Nama Sankeerthanam

The evenings of last week were spent in listening to the Namasankeerthanam program organized in connection with the Ramanavami utsavam.
I am always fascinated by stories and used to love katha kalakshepam (hari katha) as a youngster. This namasankeerthanam was new to me and thought it will be a story telling session. My hubby loves carnatic music and we found out the program was more of music and a little bit of story telling.
Any way it was enjoyable. It was by one Mr. Udaiyalur kalyanaraman accompanied by another singer, a harmonist and a mrindagist.
The music value of the program was really very classic. He was able to sing in sanskrit (ashtapathis) , tamil , telugu and kannada (purandaradasa). He could campare the ideas of poets like Tyagaraja, purandaradasa, narayana thirtha who have expressed the same ideas of bakthi in different languages through their music.
I never knew that this bajanai had a sampradayam. That is a particular way of performing.
So I was surprised that there was a seeta kalyanam day when people brought sweets, paruppu thengai, etc etc which is normally part of any tamil brahmin wedding.
One of the days some of the audiences joined in mild steps of dancing and ladies joined in kummi in the background of perfect rythemic music. and there was a kolatam also, each assigned to certain songs. It was sort of funny to see senior citizens dancing and singing. The Bagavathar insisted on each person joining the bajans and was often singing simple bajans so that all could join and tap or clap with the rythm.
There was food for every body after the namasankeerthana every night.
All this lead me to thinking. Is this is one way of Bakthi being spread in the form of audience participation so that people will not get bored. Is this one way of maintaining the traditions of the rituals like marriage rituals.
I was questioning myself is it some sort of entertainment which was needed in the villages where each person whether he is good at music or dance to participate and let his /her hair down in the name of bakthi.
The bajans was reaching a cresendo often with all singing in unison hare rama hare rama. This did remind me of the Rajnish Ashram where people were singing (or was it shouting) in the top of their voice.
The Bagavadhar was saying that this bajanais normally start in the night and sometime continue throughout the night.
My grandmother used to say that when they were children they used to be awake whole night on krishna jayanthi and used to participate in kummi , kolatam and some small skits. some expression of art?
Though this raised a lots of questions in me, the point is I did enjoy the evenings and liked the rendering of the keerthanas and his telling the meanings of those keerthanas.
Such traditions I feel should be continued.

language

When I first came to Malaysia seeing the boards on the roads I used to laugh, seeing their spellings. Since it was all Roman alphabets I could read them, and thought these people were weak in spellings and used to laugh at spellings like 'klinik'(clinic) , 'bas' (bus), 'doktor'(doctor)etc.
It took me some time to understand that they have adopted the roman script for their language and they write their words phonetically and all these days what I was reading was not english but bhasa malayu the local language. Slowly I understood that c is 'cha' and k is ka and ' i' is ee and so on.
At one time I thought it is a easy way of learning a language. I was thinking if only we could read all the indian language with roman script learning will be easy . Many of the tamils who don't know the 'deva nagari' script and many of the north indians who don't know the tamil, telugu etc script can learn the other language easily.
Now suddenly it dawned on me because of the roman script of bhasa malayu, when I try to spell many english words I am getting confused. Now also , I see lot of boards on road and try to pronounce them and decipher them with a bhasa malayu dictionary. The result is when it comes to queen's language I am faltering. (Not that I was very strong in that language before.)
So I came to a conclusion that our languages are good as they are and any body trying to learn it let them learn the script also . Another thing I did was went and bought an english dictionary. (our big dictionary is back at home in India) . I am still not comfortable using a dictionary in the net.

some tv programs

We have here a facility to watch some movies in the tv by paying a certain amount 9.99 Ringets in a particular channel. They show some 9 movies again and again at different times for a whole month and we can watch them. This is one of the advantage of set top box I suppose.
After knowing that June R a tamil movie will be shown this april , immediately I subscribed for the channel over phone. The additional attraction was The Emperor's journey.
About June R I had read quite a bit of write ups in magzines before release itself. It had a very good cast also. Jyotika, Saritha, Kushboo. To add to all this the movie was directed by a woman, some Revathi Verma. So with great expectations, I made my hubby also sit for it the first time they showed on April 1st. It became such an april foolish thing to do.
It was not as good as it was promised and I felt it was an incomplete film. May be the movie was short, but that is not what I mean. I felt it was abruptly ended.
The same kind of experience I got when I went and saw a movie by name'viswa thulasi' a movie again highly hyped by the magzines ( I read basically ananda vikatan, kalki and kumudam which are three decent tamil magzines ) Again a good star cast of mamooty and nandita das and a woman director. I saw that in the local theatre. There also I had the same abrupt ending feeling. I don't think audience will want to pay their hard earned money to see such movies where the director wants to show their talent rather than entertain the audience.
May be I am not used to such kind of movies, or may be the high expectations made me get this disappointment. Here I should mention movies like 'kannathil muthamital', and 'aszagi'. I enjoyed those two movies and they were also sort of off beat movies.
A great relief was ' The emperor's journey' and I wonder how it could have been taken in such a lovely way and how it could be told as a story. It is about the Penguins in the antarctica . It is indeed a wonderful movie.