Fiddler par excellence...

In an enormous ocean called music of seemingly endless boundaries, a tide came, a low one at that and literally swept me away with its aural grandeur... I was witness to one of the more exhilarating and amazing experiences in recent times and for some time to come... If a novice could consume it in all its glory in such a short span, I can imagine the joy of purists...

Age, form, stage and just about nothing seemed to come in the way of this magician who connected to the audience in a remarkable way. He was akin to the dude from Hamelin, with a bow for the pipe and was eminently successful in guiding the folks on a journey on which they didn't mind submitting themselves totally...

His amazing repertoire had the novice in me glued so much so that double stops, vibratos assumed a totally different nuance... The remarkable ease with which he used the bow made me wonder if it was actually a magician waving his wand... mind blowing...

Words fail me at describing what I went through when the fiddler performed "Himagiri Thanaye Hemalathe" and when I realised that he had packed five different gems of compositions into that single gem and every single time he cut into Himagiri, I couldn't help but be left agape...


The child-like enthusiasm and the sheer energy in him bore no proof of his age... the facial muscle contortions and the tweaking of his contours had the crowd guffawing, while I smiled... I also wondered if such acts could be mistaken for the lack of seriousness by the more orthodox... but then that was the mark of a genius who was playing to the purists and the galleries alike, all while making sure he wasn't diluting the art or insulting it in anyway...

Vatapi Ganapatim Bhaje, Raghuvamsha Sudha, Nagumomu Ganaleni sounded extremely dulcet and his accomplices' remarkable support on mridangam, ghatam and tabla only compounded the effect... ... the considerable amount spent on the extremely difficult lower octaves and even before you had settled on it, the shift to the higher ones left me spellbound... the best part was that this transition was made look a child's play and totally effortless... well, it was not...

Kora kagaz tha yeh man mera of Aradhana had its roots in namma Bilahari, so said the genius... Aaja re pardesi of Madhumati assumed new levels of pathos on his weapon...

His rendition of Oothukkadu Subbaiyer's Alaipayuthey Kanna had me smiling, albeit for altogether different reasons... The final mellifluous English notes had me asking for more... all this surely warranted an encore...

I have forever justified the eccentricities of the geniuses in my own mind saying that if we liked them, adored them we had better like their eccentricities as well... but suprisingly the readiness with which he acceded to some of the requests, would have endeared him to a few tag-alongs also...

For an evening that was truly enthralling and magical, many thanks to you... Dr.Kunnakudi Ramaswamy Vaidyanathan





I am still wondering how could anyone, I mean anyone, migrate from Raghuvamsha Sudha to Sare Jahan se Achha and then effortlessly get back to Himagiri Thanaye which he had started off with...