RIFLE RANGE BOY

Kadavul Irukindran from the movie 'Ananthi Jothi' (1963) It seems that poet Kannadasan started off as an atheist. With time, through his voracious readings and research for his songs, he claimed to be an avid practitioner of Sanathana Dharma (Eternal Duty) or Hinduism in his later years. Many of his later compositions brilliantly express the entity we assume to be God - the Force that puts order to things around us, the seen and the invisible, the heard and the silent, the felt and the void. Here, Mahakavi Kannadasan, in a 1963 composition, tries to explore the meaning of God, which carries different visions to different people, from an external force that oversees every move to an internal mechanism so intricate that it does its own checks and balances. You say He is not there because you cannot see Him. When you float but cannot see the air, you are hovering upon. When you close all your senses to the external stimuli, is the something you feel is God? In the crypts of darkn...

Yeats, Keats and TS Elliot all wrote fantastic poems. Rumi did the same but at a different level. To connoisseurs of Tamil poems, they transcend all boundaries. A poet can describe his loved ones in so many words, compare her to the lush of Mother Nature or the beauty of a full moon but a Tamil poet tells her at a divine level. Something as mundane as feeling frisky on a wet evening is pictured by Vairamuthu beautifully in a single stanza. (From the 1980s movie 'Raja Parvai' where ironically a blind man describes his feeling to his non-blind companion) "அந்தி மழை பொழிகிறது, ஒவொவரு தூளியிலும் உன் முகம் தெரிகிறது" 'Evening rain is pouring, In its every droplet, I see your face.   Some may call these lyrics cheesy, but it works perfectly well for admirers of Tamil literature. We have heard songs that induce suicide. The Hungarian composer Rezsö Seress is given the dubious honour of composing  Gloomy Sunday  in 1932, connected to more suicides than any son...