#Scurf123: Sid Sriram changes my mind
On the fierce triumphs of 'Kumkumala' 💕
This morning was one of three most hungover mornings this year. I didn’t have a headache, but there existed a lag between what I wanted to do and what I was able. Commiserations were in order as I unlocked my phone and out of some muted heavenly intervention navigated straight to YouTube. First I listened to the middling Kesariya, for about a couple of times, unmoved, unimpressed dallied on to Sid Sriram’s rendition of Kumkumala. Within five consecutive listenings, I knew I’d arrived at the perfect song.
I didn’t miss a beat, put the song on repeat on apple music, amped up the volume on the airpods and nestled back in bed. My head was not throbbing, as is was wont to in this situation, but there was a lurch somewhere there. It felt mushy. My eyes ached. The song did its work, soothing unknown parts within. Correcting, repairing and fixing loose bolts and stray nuts. I felt that I was becoming whole one beat at a time. In Kumkumala Sriram’s voice mirrors the sonorous melancholy of a heavily rained in evening, nurturing my battered spirit, lending it a dewy, moisturised sheen of adoration.
This was going to be the song that every soon-to-be-married couple will be mindlessly lip-syncing to at their pre-wedding parties. This will be the song which will be used as a background score to the numerous proposals men and women will partake in. Kumkumala, sung in what seems like a rapturous dream by the insanely talented and multi-hyphenate artist Sriram, is also his debut for the masses. The song comes at the time of the year when more and more people are getting married, or are taking those kind of big, time-altering, larger than life decisions. The timing felt potent, specific, as the release and its subsequent magic aligned.
I can already envision when later this year as people will gather in Lutyens’ Delhi’s myriad gardens, under the stars, dressed very much like the micro-celebrities they rightfully are, the song oozing ever so gently out of large JBLs, will softly care and gently nurse all their (once again) calloused souls. Working like a humidifier in our dead, dry and emotionally bankrupt lives, it will quickly absolves us of all afflictions, heartbreaks, promising us the time of our lives. It is made for our big parties, those starry, garrulous awnings, and canopies of huey shaadi pandals. It already feels infallible, mostly because of Sriram’s mellifluous treatment, but also because of how tired we all are with the breathless, boop-ey, racy songs our senses have till now been exposed to. Banquets will echo with the sound of Sriram’s melodious crooning, and we will close our eyes to be released from the pain of that moment — wherever we be, whoever we be.
Now, in my (recent but expansive) history of listening to non-Hindi Indian music, the artists I have (accidentally and unknowingly) most listened to are ARR and Sid Sriram. While ARR’s blues have been common meeting grounds with exes turned friends turned strangers, Sriram’s songs have been a silent but salient guiding light in moments of acute despair. Its just that I did not know they were all sung by him!
Last winter I found Sriram through YouTube. Bored, with too many things to do, I was aimlessly surfing through the trending music section of YT when I chanced upon the beauty that is his A Capella version of Apsara Aali. Here, unhinged yet fully in control, Sid’s voice displays terrific form and range. Craving some more of his divine voice, as I divvied up my searches on google and YT, I discovered I had been listening to most of his songs over years not realising he’d sung them.
Take, for instance, the gorgeous Adiye, charged with a sexually powerful, symbolic video that challenges notions about colour, beauty and aesthetics in mainstream cinema. Or the bountiful Thalli Pogathey that astounds in its baffling range and mind-bending superiority of composition. And then the unplugged Thalli Pogathey version that made and unmade me in more ways than I can put a finger to. It altered my definition of what an Indian song could sound like in its reprise form and that a lot can still be packed in a “stripped down” version of an already super-hit number.
But there was a difference.
Listening to the songs now with the knowledge of the excruciatingly beautiful talent of their singer, Sriram, made me perceive the songs anew. I could clearly see myself as two different people — one before I knew who Sriram was and one after. Earlier I was good at nothing, except these being or trying to be friends with people I barely knew but exchanged a lot of deep secrets with, whispering with them during those night outs, crisp words of nothing. I would go out almost every other night then, expecting that I would meet that perfect person who would cure me of my social incapabilities.
