I borrowed John Keats’ lines to describe what I feel towards some of my favourite songs in Tamil cinema. I often marvel at the lyricist’s ability to capture some pure emotions.
Most of my favourite songs fall on either end of the emotional spectrum: an admiration for someone or pain at the thought of that admiration not being reciprocated. It’s rather intriguing for me personally because I have spent very little time on either end of those and have largely been a content fellow. The artists perhaps are motivated strongly by these extreme motions.
Someday, I hope to find a song that’s in the middle of that spectrum, an ode to normalcy, perhaps?
This rambling was triggered by a new activity I’ve picked up of late. I have been listening to a lot of the songs from the 90s and 2000s while I do my dishes at night, with the noise cancellation of the modern-day headphones nicely shutting off the sounds of the water hitting the vessels. Some songs are so wonderful that they make me long for more dishes to be present when I’m done, which is when I decide to head to the balcony and listen to some of these songs while I gaze at all the construction being done around the concrete jungle I live in.
One such song is “Unmai Sonnal Nesipaya” which falls in the infatuation end of the spectrum, and it is brilliantly penned by Vairamuthu, and sung with equal elan by Adnan Sami (Who I recently discovered is from Pakistan and doesn’t speak a single word of Tamil, naturally) and Sujatha, with music being composed by the Mozart of Madras, AR Rahman.
Here it goes:
