Carnatic musician TM Krishna has come out with a Carnatic song, which while shattering the concepts of classical music makes a plea to reclaim our common spaces invaded and destroyed in the name of development.
The song, ‘Chennai Poromboke Padal’, is written in Chennai Tamil and not in chaste Tamil. It seeks to reclaim the word ‘Poromboke,’ which traditionally meant ‘common space for community use’, but over the years became a pejorative, intended to demean and devalue a person or a place.
The prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award, known as the Asian Nobel, is normally given to outstanding social workers. But, in 2016, the foundation conferred the award to a Chennai-born TM Krishna. It was in recognition of Krishna’s efforts to blur caste boundaries in the world of classical music and to liberate art from “man-made ghettoes”.
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The idea of this song has come from Chennai-based environmental activist Nityanand Jayaraman, who worked behind the 'Kodaikanal Won’t' rap song, which created a massive online campaign that put Unilever under pressure to provide compensation to the victims of the pollution it caused in Kodaikanal.
In the song video, Krishna is seen singing with the background set against various developmental activities polluting the environment.
On his new experiment, Krishna told Times of India, that “every music has its own kind of movements”. "What's there is very beautiful. I am going to be singing Thyagaraja keerthanas all my life. I'm never going to say that it's not important. But the point is that Thyagaraja can co-exist with poromboke. That is what we want with the society as well," he said.
