‘From Raaja With Love’: Maestro Ilaiyaraaja puts on a mesmerising show in Chennai, despite glitches

Key Takeaways

• “I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman in the ‘Song of Myself,’ and I couldn’t help thinking about the depths of what that meant on Sunday morning.
• Like me, tens of thousands of Tamil music fans made their way to the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Chennai with their hearts eager to know the answer to just one question: “Which Ilaiyaraaja would we get to experience today?” Sure, there is just one ‘Isaignani’ Ilaiyaraaja, the corporal being celebrated as the ‘King of music.’ But if the last 50 years of Tamil music have taught us something, it is that Ilaiyaraaja contains multitudes.
• There’s an Ilaiyaraaja we listen to when we miss being cradled by our mother; an Ilaiyaraaja is waiting perennially to pacify a freshly broken heart; there’s one for when we miss the smell of petrichor, one for late night ruminations, and one for when the breeze hits us through the windows of buses and trains.
• I, for one, have even met an Ilaiyaraaja who extended his arm into the darkness I was once drowning in.