to one of the things people who overwhelmingly liked it have pointed to – that its remorseful and critical look at war is more in keeping with the current times. For me, that actually may finally be the aspect I found most unsatisfying and this is where I come in with my outside-in and admittedly trenchant perspective of Western society.

The theme of remorse took my mind back to a teenager in junior college lamenting 9/11 the day after, in response to which, his classmate made a quip he likely found bewildering – “Well, they shouldn’t have been messing around in the Middle East.” As you may have guessed if you’re familiar with my views on this subject, the guy with that nasty quip was me. At that time, my exposure to Western music was very, very limited and while I was further along with books and movies in the English language (and, made/written in the US/UK), it was still a fragment of what I have experienced in the nearly twenty five years that have passed since then.

And all the love for their art is yet of little help when it comes to dealing with the Western liberal’s relationship with how their State operates. It gladdens my heart to know that the Western liberal shares my anguish over war and, as a corollary, thinks the current war against Iran is senseless. My question, unfair though it may seem, is different – does this anguish in any way thwart the Western military-industrial complex from pursuing war remorselessly? The answer is a resounding no.

I haven’t read Homer’s epic so I am summing up the gist of The Odyssey as best as I understood (and correct me if I am wrong). But the travails that Odysseus and his men undergo on their homeward voyage from Troy originate in Odysseus’ hubris, which leads him to defy the Gods. In response to his defiance, culminating in him revealing his identity to the Cyclops Polyphemus (son of the God Poseidon) having originally deceived him to seal his escape, the Gods subject him and his crew to the most terrible punishment, such that none of his men survive and he is captured by Calypso.

Now, cut to Nolan’s rendering of the epic. We see some energetic optimism and adventurism from Odysseus on the voyage from Troy but not really God-defiance. There is no boastfulness as such, just the one note of ebullience when he strikes a last arrow at the eye of Polyphemus as their ship is escaping the island. You could call him impish, immature but not really full of hubris. Much later, when he recounts these events to Penelope, he remembers the siege of Troy with regret and wonders if it had been in vain and whether the price to be paid for their senseless devastation of Troy would be the collapse of the Bronze Age itself.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it lines up with Nolan’s treatment of Oppenheimer. Prior to the first atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, it is Oppenheimer who forcefully pushes nuclear development through, overruling objections from his colleagues in the scientific fraternity by arguing that they need to get it before the Germans do. Later, when the fateful bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and he is asked to address a thrilled crowd at the Malmo site, he struggles to, as he imagines the ecstatic crowd as victims of nuclear holocaust. Yes, he started it but by the end, he regretted his part in it. This is also how Nolan seems to read Odysseus.

In Oppenheimer’s case, this theme of regret worked because the real life Oppenheimer too came to regret his role in creating the atomic bomb and became a vocal anti-nuclear proliferation campaigner.

This doesn’t work so neatly with Odysseus because when these anxieties about war are transposed onto a mythical and fictional figure, Odysseus is no longer just Odysseus the character but a proxy for the anti-war view in Western society. Odysseus pondering over the destruction he and his men had wrought in Troy is every thoughtful Western liberal lamenting the never-ending, ‘forever’ wars that the US in particular seems to participate in post-World War 2.

To wit, then, let’s examine the record. That Keir Starmer did diddly squat to oppose the Iran invasion wasn’t a surprise because the UK, already battered by the 2008 financial crisis, has further boxed itself into a corner with austerity and Brexit. If a once great power managing its decline wants to hold onto any remaining powerful friends, that is somewhat understandable. But cut to 2003 and the UK was possibly at its post-war zenith. It had prosperity, immense soft power and an extremely popular Labour leader in Tony Blair. And what did Blair do? He was one of the biggest cheerleaders of the Iraq War, a war that France and Germany offered principled opposition to by the way.

Hillary Clinton and John Kerry voted for the Iraq War. Today, the Democrats complain about Trump bypassing Congress to get the US embroiled in the Iran War but Trump could, rightly I am afraid, argue that when there’s a war that neocons on both sides of the aisle love, they have offered it unstinting support anyway.

Barack Obama wasn’t in the Senate yet when the Iraq War was authorised. When he became President, he did withdraw troops from Iraq. Hand in hand, though, he joined the UK on a mission to decapitate the Libyan dictator Gadaffi, having offered to bring him into the mainstream in exchange for nuclear disarmament. The images of Clinton enthusiastically cheering the decapitation of Gadaffi are notorious enough I don’t need to post a reminder of them.

Hold on, now! You say these are indeed neocons and they don’t represent the Western (Anglo-American really, but continental Europe has been passive post WWII) liberal point of view. I find that a hard line to swallow having been fully adult during part of the Blair years and for all of the Obama years and knowing just how popular both were among liberals. But let’s accept that proposition for argument’s sake. Right then! Which group offered the most vociferous, most panicked opposition to anti-war, left-wing Democrat or Labour leaders (Sanders and Corbyn respectively)? Why, who else, the liberals! Again, Trump himself called out how Obama orchestrated the withdrawal of all centrist candidates from the 2020 Democratic Primary so that Biden would get all of the centrist vote while Warren would eat into Sanders’ progressive vote. Something that had the Republicans done likewise in 2016, Trump would have lost the Primary! It is a reasonable proposition to say that had the winning Democrat President of the 2020 election been a person who retained full possession of his mental faculties to a level required and desired of someone holding such an important job going into 2024, the fight against Trump would have at least been closer and the circus of getting his VP rushed into the contest at the eleventh hour would have almost certainly been avoided.

You see, Western liberals are not the hapless, pearl clutching angels they want you to think they are. They have plenty of agency but practice selective amnesia in forgetting their own role in enabling the rise and rise of right wing demagoguery.

And in case you’re wondering what Hollywood has to do with any of this, it very much does. It has functioned as the propaganda arm of the US establishment for many years and increasingly of the centrist arm of the Democratic Party. When Steven Spielberg made a movie about the Pentagon Papers (called The Post, released in 2017) and richly valourized the Washington Post’s role in it, guess who he most conveniently omitted any mention of? Why, the Congressman who, alone and bravely, read the Papers into the Congressional Record so that they could never be expunged out of public view again – Mike Gravel.

When Gravel passed away in 2021, the mainstream outlets like New York Times offered gently condescending obituaries on his behalf, describing him as a gadfly, an eccentric, where the leftwing Jacobin paid rich tribute to him. Please note, Gravel was not a communist or socialist in the 1970s when he read the Pentagon Papers into the record. It was his party that moved further and further to the Right, possibly intoxicated by the power the US wielded post the collapse of the USSR.

In light of all this then, is it necessarily unfair of me to interpret Nolan’s render of the epic as yet another mea culpa offered at a time when the Western hemisphere is deeply unpopular with the Global South, a strategic retreat into ‘honesty’ of sorts? I am not sure it is. And on the contrary, it seems to me that the original storyline of the epic and its arc, of arrogance, hubris and greed getting the punishment they deserve and the atonement being an outcome of that rather than a sincerely spiritual moment of self-introspection, seems to ring truer to how the Western establishment operates. Perhaps this is unsurprising as Homer was unburdened by liberal guilt and said it like it was rather than as how it ought to be, which is the narrative the Western liberal prefers. And in turn, the Western liberal appears to be unburdened by how dishonest this ought-to narrative is because the salvation of guilt-washing that it offers him/her is much more alluring.

PS: During the time of Oppenheimer’s theatrical run, the lack of depiction of Japanese suffering post Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a line of criticism that particularly bothered me as I reasoned that the scene showing Oppenheimer imagining his colleagues as those victims was the stand-in. But in light of Nolan’s The Odyssey, I wonder if the omission is more revealing. Does it suggest that the liberal’s self-obsession with these cycles of triumph and remorse leaves no room to actually empathize meaningfully with the victims of the destruction they unleash? There’s something there, I am afraid.

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Three Musketeers – The incredible impact of SPB and S Janaki on Ilayaraja’s music

July 14, 2026

Yes, this is the elephant in the room in some ways.  But…with both SPB and S Janaki now no more and maestro Ilayaraja himself now acknowledging their contribution more effusively than has been his wont in the past, it’s about time.

So…like most other fans of S Janaki and specifically her work with Ilayaraja, I have spent the last couple or more days listening to the songs she sang for Raja on the commute.  I began with solos, like Ooru Sanam or Kaatril Endhan Geetham.  I then moved onto duets.  And of course, she sang many more duets, by far, with SPB than with anybody else.

And as I got through, at first, the mournful Oomai Nenjin Osaigal, the mysterious Paadu Nilave and moved onto the intense Rojavai Thalatum Thendral, the uber-romantic Pani Vizhum Iravu and then to the kick-assery of Vanithamani or Thodatha Thaalam, I couldn’t help but marvel at just how many incredible duets the two have recorded. Not that I didn’t know this already but I had to marvel anew at the sheer volume and variety of repertoire covered just by their duets. I haven’t yet had time to get to, variously, Uravenum Puthiya Vaanil, Roja Ondru Mutham, Roja Ondru Ulangayil, Sundari Kannal.  And this is still not a comprehensive list.  There are just so many. Among the last songs where Raja turned to his trusty old firm is the rural-based gem Punnai Vanathu Kuyile.  Even with the sheer flood of rural-based songs that Raja unleashed in the early 90s, inducing ennui as it got hard to tell where Povoma ended and Poothathu Poonthoppu began, Punnai Vanathu has something special.

And how much of that something special indeed is on account of the singing?

On earlier occasions, Raja had expressed the view that what makes his songs popular is intrinsic to the composition and not dependent on the singer.  In an interview given during the release of Shamitabh, he went so far as to say that his songs would be hits irrespective of who sang them.

