Aparna’s Blog

Believe it or not, it has been more than 6 months since I last went for a concert of Sanjay!!! His concert at Anjaneyar temple, Alamelumangapuram on January 22nd was the last one I went to. I was not able to go for the next 4 concerts of his, the last of which was on March 29th. After that, there has been no concert of his in Madras!

In this gap, I would have gone for about 15 concerts or so, including a few of TMK too. (There are not many concerts of TMK either ) But a few of those concerts though were great, were not as satisfying to me as Sanjay’s concerts are. Everyday I check ‘The Hindu’ first thing in the morning hoping to see some Sanjay’s concert listed there, only to be met with disappointment. I can’t wait for the days when there’s at least one concert of Sanjay and TMK every week, to come soon. The wait has become too long already!

Rummaging through my bag, in which, I should tell you, are lots of papers, I started going through what I had written on those. Songs lists of concerts, notes taken down during lec-dems, lyrics of songs, thoughts which I wanted to later become blog posts and even full posts which I never got around to typing on the computer and publishing. There are a whole lot of writings which didn’t become posts in this blog at the time it should have! Anyway, here is a very belated post on a photography exhibition with inputs from what I had written on one of those papers right after coming back from the exhibition.

A few months back, or to be precise, from 23rd March to 4th April, there was a photography exhibition titled ‘Vijayanagara – Splendour in Ruins’ at Lalit Kala Akademi organized by Alkazi Foundation in association with Prakriti Foundation. It was an exhibition of rare photos of Hampi taken in 1855-1856 by Alexander Greenlaw, an army officer.
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Click here to watch the song.

This Malayalam song, picha vecha naal is the one that I have been listening to, for the past 3 days. I have been hooked to a new song after a long time! Though this song, which seems to be based on many raagas, reminds one of so many other songs, yet there is something haunting about it. Soft, soothing & melodious! Shankar Mahadevan’s singing is the biggest plus of it. My most favourite part in the entire song is the humming at 2:38. The female singer, whoever she is, does just the humming in the entire song, yet her humming followed by that haunting dhirana dhirana & the swarams NDPM RMRP NDSNDMP sung by Shankar Mahadevan turns out to be the best part of the song!
The visual is full of vibrant colours and that’s what makes it good too.

P.S.: Thanks to Sreekrishnan for the link!

That’s what this year has been all about till now.

After several unsuccessful attempts at trying to be regular in going for a walk or doing exercise in the mornings, the reasons for those attempts turning out to be unsuccessful being my laziness that stopped me from waking up early, I finally reached a point where I myself got tired of being lazy and on one fine day, on the spur of a moment, I decided to join yoga class the very next day itself!
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This is my 500th post! A big thanks to each and everyone of you for making this happen!

A couple of weekends back, I had been to Mayavaram with my family and, as usual, we visited lots of temples. On Sunday, we went to Kudumiyanmalai and on Monday, we went to a whole lot of temples in and around Kumbakonam – Kumbheshwarar, Darasuram, Patteswaram, Baanapureeswarar, Thiruvisainallur SivayOginAtar temple, Thirunthudevankudi Karkateswarar temple, Thirubhuvanam, Thiruloki Sivan and perumAL temples. Almost all these temples are architectural marvels and, needless to say, we were just bowled over by the stunning architectural beauty!
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