Rendezvous

Usually the word rendezvous is associated with an unexpected meeting with a person. In this context, I am going to use it to denote my unexpected stumbling upon things I had been looking for a long time in the past and eventually given up. It was so incidental that I happened to solve four of them in a short span of time in the recent past.

1. The Prayer Song:

Boston School Nandanam had lots of prayer songs for morning assembly. I still remember them intact. However, there used to be one Pillayar song that was reserved for opening part of special occasions. I had carried along the first two lines in my memory - but was looking for its full version for a very long time in the past. It didn't strike me for long that I could actually search for these songs online. Thanks to YouTube, I was able to locate that full song, albeit sung in a different ragam (Hamsadhwani) than that prayer type. This rendition is by a French national and hence adds more beauty to how it is sung.

Kalainirai Ganapathi saranam saranam

2. The Ultimate Mesmeriser:

Shazam to the rescue this time! Shazam is really a cool app for one's mobile. Just allow it to listen to a song and it fetches the complete song information for you! Once I was really mesmerised by an Abirami musical song, sung by an unknown divine voice, while I was in Karaneeswarar Koil. It was a lengthy song intertwined with a list of all Sivan koils including the 274 Dhevara Koils. One Shazam and I was able to identify the song as ''Sivaya nama yena sindhippom" sung by Rahul. The drawback in Shazam is that it does not fetch any results from YouTube. But, I copy/ pasted the result text string in YT and was able to get the link readily!

Sivaya nama yena

3. The Punnagavarali:

I should agree that this was one of the easy-but-difficult type things to find out. I remember watching one paambu movie in Tamil, where the story line was actress Sithara offering her daughter as a gift to a paambu (Nagadevathai) and the paambu taking a lady's form to get the daughter from her. This film features a very good small piece of song in Punnagavarali ragam. I was able to clearly remember the second line onwards, "uchanthalaiyile ulla varaiyile minnidum manikka jothi, adiye yen vannakodi, naan yaaru kandupidi". Sithara will try to switch off a TV but still the paambu lady will appear in the screen and continue her song. I had given up my search years ago as I did not know the first line, but then it stuck me, "why not ask friends in my whatsapp groups?". I initially checked with my friend Nikhil who is a fan of Sithara, he couldn't recall any. And then there came another friend, Sampath Kumar, who was able to recollect the movie and share its Kannada link! A YouTube search for a similar movie resulted in the exact Tamil song I was looking for!! Watch from 06:20 to 07:20 in this clip.

Paambu song

4. My first stage appearance:

My first stage appearance was when I was studying 1st standard. I got a role of a Doctor in a group nursery rhyme. All I remember was the rhyme had the words "operation, operation" and I had a big (cardboard) saw in my hand and performed an operation on another fellow student. My joy knew no bounds when my son was casually singing a rhyme in the same ragam but with different words. I caught him immediately and asked him to sing it fully for me - voila! It was the same song. The doctor paragraph was one in that song. Decades after decades, the same song is still being taught in for the same 1st standard students!!

Found a peanut