But over the years, he has also acknowledged the brilliance of both SPB and S Janaki.  Particularly, in the case of the latter, he said that she got closer to the essence of the song than others. 

And then again, in the Billboard India interview given recently, he said his personal preferences would take him towards Asha Bhonsle or Yesudas.

What’s going on here?  I think this is about the maestro publicly vocalising a dilemma/debate he carries on within. 

On the one hand, Ilayaraja is unsurpassed in our film music when it comes to marshalling large orchestral forces and using them aptly in film music.  Yes, yes, I know, he can devise brilliant arrangements without very many instruments as well and have made this point on my blog before as well as elsewhere online, pointing to utter classics like Mandram Vandha, Enna Satham or Ilaya Nila (none of these songs use violins – I know, the shock, the horror!).  I emphasise large orchestral forces simply because that’s been harder to do for our composers.  There’s many a Hindi classic that boasts of gorgeous and sparse arrangements like Mere Mehboob or Tere Mere Sapne.  But to use the forces employed on Sundari Kannal and still make every note count, that’s harder.  And specifically at the Sundari Kannal level, nobody else has done it.

At the same time, there is a deep sense of spontaneity and fun in his music, underplayed often by fans and detractors like.  This sense of fun should be at odds with a composer who is accomplished at marshalling a huge orchestra but it somehow isn’t.  If anything, he is often able to infuse that fun factor in songs that do use a lot of orchestra. 

Sample the aforementioned Vanithamani.  It’s raunchy as hell and yet, the second interlude gets intensely (Western) classical for about 20 seconds before keyboard and guitar bring it back to where SPB and Janaki can pick up the charanam/antara.

Now…just for a minute, imagine Vanithamani sung by some combination of Uma Ramanan, Shailaja, Jency, Deepan Chakravarty, Krishnachandran, Arun Mozhi. I have my reservations about Jency and Krishnachandran but the rest are technically AOK.  And yet…can you imagine Vanithamani still being as fun as it is with any of them singing it?  Me neither!

On the songs where either one of the fabulous duo sang with one of these second-tier singers, the latter only served to highlight the brilliance of the former.  Poor Krishnachandran had to sing alongside Janaki in Yetho Mogam and Aanandha Maalai (there may be others I am not aware of) and in both songs, she sounds even more lustrous now that there isn’t SPB to compete with her.

But this lustre comes with the lack of the call-response effect when she is paired with SPB.  Where it becomes more akin to the two having a conversation and completing each other’s sentences as only good friends can (which I believe they were outside the recording booth anyway). 

At least Raja had a reliable second serve (to borrow SD Burman’s coinage with reference to Rafi and Kishore) in Yesudas when it came to male singers.  Wouldn’t be quite as expressive and exuberant as SPB but would more than get the job done.  But, until Chitra came along, the best substitute he had for Janaki was either an aging but still good P Susheela or Vani Jairam when it came to female singers. 

It appeared to further take quite a few years for him to get the shy Chitra to shed her inhibitions in the studio.  And even so, the very convincing take on intoxication that Janaki delivers on Endhan Kannil (Guru) would still be beyond Chitra.  In Raja’s 2000s and onwards live shows, Chitra began to take up Janaki’s songs with the latter having retired from performing.  Technically, of course, she was impeccable.  But her Kannan Vanthu Paaduginran was still pretty without having the stylish swagger Janaki could infuse into it.

Now consider the speed at which Raja worked.  It is fair to say that while, of course, he micromanaged SPB and Janaki too just like the others, he did not need to direct them quite as much as he did with other singers.  And, which may be/may have been harder for him to accept, they may well have exceeded the brief on occasion in ways he found desirable upon hearing the output and had to gladly accept.

And that’s the rub, that’s the paradox.  When he collaborated with SPB and S Janaki, it became more like a band and less like a well-oiled orchestra where every musician was only a cog in the wheel for Raja.  A band of friends who knew each other’s favourite moves intimately well and could execute eyes closed.  That sheer spontaneity lent that something extra, that x-factor to the songs the trio did together.  You had, on the one hand, the army of instruments Raja could command to crystallize his vision.  On the other, two singers, both of whom were well established in the field before he got his start, who brought his vision to life better than the other singers he worked with.  And not once, not every now and then – instead, almost every time. 

It is impossible that Raja wasn’t acutely aware of this dynamic.  And he also had too much of a personal rapport with both singers to will it away, to conspire against it. 

And yet, he would put in efforts every now and then to give himself other options.  For one thing, it would have helped maintain a balance desirable to him.  Even with friends, you don’t want them to think you can’t do without them on a professional level.  And so, you have Chitra and later Mano getting more and more songs from the mid-late 80s onwards.  You start to even get Mano-Chitra duets like Vaa Vaa Vaa Kanna Vaa or Satham Varamal.  I am a tad unconvinced by Mano on both, more so Vaa Vaa Vaa, while Chitra is outstanding on both songs.  But…both songs could have been sung by SPB-S Janaki and listeners would have likely enjoyed them even more if so, plain and simple.  Likewise with Chitra-Yesudas duets – there was a good reason to ‘cast’ him instead of SPB for Thendral Dhaan as SPB was male lead in the film (Keladi Kanmani) but, again, Thendral Dhaan would just have been better as SPB-Chitra.  Or…ahem, SPB-S Janaki. Going back in time a little to 1985’s Kaaki Sattai, having given three duets already to SPB-S Janaki, Raja paired SPB with P Susheela for Pattu Kannam.  And she sang it beautifully, of course. And yet….Likewise in the case of Dil Dil Manadhil on Mella Thirandhadhu Kadhavu. The fit wasn’t non-existent with these other legendary singers; it just wasn’t like hand and glove the way it was when he employed his and our favourite duo.

By the mid 90s, Janaki was getting on already.  She was still brilliant as ever but her voice had noticeably aged.  With the arrival of chocolate lover boy heroes who dominated 90s Tamil cinema (including Vijay and Ajith in their non-action star avatars!), Raja probably also felt SPB’s voice no longer suited these stars (didn’t stop him from having Dr Yesudas sing for Vijay on Oru Pattampoochi!). And so, he moved on.  It became much more of Hariharan, Unnikrishnan, Swarnalatha, Sujatha, Anuradha Sriram, among others.  All terrific singers, needless to say. 

But the magic of old wasn’t quite there.  It would be unfair to attribute this entirely to the singers because the music too had changed.  Both Raja’s music and the music around him.  But it was partly also the singers.  They never fully cohered with his vision (which itself, I dare say, was often less coherent than before).  The notes were there, the melodies were there.  The elements were present arithmetically, only sans the all-important chemistry. 

It is hard to know how much better Manjal Poosum (Friends) would have been had SPB-S Janaki sung it.  Surely, it would also have had to have been recorded at least five years prior than it actually was, with Janaki’s voice ageing.  But, let’s say, it was recorded in 1995-96, the same time as Punnai Vanathu Kuyile.  Would the duo have really only done as much with the song as Devan and Sujatha? Nah, surely, it would have, again, had that X-factor (though I am going to bet even that X-factor wouldn’t have made up for what the arrangements no longer had vis-à-vis his vintage sound). 

So there you have it – the ultimate paradox!  The master orchestrator of our film music, with two fusion albums and now a symphony to his name, also found his fates intertwined with two outstanding singers. And he turned to them again and again, resisting (until the mid-90s) the impulse to forge his sound in a new light with other singers so that more of the music’s brilliance would be attributable purely to him.  No, the magnetic pull was too strong.  Somewhere along the way, through the early years of Raja, where the first SPB-S Janaki duets, starting with 1976’s Oru Naal Unnodu Oru Naal, began to tumble out, their voices and his music had learnt to fit together as perfectly as jigsaw pieces.  Other singers, no matter how great they were in their own right, just didn’t deliver the same high with his music as SPB-S Janaki did.

Raja could no more resist the SPB-S Janaki magic than us listeners can.  And he gave them a super-long, double decadal run until he had finally had his fill.  And us listeners have still not had our fill of listening to these incredible, timeless duets, probably won’t in a lifetime.

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Wimbledon 2026: Noskova triumphs, slays the ghost of Novotna

July 12, 2026

When I began watching tennis, the legendary Martina Navratilova’s time had all but passed. She reached the 1994 Wimbledon final but I have no memory of watching it. She continued in doubles for a few more years but I don’t remember any of that either.

I do remember another popular Czech serve-and-volleyer as would any other tennis lover of my vintage or older – Jana Novotna (RIP).

Novotna first reached a slam final at the Australian Open, not Wimbledon, losing fairly tamely to Monica Seles. But from 1993 onwards would begin several fruitless, and tearful, pursuits of the Venus Rosewater Dish.

In 1993, leading 4-1 in the decider and on the cusp of winning the Championship against Steffi Graf, Novotna choked badly and ended up losing. In 1995, she similarly choked out in the semis, again against Graf. In 1997, she made the final, only to lose to the Swiss Miss Martina Hingis (incidentally named after Navratilova and also of Czech/Slovak origin). It was finally in 1998 that she managed to not fluff her lines and prevailed over Nathalie Tauziat to win what would be her only slam title. For a player ranked as high as no.2, who won 24 titles and who made the quarterfinal stage at every slam, she had underachieved due to her brittleness.

Yesterday, for a while, it looked like 21 year old Linda Noskova was haunted by the ghost of Novotna. Up until then, she had put up a supremely confident show against compatriot (and crowd favourite) Karolina Muchova. Perhaps still weary from the epic semi battle against Coco Gauff, Muchova struggled to get into top gear throughout the first set and for most of the second. Only during the later stages of the second did she finally stir to life.