Then, what I wanted the most was to get to start living the life I wanted, and stop witnessing it from just the outside. I would then (as I still sometimes do) observe people from the outside, trying to looking in, longing for the humidity of their lives. What does it feel like in their living room at night when everyone goes to sleep? How does she look when she’s doing her hair? Somehow everyone else’s life felt better, warmer, more lived in. Then listening to and sharing Sid Sriram’s songs about love, about community, company and so many more things felt like building towards the kind of life I ached for. In the gloaming after hours when these strangers and I would gather at the balcony of my rented apartment, listening to and gently swaying to the rhythms of Sriram’s songs, I felt like finally getting closer to those humid lives.
Six years later, in the winter of 2021 as I listened to the same songs I was a fuller, more formed version of my those previous selves. What made Sriram’s songs more palatable was their make. Trained by his mother in Carnatic music, his songs however modern are always influenced by traditional tunes. This fusion, a newfangled hybrid is not only refreshing but also deeply impactful; they feel like meeting places for secret societies, where you exist inside. A place that causes your beating heart to rest, for your blood pressure to slow, and you finally catch your breath. Like the afterglow of a slow, prolonged orgasm, enjoyed with sips of rice wine, at the end of an excruciating week. His songs dim, perhaps even dull, all pains, worries, grinding the din of the day to a gentle halt. Life recedes into its butter-paper form, gently fading into the background as these songs emanate from my airpods. In their true form the songs, like their singer, seem to me in many ways equal parts baroque and classical.
I understand that this sounds like me being too expectant of the new movie too, in some way. But it’s hardly so. It’s an outpouring of appreciation for what feels like a truly once in a few months celebration of a song that is so pure in its essence. I also know that movie might just be a charmingly bathetic finale to the waves of emotional intensity that build throughout Kumkumala. The song is beatific — no existential dread, no melancholy, just vanilla love and its initial, electric charge. And sung in the shaking, promising, vital crooning of Sriram. It captures something in the current time, too.
While I know it’s hot to 💩 on everything that comes out of a certain production house, or is related to a clutch of Hindi film industry, and they truly are fully deserving of it. But Pritam is his own industry and Sid Sriram is just the perfect addition to his gallery of stars. 2022 has, anyway, been unjustly cruel towards singers (KK, Lata Mangeshkar). So we commemorate the tiniest of joys.
To preserve the day I went on a Sid Sriram YT pilgrimage, pausing again and again at the Apsara Ali A Capella video.
Stripped down to his near close up, on a sofa with a blank wall as a background, the video shows the painful alaps the singer undertakes to accomplish the raw yet perfectly well-rounded classical approach to a cult song. Something pierced me in the sight of Sid air drumming through alaps, gazing heavenward like a monk in deep meditation, and flexing every singing muscle in his body as he warbles alongside an unseen spirit. I was moved by the intimacy of the video. I texted the description of the video to a couple of friends who didn’t buy it. I found it to be a perfect match of sound and vision, an almost masterclass on making a song on zero budget and sheer talent (and curly hair).
TBH reflecting on the tension and richness of Sriram’s singing, Kumkumala has nothing on his earlier, better songs. But this introduces him to a mass of people who’d otherwise have been pretty clueless about the concept of Sriram.
Repetition also charges Kumkumala with its incantatory power. As Sriram circles over the word “kumkumala” over and over again, inspecting it from every angle, one can hear him teasing out an ambivalence, even a touch of divination from it. I can only speculate on the loves Sriram might be revisiting and recreating through the song, but I can sense the painful triumph in his voice — the voice of a man ready to challenge himself.
If you’re with me till here, then listen to it maybe? And share your thoughts about the song, or anything about this post?
This is scurf’s weekly (mostly, usually) public essay. We took a little detour with this one, as I just loved the song too much, and wanted to think with you all about it. Welcome to scurf, if you’re new and welcome back, if you’re not. If you enjoyed this, maybe consider sharing this and recommending it to the gentle, quiet readers in your life.