One song at a time - 28. Kalala Alalapai
(Gulebakavali Katha) In the last post I spoke about Jaidev, whose talent was not given its due by the film industry. But we have to be thankful that he is still remembered by the connoisseurs today. In certain other unfortunate cases, the song remains in public memory but the memory of the creators has totally slipped into oblivion. One such case is what I will be talking about today. I first heard the song, 'kalala alalapai', during my hostel days. Those were the days when my room mate Siva and I would have the radio on continuously and keep searching for one station or the other to listen to songs. Other than the usual suspects like 'Vividh Bharathi', we would also tune into Radio Ceylon, which would play Telugu songs. (The role of Radio Ceylon in propagating Indian music is enormous. A big book needs to be written about it.) The signal of Radio Ceylon was never strong and so most of the music we heard on that channel was combined with noise. Inspite of that, we use...