1978 - 1992 - Absolute Favorites - INTRO

What was it about music and movies? Why were they so inextricably linked with lives of people in India, especially from my generation? Was it because they were the only outlet for entertainment available to people of that era? Or was it because role models, thinkers, and movers and shakers, often emerged from those fields? Did the age-old song-and-dance tradition prevalent in our country, since the age of our paatan-muppattan have a role to play in it? Or did the Darwinian (or whateverian) impulse to respond to aural and visual stimulations sway our eyes and ears? Just what is it?

Music - and movies as an extension (or was it the other way around?) - has been an integral part of my mental maturation and expression, since the time I acquired a cognition about self and surroundings. (with so many 'tions' in one sentence, I came close to the legendary T Rajendar dialog in 'Oru Vasantha Geetham'. Click here for a sneak peek of the epic court scene). 

Music has been the foremost among my personal smritis that has taught me things; has sparked ideas, helped dissolve sorrows, and made me laugh and cry.  My ethical and aesthetic compasses have lurched, my mind has jolted, my heart has melted, and my skin goose-bumped to beautiful songs and movies. 

Not just that. Songs and films have been indelible mile-markers and fog lights that I have used to ride the tempest of life. I don't remember what I studied in third standard but I recall the songs and films that inspired me then. I remember the 'Gitanjali' numbers that I listened to when I didn't do my final Maths exam well in twelfth. The 'Raja Rajadhi Rajan' that we sang after an election victory in college still lingers in my mind. The songs that my wife and I listened to during our honeymoon, the lullaby that I sang to my daughter, the last movie that my dad and I saw, are all fresh in my mind like they happened yesterday. Is this how it works for everyone? I don't know.

1978 was an interesting year in my life. I was in first standard. It was perhaps the first year that I began to acquire a discerning sense of awareness for the finer pursuits of life: music, movies, drama, cricket, paper-roast dosa, rose milk (my favorite drink ever), and sundry.

I can distinctly recall the exhilaration that I felt when I heard a song from 'Priya' or 'Sattam en kayil' (The Law Is In My Hands) or the trauma that I experienced when I saw my matinee idol, an up-and-coming Rajnikanth, being beaten up by the pot-bellied thespian of three-hundred movies, Sivaji Ganesan (more on that later).

Through this series, let me embark on the journey of capturing my absolute favorites between the years, 1978 and 1993, in the backdrop of what was happening in my life.

>> 1978 - 1. NINAIVAALE