One song at a time - 38. Vaishaka Sandhye / Mainakam

(Shyam)

Each of us has a gripe about what is missing in film music these days. Lack of melody, lack of good poetry, lack of good voices, lack of natural instruments and much more. While I too miss all of these, one thing which I miss, especially in Hindi and Telugu film songs is the sense of ordinariness in song picturisation.

In earlier days, there were lot of songs whose picturisation was nothing but a capture of the ordinary lives led by its protagonists. This would come as a nice relief against the running around the trees and frolicking type of songs. Think about the picturisation of songs in movies of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar, Basu Chatterjee and others and you will immediately understand what I say. Nowadays this aspect has completely vanished from Hindi and Telugu movies. Every song is lavishly mounted. Even if you have to cry, it will against a backdrop of half a dozen dances wearing colour coordinated skimpy dresses. The music accordingly has become very loud and only helps in accentuating the garishness of the scene. While most of the modern Tamil movie songs fall in this category, there are a few village based movies wherein we get to see some ordinariness. Malayalam films have somehow retained this aspect even now though the pull towards the Telugu garishness is quite high in Malluland nowadays.

Today let us hear one Malayalam song which captures the lives of two people in the city of Madras. The songs captures very simple day to day incidents from their lives. This song, 'vaishaka sandhye' is from the movie 'Nadodikkattu'. Music is by Shyam. During the 80s, Shyam, who is from Madras, came to the Malayalam film world and gave some lovely numbers which are still favourites with the Malayalis. This song has a very nice flow and Jesudas sings it very well. Shyam, who worked with Salil Choudary, has a good sense for orchestration and you can see how much the orchestration adds to the song. This song was later used in a Tamil by Shyam himself Chandrabose (thanks to my friends Raj and Inbavaana for pointing out the error) but somehow that did not capture my imagination as this song did. Shobana looks so very simple and charming. Mohanlal does his part very well. A lovely tune and nice picturisation.

I now give you another lovely song composed by Shyam and sung wonderfully by Janaki from the movie 'Trishna'. This was a super duper hit song in Kerala and people remember it fondly even to this day. In the structure of the song and the orchestration you clearly see the deep impact Salilda had on Shyam. You could almost mistake this song for a Salilda song!!