A Native returns

Being a Tamilian brought up in North (well at least relatively speaking :D ), I have always lived with mixed bag culturally speaking. I was and still am more comfortable as a Northie and at best a diffident Tamilian. I revelled in Hindi music, Hindi cultural idioms, slangs etc and had not much idea of these things in Tamil Nadu.

I prided myself about a few things though...I learned to read Tamil on my own, which was one of the few out of the way efforts in my life. And we did speak some form of Tamil at our home...though Tamilians may scoff at it. Once a Chennai woman found my Tamil so obtuse that she asked me if I was a Sri Lankan Tamil - my Tam was that different.

However I did have a taste for Tamil music. I remember as a kid, at 4 or 5 o clock in the evening, my Mom used to tune the radio to Tamil Short Wave channels (yes when I was a kid, TV, Cable TV and FM were yet to arrive)...those heady Ilayaraja stuff of the 80s...I still have an affinity to them. But by and large I did not listen to much Tamil music..indeed at one point of time I used to sneer at it. I remember at XL, I had Bong and Telugu frnds who were big fans of Tamil music, while I was not...in fact I got some songs for Mom from them.

Things changed when as part of my job I moved to Tamil Nadu...remember those early days...hated everything Tamil, the movies, the stars, the music, that awful dappankuthu - rowdy looking men dancing in their dungarees with their nadas hanging...hated being in Chennai, the heat, the humidity, the water...hated that these people were incomprehensible to me and I was so incomprehensible to them - even though we shared our mother tongue. But then slowly I reconciled and the bridge was Tamil music...I discovered several songs to my taste...I did not understand a word, yet the music was ..um..delicious, I just took to it. Being some sort of poet myself, I cannot let a good song go by without understanding what it meant..so painstakingly I used to go over lyrics again and again, use the aid of a dictionary...I'm always shy of asking ppl for help, for the fear of being ridiculed. My fancy to certain Tamil songs was a private matter to me. Often searching for songs was very difficult..since I did not understand its title word, I either mispelled it or plain simple did not know what keyword to type in. But gradually I found out ways around this handicap.

Now I really like this music...its as if my heart is attuned to it...and on many days I listen only to Tamil music instead of Hindi, even though I have several of my Hindi favorites stored in my laptop. I also learnt to enjoy the picturization of these songs. Some picturizations are really too good...so apt, so fitting.

And through the music I sort of understood the rhytm of this land better. Its not just a sweeping statement...truly in this case I have experienced so...music does bridge the cultural divide, especially for the long lost native who wishes to return to his roots.