But if so, she had timed it to perfection. Offered the chance to serve her way to a first slam title in barely over an hour, Noskova got tight and committed errors. She did not exactly choke, though. From 30-40 and again facing Ad out, she battled back, serving up stunning out wide aces on the Ad side to get back to Deuce. But from the Deuce, either the serve or the forehand kept letting her down until, eventually, she forfeited the chance to serve it out and the score was back to 5-4. Muchova duly made it 5-5 and went on to win it 7-5. Noskova sat down hunched over a towel for quite a while before leaving the court for the permitted between-sets break (not available in Novotna’s time if I remember well).

Upon return, she still appeared tentative and frustrated with herself up to 30-30 in the first game. From there, she steadied herself and held her serve. By so doing, she had managed to settle herself down and got back into the match.

This, even though Muchova was in full flow by now. Her serve was now firing and the brilliant wrist flex on her forehand (very Federer-like) helped her get considerable elevation even off low balls. Some say she looked the better player than Noskova even yesterday. I am not so sure of that but she does have the better-looking strokes and she will probably carry that distinction to her grave.

But Noskova has been on quite a roll lately. She had won the grass tune up event at Berlin prior to Wimbledon. At Wimbledon too, she wasn’t just winning, she was crushing her opponents. Past slam winner Madison Keys, veteran Elise Mertens, the extremely talented Marta Kostyuk, all perished in straight sets against her.

In an earlier post, I had waxed eloquent about aesthetics achieving a marriage of sport and art once in a while in describing Osaka’s sweet ball striking. Welp, here’s the obvious counterpoint – you don’t need to have good-looking strokes to be good at the sport. As much as we may wish it wasn’t so, the two things aren’t connected at all. Potent strokes do help but they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, if you will. And potent strokes directed effectively are the real killer. Do you find Novak Djokovic super-attractive to watch? Yeah, me neither.

Likewise, Noskova, while hardly having ugly stroke production (Swiatek’s is way uglier and you hear nary a peep about it), has a kind of mechanical efficiency that fans aren’t always appreciative of. But her game just works. Her serve is not the fastest but it’s plenty fast, consistently up in the 110mph bracket and she serves to great angles, especially wide on the ad. Her forehand is a flat bludgeon, super-effective on grass and her backhand is solid too. Already, there are no weaknesses immediately available to attack. Apart from that, she has soft hands when she needs them for volleys and drops.

If I had to pick flaws in her game, I would point to the below:

  1. A return that works well on grass, hinging heavily on the chip return, but may not work so well on hard court
  2. Related, she isn’t the fastest mover and can be pulled wide with consistent and well directed rallying
  3. The flat forehand may itself beget errors upon asking her to hit one too many of them

These are not severe weaknesses but are still exploitable. In time, we may see opponents hone in on these weaknesses to sort her out. But, it appears as if Noskova’s purple patch caught the tour by surprise. The tour got Raducanu-ed in 2021. Surely they are wiser to the prospect of an unexpected dark horse run now. But Noskova happened to also have real solid weapons to hurt her opponents with. And she was playing on a surface that doesn’t give players much time. Time they may have needed to work out how to play her. But she kept executing impeccably on serve and putting the pressure back on her opponents. That deceptively simple strategy can go a long way on grass. For Noskova, it took her all the way.

As for Muchova, while she will rue another missed opportunity at the slams, it’s important to underline one thing – while she did brilliantly well to fight back from championship point down, she never earned a championship point of her own, never even got close to one. She was simply outplayed. Noskova was simply better on the day. Whether she will regularly have the edge in the match up we shall see. But Muchova can go home head held high and feel proud of her efforts these two weeks, in twice coming back from match point down. Once to win the match, against Gauff in the semi, and once to extend a Wimbledon final into a second hour, to send the crowd home feeling satiated at having watched a bit of a thriller. Trust me, the Wimbledon crowd deserved this after enduring a run of damp squib finals post-covid and especially after the double bagel meltdown of last year.

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Paadavaa Un Paadalai – farewell S Janaki

July 12, 2026

Nearly six years after the demise of S P Balasubrahmanyam, with whom S Janaki shared the microphone on thousands of songs, she passed away on 11 July. She was older than him and also older than Ilaiyaraaja, under whose baton she was most prolific.

The association of S Janaki with Ilaiyaraaja’s music and with duets co sung by SPB is so strong it overshadows her career outside of those associations. In fact, she had got her start much before both. Her first recorded song was for the unreleased movie Vidhiyin Vilayatu in 1957! And her first few songs were not for Viswanathan-Ramamoorthy (as they were then, before the split). SPB sought guidance from her as he tried to get his own playback career going in the mid-1960s and Ilayaraja leaned heavily on her contributions for his debut film Annakilli.

But if there is a song from that pre Raja period that still broke through into my consciousness and others of my age group, it would be Singaravelane Deva from 1962’s Konjum Salangaigal.

I cannot claim to be able to give you a solid primer of her other great songs from this period, for MSV and other composers, but this duet under the MSV-TKR baton is also well worth your time:

That Raja occupied my imagination much more is only partly to blame for this. I know of many more P Susheela songs (or of TMS/PBS for that matter) from the 60s and 70s. For whatever reason, in spite of her already enjoying an illustrious career before Raja came along, S Janaki did not get bracketed with those singers. People of my parents’ age group spoke of TMS, PBS, AM Raja, PS and LR Eswari when they did speak of the MSV era. Or of Sirgazhi Govindarajan with reference to his devotional songs.

Curiously, while Janaki continued to record plenty throughout the 90s, including with Rahman, those songs never left the impact that her work with Raja did. And it’s not as if Rahman didn’t give her enough slices of his most memorable work. There’s the fun duet Errani Kurrathani Gopala from Kadhalan, the endlessly-repeated-in-the-day Ottagatha Kattiko from Gentleman and, of course, the piece-de-resistance, the semi-classical workout of Margazhi Thingal from Sangamam.

But, where SPB’s work with Rahman and many other music directors in the 90s passed into his ‘greatest hits’ list, so to speak, that didn’t quite happen with S Janaki’s work in the same period, at least not nearly to the same extent.

Partly, it was that her age began to tell in the 90s. I would be lying if I said I didn’t find the high notes on even the Raja-composed Yendhan Nenjil or Nila Kaayum Neram at least a touch uncomfortable. Not everyone can manage to keep their voice so magically intact into their 50s, 60s and even 70s as SPB did, something which even he described as amazing as he had not made any special efforts to tend to his voice. The Mangeshkar sisters didn’t age well at all and, fortunately, Janaki wisely chose to gracefully exit stage in the early 2000s before people could dare ask why.

That contentment and lack of egoistic attachment would surprise no one who had watched her live or at least watched TV programs of her stage performances (as I did, not being fortunate enough to see her on stage). She simply stood upright and emotionless before the mic and looked into a little book with the song lyrics as she sang with utmost concentration. All the expression came from within. She needed to make no effort by way of gesticulations to bring out the emotion. Not that those who do so ought to be judged. Shreya Ghoshal used every inch of the stage when I watched her perform at Shanmukhananda Hall and it definitely did not come at the cost of her singing in any way. But for Janaki, the song appeared to be enough to get the best out of her. Her process did not change from playback to stage.

And it was Raja who tapped into her process more than any other composer, which is perhaps why her singing in turn became so strongly associated with his music. By all appearances a modest and conservative woman, Janaki was not trying to be irreverent; she simply had the capacity to surrender herself completely to the song. And Raja could use this capacity to coax every emotion he desired out of her voice.

Whether it be the intense pathos of Kaatril Endhan Geetham (he made her go ballistic more often than the others, producing tour-de-force, powerfully intense solos like Dhoorathil Naan, Ponvaanam Panneer or Azhagu Malar Aada).

Or the stylish self-expression of an urban and urbane woman completely comfortable in her skin, like Kannan Vanthu Paaduginran or Oru Poongavanam:

Or even riotous, bordering on the vulgar (if not outright vulgar) sensuality, right down to, uh, noises like Ponmeni. Perhaps being tasked with producing those noises left her no choice but to train her technique where she would be outwardly emotionless, only a bodily medium through which the song emanated.

And, of course, when Raja teamed her up with SPB, he could trust them like a cricket team would trust Gilchrist-Hayden or Haynes-Greenidge. They would just get right down to business and utterly throw themselves into the song, to the endless delight of us listeners.

And on that note, I want to end this little tribute by posting a song of which only one major collaborator, Raja himself, survives. Co-composer MSV and lyricist Vaali had passed away quite a few years ago. Then co-singer SPB in 2020. And now S Janaki. An incredible composition, possibly one of the all time greatest duets in Tamil music. But of the ones who created it, all but one are no more.

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Wimbledon 2026 – manic weekend on the women’s draw and some Naomi Osaka magic after ages

July 6, 2026

I happened to be in the US during US Open finals week in 2018. Yeah, that one – where Serena Williams dueled with chair umpire Carlos Ramos, in an incident that overshadowed Japanese-American Naomi Osaka’s maiden grand slam win (she represents Japan in tennis but resides in California, US). This was long before she became polarizing for questioning why press conferences were required, then went on to slump from the latter half of 2021, then went on a maternity break in 2023 before returning in 2024. In September 2018, Osaka enjoyed tremendous goodwill as the bright new star expected to take over the mantle from the aging Williams. So much so that a guy I met at a recreational tournament the Sunday after finals weekend, said he had watched her live and she was serving faster than Marin Cilic. I did a double take; this was the peak of the whole why-shouldn’t-we-say-Serena-is-the-best-player-not-just-greatest-male-or-female moment in tennis. Ever the doubting Thomas, I had sided with John McEnroe on that debate to the chagrin of progressives who were aghast at my apparently sharp rightward turn. I had said to him that Osaka usually serves around 120mph while Cilic serves 130mph, so was Cilic serving slower then (plausible as Cilic’s career was winding down at this time) and he nodded dubiously. I mention this just to capture the excitement Osaka had evoked at that time, a feeling that has appeared to have been from a whole other era in recent years.

