Last month, while hearing me sing, my wife strongly urged me to open a YouTube channel to sing and post Christian numbers.
Although late, I have gone ahead and opened a channel in YouTube. I am in the hot pursuit of singing and posting as many songs, as long as my mortal body can support the enthusiasm that's bubbling inside me.
Here's the link for my channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/cherryonsong
There are Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi songs in there.
Every time I post my songs, a train of thoughts streak through my mind. Singing had been a part of my life from a very early age as I belonged to a Christian community. We had a big number of daily prayer songs, church songs that we sang every week and the carol songs that we belted out every year.
My exposure to cinema songs began in the early 70s through the morning and evening radio song programs and through the song programs in television of which the most popular ones were 'Oliyum Oliyum' (meaning 'Light and Sound') for Tamil Songs and 'Chitrahaar' (meaning 'A Garland of Pictures') for Hindi Songs. Television was a rarity those days and I am thankful to my very kind and patient neighbour who permitted me to watch these programs. I am not sure if I would be that patient in letting in a neighbour's kid to watch television in my home.
During that period, we had a Toshiba Reel to Reel spool tape recorder in our home which was kept under lock by my father. On weekends when he was around, he would play the Christian songs from it. Slowly, some Malayalam cinema songs found its way into our home through the reels of this recorder as my father recorded a few melodious Malayalam cinema songs through his friends circle. I really fell in love with some of these songs and although I hummed them or sang them silently, overt singing never happened.
Years ticked by and while into the early 80s, the spool recorder got phased out with the advent of the cassettes, the cassette player-recorders and two in ones that came in with the radio coupled. My range of songs also expanded to a few numbers in Telugu and Kannada, thanks to the daily South Indian regional songs that came through the radio. We also had an influx of cassettes of Tamil and Malayalam cinema songs from neighbours and friends. The spool recorder was still there and I used it along with the cassette recorder to record my favourite numbers from the radio.
It was in my ninth standard, when adolescence was in full cry, that I started singing loudly in the bathroom :), and from then on, singing happened every now and then, while I was sitting alone or while in the middle of some house chores and even while studying, as a relaxation in between. I had a cousin brother staying with us that time and I remember him telling me that my father kept checking with him whether I was into singing quite often while he was away at work. I could understand that his concern as a parent was whether my focus was getting away from studies and whether I had got entangled in some deep romance with some girl:). It was only much later, after I had got into engineering, that my father shared with me the fact that he had often rummaged through my books and book cupboards, to see if I was having any secrets stored in there, just to check on my focus on my duties.
So when my wife strongly recommends that I open a channel in YouTube to sing Christian numbers, I wind back thirty nine years to when I had first given indications about singing to my folks at home. I see this as a shift in orientation in the way we see things. And the question that often keeps hitting my mind, is about why my father, who started telling me that he liked my singing, much later after I got into a profession, had never opened up and encouraged me to take up music lessons or pursue music at least in a small way while I was in school or college. This is not a cribbing that I am getting into but a question of understanding that streaks through my mind. Perhaps pursuing professions like engineering, medicine or chartered accountancy, would have been less risky than getting into music, according to him. Yes I can see the wisdom in it, especially with the fact that we were part of the insecure middle class. But again, I have had classmates at school who were pursuing Carnatic music lessons side by side with their academics. It's not that a Christian cannot pursue Carnatic music, but even if there was such a reservation, Western music was an option to pursue in parallel. But, the striking part here, is that the subject of music as an area that can be pursued, had never come up from my father.
Today I strongly feel two things. One is a view about me as the owner of my life, that I should have stood up and told my father that music is something I want to pursue, which I did not. The other is a view about a parent's role, whether it is fine to play it safe or to identify areas in which children show signs of talent and thereafter to facilitate the nurturing of the same.
Feel free to drop in, listen to my attempts, subscribe and share if you find it good :))
