Raaja Gopuram - Nyaana Thangame - Part-1

Raja Gopuram……!

Just the name itself, brings the majestic Srirangam Raja Gopuram in our mind.

Whenever I had the opportunity to visit the Srirangam Temple, I used to stand near that Gopura Vaasal and read the names written who donated wherein name of IR is written as the one who donated for the 7th floor.

And with pride I used to recollect, that my donation of Rs 20, (the very first note of from my very first salary) is also part of that donation!

When I joined PWD in 1983, there were a lot of news items that IR conducts a lot of live musical shows in various towns for collection of the donation towards that temple. So I decided to donate from my very first salary I earned in my life!

I sent an Indian Postal Money Order for Rs 20, which was signed by Mrs Jeevaa Ilaiyaraaja and I got that receipt with me. In fact that was starting point for my collection of IR address and the subsequent visits to IR later !

But Raaja Gopuram has another special meaning to me!

After the title song of Nalla Naal, the next real Nalla Naal of life happened when I had the opportunity to witness the song recording of “Nyaana Thangame” from the film "Raaja Gopuram" ….!

That was an amazing experience which I could not forget through out my life !

That’s so because, I could record the most of the proceedings of that five to six hours of wonderful moments (of course with the permission of IR)!

That cassettes I never shared with anybody earlier for the past 20 years, (except that some two years back, I presented a copy of that to Dr Vijay, founder president of IR-Yahoo group).

Now, I am going to share that with all of you now through this blog !

After a long logistics related struggle, the present arrangement is made with the help of valuable help of CRV and Siva to whom I always remain grateful!

With myself remaining at West Bengal, the cassette traveled from Hosur (Shankar-Usha) to Arcot (Ramkumar) to Muscat (Venky) and then MP3 conversion at amazing speed and excellent parsing into small files and titling by Venky and again to USA (Siva) and now hosted in RA and MP3 forms by Siva in his site for your listening pleasure!

(I have justified my long gaps in between postings!!!)

For many of you, the poor audio quality will be causing concern, but please bear with me and we have to be content with that as the 20 year old treasure on a few ten rupees cassettes recorded with a mono handy tape recorder, and the subsequent copy makings to keep preserving the contents etc cannot promise you more than this !

But still I can promise that the contents are real treasures in educating many of us who have not got the opportunity of witnessing such recordings and the grueling efforts involved in a song creation!

Kindly use the headphones to listen to many of the in-audible things and try to listen as many times as possible !

You wont believe me, even after 20 years and repeated hearings, when I hear this even now, I could get something new in each time listening!

On my part, I try to provide the explanations in the form of hints for each of this audio clips to the extent possible, which will keep the interest in you growing!

There are 27 audio files totaling to about 70 MB (in MP3 formats).

In order to make it a smooth happenings I prefer to publish these audio clips in installments on each day by limiting each postings with 3 to 4 audio clips with my hints.

Please bear with me for this installment releases !

(continued.... in next Part-2)