But on Sunday, Osaka brought back much of that excitement, reminding everyone how she had got to world no.1 and four slam titles in the first place. Except, strangely enough, she was now doing her thing on grass, which had not been a happy hunting ground for her at all in her peak years.

I will get to the Osaka match in a bit but first, it was a manic weekend on the women’s draw at Wimbledon. I had said pre-tournament that we should expect the unexpected and that the top seeds were not coming into the tournament riding on any kind of confidence-boosting form. Over this week – the second week – the grass will get slower and the bounce will increase so that it plays a little more like the hard courts that players spend 99% of their time playing on these days. But what remained of the slick, low bouncing grass of week 1 was apparently enough to compound the self-doubt/unease the top seeds were dealing with. In this case – Iga Swiatek, Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka. Or, perhaps, they had already beaten themselves (except Sabalenka) and the grass wasn’t to blame even partly.

Perhaps. But on a hard court, even ones with relatively lower bounce like Miami where Alex Eala had first broken through last year (also beating Swiatek then), slowish serves and flat groundies with low bounce are still less lethal than on grass. In Miami 2025, the sheer surprise factor of Eala’s game had helped a lot. On the Wimbledon greens, her is just a difficult game generally for opponents.

It need not have still sufficed to overwhelm Swiatek in straight sets, though, and for that, her continuing travails are responsible as she continues on a downward trajectory that Eala has only abetted, not started. As has been seen often times lately, Swiatek actually fought hard in a tricky first set and did well to take it to a tiebreak. But the moment she conceded the lead at an inopportune moment in the tiebreak, she betrayed her frustration. As she has been wont to do but as she mustn’t do. She telegraphs to her opponents that she’s there for the taking and they go for the kill, realising that this Swiatek is no longer the formidable frontrunner of 2022-2024 and instead, very vulnerable and very beatable once she gets into that cycle of doubting herself. A player who has been no.1 for long spans of time and who has won six slams (including Wimbledon, no less, last year) should not be searching for her forehand out on Centre Court every time. And yet, this has happened time and again. And in fact, what’s changed is this search now seems to ensue even on clay, even on slow hard courts, her happy hunting grounds, in other words.

And the moment Swiatek began cursing her forehand technique for not co-operating, the result was but a foregone conclusion. She was much worse in the second set and endured a meltdown not dissimilar to the one against Marta Kostyuk at the French Open. By the end, she was missing the most straight forward of swing volleys and even smiling wryly to herself about it.

It is not clear how much longer the partnership with Francisco Roig will survive. I have to wonder if working for so many years with the uber-gladiator that is Rafael Nadal has prepared him appropriately to work with lesser mortals, seeing as his stint with the talented Matteo Berrettini was short lived.  To be fair, though, it must be hard for any coach to make sense of a six time slam champion, one who won four French Opens in six years, who is somehow crippled so much by self doubt that she now blows it well before the deep end of slams almost as a matter of routine. 

If Swiatek’s implosion was visibly marked by signs of doubt and frustration, Elena Rybakina’s was marked by a subdued and flat vibe, as has often been the case.  If Swiatek gets too anxious in tricky matches for her own good, with Rybakina, it can feel as if she can hardly be bothered or that she is simply unable to summon up the requisite adrenaline to not get rolled over in a fight. Either way, she barely seemed to get off the starting blocks against veteran Elise Mertens.  And so it was that the defending champion and the hot favourite were both gone in short order on Saturday afternoon.

In both cases, the matches weren’t super high-quality and could be blamed squarely on the strong favourites simply collapsing under the weight of expectations.  It was a different script on Sunday evening as world no.1 Sabalenka took on Osaka. 

I had also mentioned in the aforesaid article that Sabalenka has rather made a habit of blowing it in the late stages of slams, perhaps wanting too badly to win the slams she’s ‘supposed’ to win.  Well, on this occasion, she found herself unable to even make the second week of slams and also endured her first straight set slam loss post 2020. 

So something else other than her usual failing of getting too amped up for her own good was at work.  And that something else was the crackling sound of crisp returns and groundstrokes off Osaka’s racquet.  They kept whizzing by with a regularity that felt thrilling for the neutral and probably alarming for Sabalenka fans and, of course, herself.

Sabalenka is the 800-pound gorilla of current women’s tennis, the Goliath.  She can be overcome in a titanic struggle, as she was last year at the Australian Open by a sensational Madison Keys in a three set epic.  She can, as mentioned earlier, sometimes lose the plot in getting hyper-charged about the situation, as against Coco Gauff at last year’s French Open final.  But she’s not supposed to get blown off the court.  And not by a player older than her, one largely regarded as a has-been after returning from maternity and one who, before yesterday, had never won a match on Centre Court!

This was simply not on the script but it was happening.  In giving a veritable exhibition of her skills, Osaka took us back to an earlier era of tennis and showcased its contrast with the current one.  In her time, there was still a hangover of the preferences of 00s women’s tennis.  When timing was still prized and players tried to have compact takebacks to manage pace.  Actually, compact takebacks and timing go together – you cannot generate a ton of your own power with a compact takeback so your timing has to be impeccable.  Think Kim Clijsters.  Oh, one could watch/listen to the sweet sound of ball hitting racquet when she was playing all day.  As with, say, Roger Federer in his prime (actually, any Federer other than in his last year, when he was clearly incapacitated), this was sport that also provided some aesthetic pleasure as a bonus.

Over the last few years, Swiatek and Sabalenka have both favoured a much more muscular and physical style of tennis.  This is also because both have long strokes and not the greatest timing.  Unlike Swiatek, who rose very quickly to the top with her French Open win in 2020, Sabalenka struggled for years to manage her game in a way that she could produce consistent power without overhitting.  This is because Sabalenka does put seemingly everything into every shot.  Her forehands don’t give you the magic of ball meeting racquet at that exact moment that lets it fly back for a stunning winner.  Instead, her forehands are almighty heaves and she lets you know what her effort level is with the loudest grunt post-Azarenka.  I haven’t checked the decibel meter; it may be louder than Azarenka’s!

The trouble is, on grass where the ball keeps low and skids through, this highly physical style is not very suitable.  Sabalenka makes it work with her consummate mastery of technique but it’s an effortful adjustment.  And against an Osaka hitting the ball about as beautifully as it can be hit, Sabalenka fell short of answers.  And after all this time, Osaka was still consistently hitting up 120+mph on her serve.  Watching her out-ace Sabalenka like it was nothing was what brought back memories of that conversation in 2018 to my mind.

The loud cheers Osaka received throughout from the crowd was also a timely reminder that she is, in fact, still a true star of the game.  There is lately on social media, an obsession with wanting to see players fail and mess up badly.  And Osaka siding with the activists on the BLM question combined with her questioning press conferences were all it took for there to develop a vocal contingent wishing to see her fail.  And no sooner had she slumped, a narrative was built up to cast her achievements in her peak years as bogus/lucky.  Basically, it was a tragedy that she had even won four slams and she had been very lucky to.  Yup, do not underestimate the sheer obnoxiousness of armchair quarterbacking!

On Sunday, she had resoundingly answered the question(s).  No, Osaka had been hailed as a star because she really was that good.  And it’s heartwarming to see that after all this time, she still has it.  She still is that good.  She can still stun you with effortless power of a kind that’s largely disappeared from women’s tennis. 

I still have no clue who’s gonna win Wimbledon on the women’s side this year.  Linda Noskova, Keys, Jessica Pegula, Karolina Muchova all have a chance.  Why, who knows, the wily Gauff may yet somehow ferret out a third slam title in conditions quite unsuitable for her. 

But if you ask me who I’d like to see holding the winner’s trophy on Saturday, I have an answer now.  Resoundingly, whole heartedly:  Naomi Osaka!  Go for it, champ!

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Serena Williams’ comeback – when two tennis worlds collided

July 1, 2026

Yesterday, royalty or what passes for royalty today was in attendance for a full house on Centre Court at Wimbledon.  Unusual for a first round match, but perhaps not so surprising considering this was Serena Williams’ comeback.  

Yeah, you heard that right, nearly four years after walking away from tennis without quite announcing retirement, Serena Williams returned.  Initially, it had appeared as if she would only be signing up for doubles.  She had shown some sparkle in those doubles events, especially in the match she played alongside Victoria Mboko. 

But…a singles return, right at Wimbledon?  With no singles match time at any of the grass events preceding Wimbledon? For the record, nobody has done this, at least not in a long time. While both Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters did return from lengthy hiatuses, they had announced their singles comeback months in advance and put in the necessary training to shake off the rust and be competitive.  They had also still played non-slam events first before playing a slam tournament. They had also been in their late 20s at the time of their comeback (except, Clijsters made a second comeback in 2020 lasting up to 2022, which was so unsuccessful many casual fans may not even have noticed it!).

Clijsters was 37 in 2020.  Serena ‘retired’ at the age of 41 in 2022, and is three months or so short of 45 now.  Even Djokovic is only 39 and he has been continuously in action. In what world was this going to work?

