Mouname Paarvaiyal

I was never exposed to Tamil Oldies as a child and frankly, I never felt as if I missed much. Until with the right of kind of company and my own effort at connecting with my roots, I did pester my father to play the oldies out every Sunday morning. He gladly obliged. "Finally", he must have thought. So out came AM Raja, Ghantasala and PB Sreenivos. Now one of the old tapes he played had PB Sreenivos belting out some simply beautiful romantic songs. Much like the golden period in Hindi Cinema, where we had greats like SD Burman, OP Nayyar and Madan Mohan giving music to voices like Rafi, Kishore, Manna Dey and Mukesh, Tamil cinema had one of its best periods of movies and music.

I particularly fell in love with this one song by PB Sreenivos. Penned by the great Kannadasan and some simply superb music by MS Viswanathan, the song had me playing it on repeat for hours. I don't understand the lyrics in the entire song, but Mouname Paarvaiyal has this litling tune that oozes romance in its simplicity of sound. Especially the overlap of a hum at the end of every stanza, a master stroke from a genius of a composer!

Here's the piece...go ahead, reminisce.

Discover P. B. Sreenivos!

And as luck would have it I saw the man recently at a restaurant. He might have entered like a nobody, but his head gear and flowing angavastram were a clean give-away. The fur cap was replaced by a very grand brocade, maharaja-style toppa. Surely enough, I greeted him, exchanged pleasantries and promptly launched onto the more important subject of getting him to sing a line from my current obsession. And he was such a sport, offering not just a few lines of the song but also some extra information on how abominable Tamil music had become now.
Here's to the man and his music.