The sheer incredulity of it may have only served to heighten interest in the match.  It was part-return of an incredible champion of the game and part-curio event.  Could she actually pull this off without embarrassing herself?  There was reason to fear this outcome – her elder sister Venus has, until recently, been getting wildcards at the slams only to lose badly to unheralded players. 

Serena’s opponent for the first salvo of her singles comeback was…a little more complicated than unheralded.  And this is where we get into the collision of two worlds of tennis.

There is the world of casual fans, of people who tune in only for the slams and can usually only recall the names of the top players.  These fans would have ensured fantabulous TV/streaming viewership for yesterday’s match. These fans also, to the latter group’s chagrin, ensure the commercial vitality of the sport.  

And then there is a much smaller minority of fans who track the non-slam events and keep an eye out for upcoming players. Why do they/we do it?  Speaking for myself, I wish I could tell you there was some noble purpose behind it – of ensuring the little guys get their due or some such tosh but there really isn’t other than to say this was one of those hobbies that developed perchance in the mid 20s and which I can’t seem to get rid of.  Blame a NeoSports deal with the WTA that let me watch non slam WTA events for the first time on TV – and notice the Maya Joints of the 2010s.  And then I discovered tennis forums.  And one thing led to another.  

Whatever it may be, noble endeavour or a timesink malaise, those of us in this minority would not have done a double take at the name of Maya Joint.  She had an impressive set of results on her first full year on the tour last year, winning Eastbourne (also grass).  She went into a terrible slump this year, though, having won just one match all year prior to this one, racking up 11 losses.

The Maya Joint I remember from last year used to wear sunglasses that gave her personality a swagger that I found yesterday she was far from possessing without them.  Without sunglasses, her nerves and tension were on her full display. The lack of sunglasses also appeared to weirdly emphasise her relatively diminutive stature when combined with the somewhat frightened/anxious expression on her face. The battle appeared to have been lost before it had even begun, provided Serena could play.  

And for a while, it did look like Serena could play as she began hitting serve speeds lining right up with her averages from her active playing days in no time.  She hit up 123 mph first serves; Elena Rybakina can’t serve any faster than that!

But the rallies didn’t exactly have Serena dominating Joint. Rather, Joint’s compact strokes, perfectly suited to grass, soaked up the pace and on many an occasion, Joint was even the aggressor, hitting clean winners rather than having to wait for a Serena error. 

And then, they flashed the average topspin forehand and backhand speeds of both for the match.  Serena was a whopping 8mph slower than Joint on the forehand and 4mph slower on the backhand.  Serena’s average forehand pace was 66mph.  Impressive even in the high amateur leagues but plainly mediocre and, unfortunately, harmless at the pro level.  No wonder even Joint with her furrowed brows and a recent record that must have left her extremely deficient in confidence was having no problems whatsoever handling Serena’s groundstrokes.

The indomitable spirit of the champion asserted itself in the dying throes of the second set and Serena snatched the set out of Joint’s hands (who had a chance to serve it out at 5-3).  Serena even managed to go up 2-1 in the third set and had game point to consolidate the break and make it 3-1.  And then, she missed an absolute sitting duck of a backhand and 40-30 became deuce.  Thereafter, she was simultaneously as deflated as Joint was revitalised – woken up to the possibility that she could finally secure her second win of the year. 

In the event, Joint won the third set and with it the match, fairly comfortably.  If one had hoped for Serena to have developed some grace or generosity of spirit post-hiatus, post-motherhood and offer a warm hug to her very young opponent (Joint is 20, not even half her age!), there was no such luck.  The same champion’s ego that had propelled Serena to believe in this highly improbable comeback also thwarted her from taking the loss well, at least in the moment.

The post script will have the world of casual fans bemoaning Serena’s loss to a total unknown and muse that Serena’s time is over.  On the latter, I can agree.  It is not Serena’s time anymore, though the outcome of this match would surely encourage her to persevere at least until US Open.  It is Joint’s time.  To repeat, Joint showed promising results last year.  The worst possible outcome from yesterday’s match would have been for Joint to secure a first set lead, have a chance to serve out the second and then not only squander it but melt down and let the match slip away.  The humiliation of winding up loser yet again, only this time on Centre Court in such a high profile encounter, may just have been too much for this young player to take.  Instead, she can hold her head up high and say she finally broke the jinx on Centre Court against Serena. And maybe she can resume the winning habit again, one that she had appeared to possess in good measure last year.

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Wimbledon 2026 – opportunities galore again

June 19, 2026

After a manic Roland Garros, this year’s Wimbledon too holds out the promise of upsets galore and opportunities for dark horses or even the slamless to lay both hands on the coveted trophy.

On the men’s side, the equation is relatively straightforward and I’ll dispense with my thoughts on it in a small para. Two time winner Carlos Alcaraz isn’t gonna play. Defending champion Jannik Sinner was admitted to a hospital after physically collapsing en route his shock defeat at the French Open. He has only just returned to practice. It’s not too much to suppose he would be vulnerable. Novak Djokovic eyes yet another chance to draw level with Roger Federer at Wimbledon, as an eighth title eludes him. But time may be running out and his form too has been up and down. Alexander Zverev, who reaped rich rewards out of the chaos at the French Open, has never gone past the fourth round at Wimbledon. Thus, should Sinner and Djokovic slip again, we may have another first time slam winner on the men’s side at Wimbledon. Are buses and first time slam winners on the men’s side alike? We should find out soon enough.

On the women’s side, it’s a lot, lot more complicated.

Let’s go back to the previous decade. 2017. After a dominant win at the Australian Open, Serena Williams went on a hiatus owing to her pregnancy. When she returned at the 2018 French Open, it became clear that resuming her domination post motherhood wasn’t going to be straightforward. Even so, she made the finals of both Wimbledon and US Open in 2018 and 2019. But she failed to win a set at either of these finals and clearly looked far too slow to keep up with younger opponents – variously, Kerber, Osaka, Halep and Andreescu. Post more disappointing results in 2020 and 2021, she stopped enrolling in singles after Wimbledon 2021 without formally announcing retirement.

The period of her post-pregnancy dip and onwards up to 2022 Australian Open witnessed much volatility on the women’s side. Simona Halep, Sloane Stephens, Naomi Osaka, Ashleigh Barty, Caroline Wozniacki, Bianca Andreescu, Sofia Kenin, Iga Swiatek, Barbora Krecjikova, Jelena Ostapenko and Emma Raducanu all won their first slam titles in this period – 2017 RG to 2022 AO. Of these, only Halep, Osaka and Barty won another slam within this period. All of the other ones won only a slam each during this period and only Swiatek and Krecjikova have more than one slam. Wozniacki retired and Andreescu, Kenin, Stephens, Ostapenko and Raducanu have all made up the inglorious one slam wonder club. A club never as burgeoning, perhaps, as it is now when you consider all of these five players are still active.

Osaka and Barty were the main sources of stability in this period, amassing 7 slams between themselves. Thus, the surprise retirement of Barty post 2022 AO, following on the heels of a noticeable dip in Osaka’s form, led many to worry about how the tour was going to handle this void.

Instead, the period that followed brought back some of the stability of the early-mid 2010s when Serena was still dominant and mostly only a select few – Sharapova, Azarenka, Kvitova and Muguruza, all multiple slam winners – were able to pick up the leftovers. Swiatek’s multi slam 2022 was followed by Aryna Sabalenka finally ending her slam drought. Elena Rybakina won Wimbledon 2022 and added a second slam this year. Coco Gauff made good on early promise in 2023. So, once more, we have a group of players winning multiple slams and frequently pulling off deep runs even in the ones they don’t win. Or, should we say, had?

Because there were renewed signs of volatility at the French Open, volatility that may not be resolved in time for Wimbledon.

Firstly, Sabalenka continues to be an oddly diffident frontrunner. I say odd because the sheer racket she makes with her grunting, screaming and shouting as well as her swagger would all have you believe she relishes the role of top dog. And yet, she keeps fluffing the lines at the slams, usually at the semi or final stage. But at the French Open, she ‘outdid’ herself with an erratic Quarter Final loss to Russian Diana Schnaider. Following the loss, she wondered aloud in frustration if she should quit the game. And so, one is now inclined to discount her strong start at the Berlin Open as any indication of how she will perform at Wimbledon. Even if she performs well per se, it would take a braveheart to bet on her winning the title. A choice that would ordinarily attract the ‘smart money’ based on her track record alone.

Secondly, Rybakina’s form continues to be up and down. After reuniting with controversial coach Stefan Vukov, it appeared her troubles were at an end as she won this year’s Australian Open and went on to win Stuttgart Open on clay (apart from a finals loss at Indian Wells and semis at Miami, both to Sabalenka). But the Stuttgart win masked a decline in her form, which became clearer with early losses at Madrid and Rome. This poor run continued at the French Open, despite her being fancied for the title, and she crashed out in the second round to Starodubtseva. The latest loss at Berlin to Alexandra Eala, following a quarter final loss at Queens to Katie Boulter, once again does not inspire confidence, particularly as both players lack her power level and would usually be liable to be hit off the court by her. But far from being deceptive, her generally languid and low energy body language, may indeed indicate a lack of the proverbial ‘stomach for the fight’. Maybe she is one of those phenomenally talented players who lacks the physical and/or mental resilience to manage the grueling schedule of the tour while still having enough left in the tank for the big bouts at the slams.

Defending champion Swiatek has changed her coach without yet being able to change her trajectory for the better. A dire second set meltdown against Marta Kostyuk accrued only her second fourth round finish at Roland Garros (the previous was in 2019, her first appearance at the tournament!). For a player with six slam titles to her name, she is hampered by a surprising mental brittleness and lack of self belief that makes her unusually vulnerable in matches that get even slightly tricky. It is not feasible to expect every opponent to roll over into meek submission; yet when that doesn’t happen, Swiatek appears liable to panic and throw it all away, even after winning the first set.

As for Gauff, Wimbledon has never been a happy hunting ground for her, despite it being the venue where she first made a splash in 2019.

This leaves this year’s French Open champion Mirra Andreeva, who made the quarter finals at Wimbledon last year, and…a wide open field.

Yup, the ‘oligopolic stability’ of the women’s tour of recent years that I have referred to previously may not make an appearance at this year’s Wimbledon. Whether this stability is already a thing of the past, only time will tell. But this year’s Wimbledon is, once more, wide open and somebody enjoying a run of great form for two weeks may just be able to romp to the title.

Indeed, this tournament is perfectly set up for the kind of ‘ambush’ Raducanu has dreamed of repeating, after her 2021 US Open triumph. A tournament with the favourites underperforming, leading to a relatively easy run to the title for the one who lasts seven matches. We have seen so little of Raducanu this year that even the fact that it’s now nearly five years since her lone slam and title win may not hinder such an ambush strategy.

Does that necessarily mean she’s gonna pull it off, though? I wouldn’t bet on it. Surely, surely, the tour has seen quite enough by now to know that her apparently spectacular power requires wide open spaces to materialize whereas, trapped in a cage down the middle, she can be rather underpowered and liable to get hit off the court.

But does that rule out another player pulling off a Raducanu at Wimbledon and unexpectedly making it to the final? No, especially since we saw Maja Chwalinska do exactly that at the French Open. And will it again be Andreeva standing in the way of the imposter, unleashing another master class in elite level tennis to restore order after the chaos? Maybe.

We shall see. But, TL DR, expect the unexpected at this year’s Wimbledon, on both tours.

P.S: By some devilish coincidence, Serena is back again and has received a wildcard for Wimbledon as well. But for doubles! Does she feel she is not yet ready for singles or has motherhood made her a bit too magnanimous to salivate at the prospect of, say, shocking a nerve-wracked Swiatek en route to another Wimbledon? As of now, likely to be the former, but watch out, ladies, the Queen is back, so glue your wigs on tight!

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Ilayaraja – Valiant – first movement breakdown

June 7, 2026

I had reviewed Ilayaraja’s symphony Valiant in Feb, before its release on digital platforms. At that time, I could not use video links on youtube and post timestamps to refer to specific moments in the work. So…now that it has been released, I thought it would be interesting to do a breakdown of the first movement.

The first movement (Journey) has a purpose and intensity that appears to dissipate in subsequent movements (until, the fourth and last movement, Triumph, comes across more as a procession of related ideas). This intensity derives from its adherence to sonata form – it has a first subject, second subject, development and recapitulation.

But what is sonata form? I am sure you’ve been hearing people throw around this term with reference to symphonies and are puzzled by what it means. I was too until not so long ago, so you have company. I am linking the wiki article on sonata form here, but below is also a short description of sonata form.

The general rule is the first movement of a symphony must adhere to sonata form. Sonata form is a structure wherein musical sections typically follow one another in the below sequence:

Intro: Optional. Some composers may tack on some intro music, usually an adagio (slow music) of sorts, before they get to the exposition.

Exposition – One or two themes/subjects are introduced here. Beethoven preferred to introduce two subjects set in opposing keys to establish contrast.

Exposition Repeat – Optional but frequently used where either the first or the second subject or both are repeated. This reinforcement helps the listener get completely familiar with the ideas that are about to explored in greater detail.

Development – Either the first or the second subject or both are now explored. They may be transposed to different keys, the rhythm may undergo changes or the orchestration may be changed with each iteration. Or it may be a combination of all of these approaches.

Recapitulation – Where we return to the first/second subject stated as they were in the exposition. But this is not strictly necessary. The important thing is for the music to return to the tonic/home key. So composers may choose to write the recapitulation more artfully where the music thus returning ‘home’ brings the sense of recapitulation to bear to listeners without them having to listen to a repetition of earlier material.

Coda – Sometimes, the composer may add a conclusion/ending after the recapitulation.

Before I break down Valiant’s first movement using the above framework, let me do a similar breakdown for the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no.5. It’s quite a textbook example of sonata form and the sheer economy of material is also marvellous.

The first movement lasts up to 7:20 in this clip. Yeah, that’s it. For a symphony that marks a transition from the Classical to the Romantic Era, Beethoven’s Fifth is surprisingly concise.

Anyway, the movement starts off with the first subject. The famous descending progression you may have heard at least on ringtones if not in other contexts!

By 0:45, he is done with the first subject. With a lovely chord change, we have moved from a minor key first subject to a major key second subject.

By 1:28, we are into the exposition repeat.

At 2:56, we enter the development. On the surface, this sounds a lot like the first subject but listen carefully and the music has moved into a different key. There are also subtle variations in how essentially the same material is now performed. These variations help to set up the introduction of new material at 3:19 as the music builds up in intensity, sounding like insistent door knocks at 3:24. Beethoven masterfully brings the temperature right down by 3:50.

Another swell by 4:10 sets up the recapitulation. The music amps up in intensity, letting you believe the end is near (but is it?).

Second subject recapitulation at 5:10. Now listen very carefully as he is about to trick you! The recapitulation proceeds as expected and then at 5:50, the music builds up where you expected it to stop and the insistent door knock from the development returns. By 6:10, we are into a very Bach-like counterpoint section. This builds into a mini climax by 6:25.

The first subject returns for the last time at 6:55. With another sleight of hand, another chord change, Beethoven ends the movement on a note that suggests the threat is far from banished.

As brilliant as this movement (and the whole symphony) is, though, unfortunately music as brilliant and yet as concise as this can only be written once in the annals of civilization. If they weren’t carefully notated for posterity (with a million recordings made since the advent of recording technology), it would be possible to forget such a composition exists and re-use these ideas as is but that option is not available to all who succeeded Beethoven.

Ilayaraja, accordingly, takes a different approach, one that hews closer to Beethoven’s late-contemporary Schubert. Schubert’s approach wasn’t so much about taking a riff (which is what the descending chord motif is, in a manner of speaking) and rotating it inside out. He instead came up with two themes that were related harmonically but wouldn’t sound very much like each other on the surface. The development would consist of extending or contracting the melody line of these themes and rhythmic and timbral transformations. In a sense, this was actually more like Mozart/Haydn than Beethoven. But it wasn’t exactly going back in time as this music was more expansive than Mozart/Haydn. There were significant pauses between sections within a movement; the music was thus organised in blocks. Schubert’s last symphony, no.9, is a great example of this approach:

With all that said, now let’s get to Valiant movement 1 – The Journey. And it is indeed quite a journey. The title given to the movement, not a practice universally followed even by Romantic Era composers, is not a pretentious appendage. It is quite apt as the movement does evoke the sense of a journey. This is not journey as in a road or train trip but a life journey and has the arc of a ‘hero’s journey’ – triumphs are followed by setbacks followed by revivals. This alternation of positive and negative emotions is perfect for a first-second subject minor-major alternation and that’s what Raja does.

There is no intro music in The Journey. Raja starts off with the first subject. It consists of two ideas – an underlying dark riff played on violins on top of which the woodwind plays a melody. The subject itself is lengthy compared to Beethoven’s no.5; it’s more akin to Beethoven’s own 9th symphony. There is even a mini climax at 1:30 and the music then continues for 30 odd seconds until the second subject is introduced at 2:15. At 2:25 is where the subject properly begins transitioning into a major key. Notice that the melody played on the violins subtly overlaps with Indian melody. There are no gamakams and yet there is a character here familiar from Raja’s film work. This is beautifully done.

Exposition repeat at 3:19 starting with the first subject. Second subject appears to repeat at 4:40, but Raja smoothly transitions into the development now.

Interestingly, the development transitions slowly out of the major key. The sense of a threat appears to loom but the music is beguilingly gentle and lulls us almost into ennui. And then at 5:30, boom! This is where the composition really takes off. The sense of a threat builds and builds up to 5:50, whereupon, lo and behold, the music turns happy again. At 5:58, it’s almost like when I was in a helicopter flying over Victoria falls and felt like I could almost touch the mist (which rises up really, really high when the falls are in peak flow). The music that follows is an artful re-arrangement of the second subject. This is referred to as thematic transformation in classical music and Raja now uses this technique to the hilt. As delightful as this passage is, it is also rhythmically complex.

At 6:38, beautiful counterpoint plays as a sort of wistfully happy idea (again, familiar from his background scores) plays. At 7:00, the intensity swells as the first of a few triumphant crescendos plays at 7:05 (the violin accompaniment to the triumphant brass is, again, vintage Raja). These crescendos are more epic than they are forceful and evoke a cinematic flavour. But by cinematic here, I mean more like a Hollywood score, like a triumphant John Williams motif, not Indian background scores.

The music builds up to an even bigger crescendo at 7:33. This then sets up the return of the first subject briefly. There’s then a return of the Vic falls-esque raindrops at 8:40). All is comfortingly happy until at 9:20 the mood darkens as he reuses a brass melody from the 6:00 or so mark. At 9:35, the dark mood gets Brucknerian as big brass booms. It’s a bit too smooth and orderly for me to say the brass evokes Tchaikovsky or Mahler.

Another artful chord change at 9:55 and we are into a very baroque counterpoint section, albeit more Vivaldi than Bach! This is the most European, most distinctly classical sounding portion of the movement and yet the way Raja gets into it is so Raja. It doesn’t feel as sudden as it should even though nothing apparently set up this counterpoint section. The counterpoint section is followed by a recapitulation of the second subject.

Happy days are apparently at an end, though, as a storm appears to ruffle the sea waters at 11:22. Brief respite at 11:40 with another very Raja-esque violin section. At 11:59, an abrupt boom! As if bookending the happy phase of the movement. The riff of the first subject returns followed by the brass playing the riffs. The violins now sound very angry, like the Bay of Bengal in a storm. This builds and builds through insistent repetition where the phrases are shortened to increase the frequency of repetition (a Tchaikovsky-esque device). A violin theme where anxiety is mixed with sorrow plays as we return to a restatement of the first subject to lead on to the coda.

The coda begins at 15:10. This again is cinematic in nature. There is booming brass and sweeping violins but the music isn’t necessarily forceful in the way classical music can often be (as I am sure the Beethoven sample has given you a taste of). After a grave cello theme, there is what sounds like portamento as the music ends with a bang. This is followed by a brief, downtempo, sparse theme played on violins with what sounds like harp in the background. It’s like an ‘intermezzo’ – music connecting two movements, in this case connecting the first movement with the second.

In my opinion, the coda isn’t all that. For a great coda, try the one that brings to an end the first movement of Brahms’ Symphony no.4. Or, of course, the other Beethoven symphonies – the one that ends the first movement of the Ninth is brilliant too.

But it’s only a slight letdown at the end of a very sumptuous and satisfying movement that made me have to listen over and over to work out the many forms in which he presented the material from the second subject. If all of Valiant was as good as the first movement, this would be one of the great Romantic symphonies (at least in the 21-50 breakdown if not quite top 20) and I say that with no hyperbole. Even otherwise, this movement alone compels us to engage seriously with Valiant and not dismiss it as a vanity project or unfulfilled old dream of an aging composer. If nothing else, Raja has shown that an Indian composer not trained in Western conservatories can engage with their classical music, in its textbook form and not partaking of the more avant garde ideas of the 20th century, and pass the test with flying colours.

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French Open 2026 women’s final – normal service after a fortnight of tumult

June 6, 2026

This year’s French Open tournament appeared to be intent on demonstrating why it was France that gave Le Pink Panther to the world! Nothing seemed to follow the script, the pre-tournament expectations.

I won’t dwell too much on the men’s side where, variously, Carlos Alcaraz withdrew pre-tournament (and won’t play Wimbledon as well!), Jannik Sinner lost to Francisco Cerundolo and Novak Djokovic to Joao Fonseca. Fonseca also beat past finalist Casper Ruud and just as the pundits began to talk him up as the possible winner, lost to Jakub Mensik! Who has since lost to Alexander Zverev, who will contest his fourth slam final to date. And, on current form, looks likely to cap the tumult with an expected, predictable win.

That’s what unfolded today in the women’s final. Which was similarly tumultuous. Elena Rybakina’s scintillating pre-tournament form amounted to nought as she appeared to run of steam in unusually hot conditions, having perhaps played a bit too much tennis in attempting to take the no.1 ranking from Aryna Sabalenka. Iga Swiatek’s green shoots of optimism under the tutelage of Francisco Roig (and occasional mentoring by Rafael Nadal himself!) proved not yet tall enough too. And just when it looked all set up for Sabalenka to earn a well deserved non-hard court slam title, she blew it from an ascendant position in the second set against Russian Diana Shnaider. This set up the not very highly ranked Shnaider to play qualifier Maja Chwalinska for a place in the final. That the Pole should have so heavily outperformed compatriot Swiatek was already a surprise but she went on to dazzle the crowd with a consummate display of guile and craft not often seen anymore in the power-packed game of today, particularly in the hyper-aggressive women’s game which partakes of much fewer long rallies than the men’s side.

Prior to this tournament, Chwalinska hadn’t gone further in a slam than second round at Wimbledon in 2022. Her only other main draw finish was at the Australian Open in 2025. As if this was even possible, she was even more of an outlier than Emma Raducanu at the US Open 2021 (who was coming off a round of 16 finish at Wimbledon). At least Raducanu had the ‘excuse’ of having only just really got into pro tennis (after juniors) that very year to account for the lack of slam mileage. Chwalinska is 24. For her to seemingly catch the tour unawares was even more unexpected than what Raducanu did at the USO.

Not surprisingly, then, the buzz started in full swing as to whether Chwalinska would/could emulate Raducanu’s feat and become the second qualifier in the Open Era to win a slam title. The merits of her case vis a vis Raducanu too were prematurely debated. After all, Raducanu had benefited from an ultra fast US Open surface that year and light balls; this, coupled with her opponents being entirely unaccustomed to her allowed her to blitz past them before they could even find their range against her. There are no hiding places on clay, so Chwalinska had to win by slowing things way down, using a lot of loopy topspin (some would say, moonballs), drops and lobs. It was like being transported via a time machine to a time we had assumed long past – to the long rallies of, say, Borg-Vilas, Wilander-Lendl or Bruguera-Berasategui at this very venue. Thus, fans reassured themselves that even if Chwalinska won over Mirra Andreeva in the final, it would not reflect badly on the tour as the former had earned her wins through sheer grit and imaginative use of the conditions.

But such pre-emptive handwringing proved unnecessary. Chwalinska’s young Russian opponent (Andreeva is still only 19) is a name tennis fans are much, much more familiar with than the Pole and for good reason. Andreeva won Dubai and Indian Wells last year when she wasn’t yet 18. She has been marked out as a ‘future champion’ since then. And the hype had even appeared to weigh her down as her form had deteriorated in the second half of the 2025 season and she had only just begun to put together a resurgence this year.

But Andreeva was not to be denied today. If some of the other players in the top 10 like pace and like not having to think at all as they set up their shots on the go, Andreeva thrives more and more when there is less and less pace to work with. The more time you give her, the more she can think through her options to carefully choose the best one and the more time she has to use exquisite footwork to set up her shots and swing through with a lustrous finish.

Indeed, with Andreeva (not exactly a giraffe herself at 5 ft 9 inch) appearing to tower over the petite Chwalinska as the former danced gracefully around the court to fire brutal winners with a clean finish on both forehand and backhand, one could not help admire her technique in striking contrast to Chwalinska’s more unorthodox stroke production. All Chwalinska’s canniness as well as her admirable resolve and fight didn’t stand a chance against sheer, consummate technical mastery combined with a champion’s patience and astute reading of the conditions. Not even missing out the chance to serve it out at the first time of asking dented Andreeva’s hopes as she stepped on the gas and broke Chwalinska’s serve instead and wrapped it up 6-3 6-2.

And…come to think, isn’t that how it should be? What do we really engage with pro sport for? Its pure entertainment value may have sufficed in an analog age (when in India, in particular, most middle class TV sets could only play a dozen or so channels!) that offered not a whole lot of other options on the idiot box, but that’s hardly the case anymore. There’s literally so much else you could do to while away a weekend evening. You could even just watch videos posted by popular amateur players-cum-youtubers like Winston Du. And many people do exactly that; on occasion, these videos receive higher viewership than some of the highlights videos posted on the WTA handle!

No, you don’t have to watch the French Open final if you only want to be entertained. There are also no guarantees in sport – a much awaited final can turn out to be a damp squib if it turns into a one sided romp favouring one player. But what tennis at the slam final level offers you is a glimpse at sporting endeavour at the highest level and its fascinating intersection with aesthetics.

Why exactly does technically perfect stroke production in tennis also often end up looking pretty to watch (note, I say often, so this covers the exceptions!)? I am an amateur tennis player and having put in considerable effort to learn and execute tennis strokes over 10 years or so, I am none the wiser. But it applies even at the amateur level. You are only able to get away for much longer and get much higher up the ladder within an amateur distribution of skill with unorthodox technique. But the best players are often also wonderful to watch and this, somehow, is as true at Harare Sports Club on Saturday morning as it is at Philippe Chatrier Court on Saturday/Sunday afternoon. And this is also true for a lot of sports, generally. Nominally, teenage cricket sensation Vaibhav Suryavanshi is just playing the see ball/ hit ball version that prizes raw power over aesthetics and yet, his transfer of weight, complete with swivel, as he pulls the best bowlers in the world for mighty sixes is still beautiful to watch.

I am sure the answer has something to do with biomechanics and that not being my bailiwick, I shall have to bail out of that conversation. But the outcome – the best athletes in the world looking graceful as ballet dancers as they go about their business – is what the business end of slams serves up for you and perhaps this tournament taught us to savour that a bit more than we do. A little bit of chaos is fun to break up the ennui a procession of predictable results generates. Perhaps, we have seen Sabalenka a bit too often in slam finals (though it’s a pity she still doesn’t have that Roland Garros trophy); perhaps we don’t really want to see Swiatek become the Nadal of the women’s draw and establish that kind of a chokehold over the tournament. Runs like Chwalinska’s serve to interrupt the monotony and remind us once in a while of the beautiful uncertainty of sport.

But too much chaos can throw things out of gear. Especially in the women’s game which, in our manosphere age, appears to permanently attract a group of naysayers forever having an axe to grind against the ladies. The last 3-4 years, starting from 2022, have banished the extreme unpredictability approaching randomness that had beset women’s tennis in the late 2010-s coming up to 2021. Culminating in fact in the Raducanu-Leylah Fernandez USO final. And as entertaining as both’s runs had been, when neither go on to back up that run (Fernandez to a lesser extent as she did manage a quarterfinal run at the French Open later), it’s a gift for the detractors, something with which to keep taunting the tour even as Sabalenka, Rybakina, Swiatek and Coco Gauff between them have stabilized the tour. As much as a Chwalinska win would have warmed many a heart and rightly so (I wanted her to win too, for the record), it would have also re-ignited the debate. Unfairly, perhaps, as it’s now nearly 5 years since that USO final but for those who have already written off the women’s tour in their head, every instance, however far apart and however aberrational, will do.

Fortunately, Andreeva stepped up to complete the assignment her higher ranked peers had flunked this time of asking. She showed the hype around her had been well deserved. This was not a surprise win but more of a coronation. Not as queen, at least not as long as Sabalenka remains in the hunt, but at least as princess, as the one to the manor born. And she did it not streakily, not huffing past the finish line as she made heavy weather of a much lower ranked opponent, but in style as she gave a masterful exhibition of tennis of the highest level. As if to say, the fun and games were over and normal service had been restored. Whether this is the first of many to come we shall see but in restoring a more predictable narrative – that of young star rising to the occasion and winning the biggest prize – Andreeva also reassured the tennis world that all was well with the (tennis) world again; that this French Open hadn’t quite upended everything.

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What makes Western music different from Indian – through the lens of Valiant and a Shreya Ghoshal pop cover

June 2, 2026

Western and Indian music are sort of like brothers from another mother. On the surface, there is much convergence on melody. We have ragas using seven keys just like Western scales (and are not solely dependent on pentatonic scales). We also use flat/sharps between whole notes so that we play with twelve tones in total, again just like ‘them’.

And yet…any cursory perusal of music from both forms makes the differences readily apparent. Forget large scale orchestral works, here’s a song mostly dependent on guitar from R&B, followed by a film song built around guitar. They are clearly not very similar at all:

Mind, this is film music, so it’s already a hybrid aka closer to Western music. Needless to say, you would not use a repeating guitar figure in Carnatic/Hindustani music.

But even this hybrid version that blends elements of Indian and Western is fundamentally Indian and therefore nothing like the Stevie Wonder example. So why is this?

You may or may not be surprised to know Sunit Tandon, whom readers of a certain vintage or older may recall from Doordarshan days as a newsreader, is a Western classical aficionado and he has given some answers here – mainly focusing on Western music incorporating many instruments (or at least an ensemble even in ‘lighter’ forms like blues/jazz/rock) and it being centred on harmony rather than melody:

But that is a more technical answer focusing on the elements with which the music is constructed. That doesn’t make it wrong. My contention, rather, is even people who don’t think about harmony at all can immediately tell Western apart from Indian. One reason for this is the language. But even if you played Western instrumental guitar, say blues on slide guitar by Derek Trucks, followed by Vishwa Mohan Bhatt playing Hindustani on slide guitar, a lay listener would still tell them apart. So what accounts for that?

I always say music is the most visceral of arts. You observe a painting at leisure to understand and appreciate. A book gives you plot, characters and words. Again, you read, comprehend and decipher its meaning. In cinema, things happen much faster but it’s also audiovisual with the greatest verisimilitude to life, so it’s easier to understand and follow. Music, especially once stripped of words, is entirely abstract and yet people who may not even have a sense of pitch are able to follow it and fall in love with it. One of the wonders of the world, as Steven Wilson ruefully observed.

Ergo, what differentiates Indian from Western fundamentally is also visceral at base.

Two examples of recent vintage gave me some insights into some of these visceral differences.

First and a rather innocuous example – a Shreya Ghoshal cover of Coldplay’s Fix You.

I am not a Coldplay fan. I wear not attending their India tour with eye-watering ticket prices as a badge of honour and you can call me pompous, snobbish, jerk, whatever you please for that and I shall still stand by it. I am generally not fond of whiny Britpop vocals and make no exception for Chris Martin. On the other hand, Shreya Ghoshal is one of my favourite singers and, like many other Indian listeners, I consider her a worthy successor to the legacy of the Mangeshkar sisters.

With that preamble, let me say that she made rather heavy weather of this Coldplay song! I had to admit, with a heavy heart, that Martin was heaps better on this song. This has nothing to do with the original being embedded in my head; I hadn’t even heard the original Coldplay song prior to this.

So what made the difference?

It’s a very simple but fundamental difference in their approach to singing.

In Indian music, we punctuate every single count of the beat. Rhythmic adherence is expected to be absolute. An odd harkat or two might extend longer than the others but the usual practice is to absolutely punch in every note right on the beat. That’s why the practice of using a hand motion to maintain beat is commonly used by our singers.

Western sense of rhythm is, I dare say, a little more evolved. For a more objective and neutral descriptor, I would say it is more flexible. It is absolutely ok to overrun the beat within a line of verse just as long as you aren’t going out of time. You can stretch a word or syllable or you may compress as you see fit just as long as you’re landing up in time. Here’s a great example of this kind of singing from a singer who isn’t really more technically accomplished than Shreya. As such, I would not consider Corrine Drewery as accomplished as Shreya. But her mastery over this style of singing is, nevertheless, in another league while Shreya comes across as deeply unfamiliar with a style of singing she may have believed, on the surface, to be adjacent enough to ours.

It may surprise you to hear this, but this sense of time is deep rooted in Western and informs even Western classical music. Does that sound formidable to you – to have a large scale orchestra playing all together (what is called a tuti section in formal terms) and still maintain a loose rather than robotically precise sense of time? Yeah…well, that’s basically what makes Western classical so hard to perform. Listen from 39:10, the adjustments the musicians make as the tempo and/or rhythm keep transforming are phenomenal:

Even right after this, the same phrase is played twice at 39:29 but the second iteration is slightly slower than the first. This is not a mistake, it’s an effect. This is what lends Western classical its surprisingly free sense of time. It’s not free free, because you can’t have an ensemble playing however they wish individually without the music falling apart. It’s a sense of free-ness that adds a layer of unpredictability to the music, even their classical music, even when it’s a traditionalist like Brahms.

To this, they add another element that is much more pronounced in usage than in Indian music – dynamic range (aka notes played softly or loudly or everything in between for effect). Western classical even uses notation to emphasise this quality – pianissimo for the softest phrases and fortissimo for the loudest ones.

Here’s Dvorak Symphony 7. Contrast the piannissimo at 3:00 (so soft you may have to strain to hear it if the ambient noise is too much) with the rousing fortissimo at 8:50. If you’re hearing this the ‘right’ way, the fortissimo should be pushing you back with the sudden injection of force:

For contrast, here’s the first movement of Valiant. I am not putting timestamps because even the loudest moments don’t approach the jump-scare effect of the above fortissimo nor does the music get pin-drop soft at any point:

I think this example really drives the point home. There isn’t really anybody in our film world who understands Western music more deeply than Raja. He has been the most successful in straddling both worlds – Indian and Western – simultaneously and conjuring up moments of stunning synthesis of the two with a beguiling ease, almost at will. Even so…even his DNA is, naturally, fundamentally Indian. He doesn’t quite go where they do. Or…does/did he?

For here’s Thedum Kanpaarvai:

The soft but menacing violin interjections to the pallavi evoke for me the quiet flute part that opens the fourth movement of Brahms’ Symphony 4 (at 31:35 in the video earlier up in the article) – quiet but filled with immense and frightening tension, as if containing an explosion with the greatest effort. Should he have perhaps written the symphony back then, in the mid-late 80s? Maybe…all water under the bridge now.

Yes, tension is a very, very key aspect of Western music. Where we emphasise tranquility and sonority, they seek catharsis. And nothing delivers catharsis better than creating and exploding/releasing tension.

But what is tension? It’s best described viscerally – the notes rubbing against each other as if angry to have each other’s company rather than flowing like a river. It’s most often found in riffs, whether or not played on guitar.

Here’s another example from Swing Out Sister. At the 0:50 mark, the bassline plays a very insistent riff just as Corinne gets into “But if you fall…” and the moment she does, a reassuring piano chord progression plays, releasing the tension.

Maestro Ilayaraja’s usage of tension in our film music is particularly special as he deployed it way more often and to more telling effect than any of his predecessors, and this is not hyperbole. Here’s an example of it at 1:43 in Oru Kadhal Enbadhu, as the initially happy sounding flute gives way to a…not gloomy, not dark but an impassioned string section:

There’s one last dimension that separates their music from ours. It was less prevalent in classical music (or at least used in a different manner to how we understand it today) but has come to occupy paramount importance in blues/rock/jazz. Flavour. That is, you don’t just play a set of notes plainly…you play them with a particular accent, emphasis or style and the notes then become a lick.

It’s rather difficult to describe a lick in words, but listen to the opening of Stevie Wonder’s Superstition. If the Fender Rhodes opening was not played with so much flavour, it would not, to put succinctly, kick ass.

Needless to say, Raja does similarly capture a sense of flavour in the parts written for, particularly, guitar and keyboard. RD Burman took the first major strides in the direction of writing licks, transforming Western instrumental parts from just parts adding ornamentation to something that spoke to the audience and conveyed raw emotion. But an example of pre-RD writing highlights how Western instrumentation tended to evoke ‘stylishness’ and sophistication rather than a raw mood before his time. Like the stylish Raat Ke Humsafar:

So…to sum it up – looser sense of time, dynamic range, tension and flavour. These are the aspects that inform much of Western music – right from classical to R&B/soul. Another way to put it could be that our classical music explores what all note combinations you could come up with in a given raga formation whereas their music explores what can be done with the notes. Thus, Western always has a bias towards drama, which may also be why tragic and angry pieces of music are celebrated more than lyrical and sunny ones. We don’t necessarily have this bias for tragedy and that, again, is because our music prizes sonority.

Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

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