Enakena Yerkanave: A Technical Dissection of Rāga, Sthāyi, and Sonic Craft in a Tamil Cine-Classic

 

“Charting the Musical Genome of Enakena Yerkanave: A Voyage from Dharmavati to Kalyani, Through Sthāyi, Counterpoint, and Orchestral Finesse"

Tamil cinema has often borrowed from the Carnatic idiom, but rarely with the finesse one encounters in Enakena Yerkanave from Parthen Rasithen (2000). This song is not merely a romantic duet but a crafted sangīta-śilpam—a musical sculpture where rāga, sthāyi (octave), orchestration, and anubhaavam (emotional resonance) are brought into play with consummate artistry.

Below, I attempt a technical analysis of the composition.

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1. Rāga Lakṣaṇam: Which rāgas are used?

The song pivots upon two Carnatic rāgas of distinct temperament:

• Dharmavati (59th Melakarta):
• Character: Bright yet serious, with shades of viraha (longing) and bhakti.
• Used in the male portion, establishing intensity and depth.
• Kalyani (65th Melakarta):
• Character: Majestic, luminous, suffused with karuṇā-rasa (tenderness, compassion).
• Used in the female portion, adding warmth and tenderness.

Thus, the juxtaposition of Dharmavati and Kalyani creates a dialectical musical canvas—sorrowful yearning versus radiant affection.

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2. Sthāyi (Octaval Architecture)

• Male Voice (Unnikrishnan):
• Predominantly in mandra and madhya sthāyis (lower and middle octaves).
• Effect: Gravitas, grounded intensity, an earthy sogham.
• Female Voice (Harini):
• Predominantly in tāra sthāyi (upper octave).
• Effect: Lightness, ethereality, a cloud-like paasam.

This vertical separation enhances the emotional polarity between man and woman.

 

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3. Interplay Between Rāga and Sthāyi

• Dharmavati + Lower Octave (Male): Conveys viraha anubhaavam—anchored passion.
• Kalyani + Higher Octave (Female): Conveys paasa-mozhi—tender affection.

The thematic symbolism: earthbound yearning (bhū-loka) versus celestial compassion (deiva-loka).

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4. Interludes and BGM

• Strings: lush harmonic grounding.
• Flute: tender breathing spaces.
• Veena-like plucks: Carnatic undertone.
• Background Score: darker hues under male voice, luminous flourishes under female, with subtle counter-melody hints.

Bharadwaj’s orchestration allows the emotional contour of the duet to remain the focus, rather than overpowering the vocals—a delicate balance rarely achieved in film music.

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5. Counterpoint Parallel

Though not punctus contra punctum in the Western sense, the piece evokes a counterpoint-like effect:

• Octaval layering: Male in Dharmavati (lower), female in Kalyani (higher).
• Instrumental counter-melody: Flute & strings weaving parallel strands.

Thus, Carnatic monody is enriched with polyphonic suggestion, giving listeners the impression of dialogic layering.

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6. Cinematic Resonance

• Hero = sogham (longing, passion).
• Heroine = paasam (tenderness, romance).
• The counterpoint-like layering mirrors their push-and-pull onscreen, aligning music with narrative.

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7. A Comparative Note: Bharadwaj vs Ilaiyaraaja

While Bharadwaj’s composition is a masterclass in raga layering, octave contrast, and orchestral subtlety, it naturally invites comparison with Ilaiyaraaja, the maestro who defined Carnatic-cinematic fusion.

• Rāga Use: Ilaiyaraaja transitions multiple ragas seamlessly; Bharadwaj’s Dharmavati ↔ Kalyani interplay is restrained and intimate.
• Octave & Voice Layering: Ilaiyaraaja often uses dense vocal overlays; Bharadwaj achieves quasi-counterpoint through male/female octave contrast.
• Interludes & BGM: Ilaiyaraaja uses orchestral climaxes, Bharadwaj uses interludes to support, not overshadow the vocals.
• Emotional Resonance: Ilaiyaraaja is macrocosmic; Bharadwaj microcosmic, tender, and personal.

In essence, Bharadwaj quietly honours Ilaiyaraaja’s tradition while asserting his own subtle, intimate aesthetic.

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8. Why This Song Endures

• Retains Carnatic grammar in cinematic context.
• Contrasts engineered as deliberate śilpam.
• Interludes and BGM sustain mood.
• Quasi-counterpoint layering gives cross-cultural texture.
• 25 years later, still resonates as soghamum paasamum serndha anubhaavam.

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9. A Salute to Bharadwaj

Composed in 2000, Enakena Yerkanave remains timeless. Bharadwaj’s genius lay in aesthetic engineering—male Dharmavati in lower sthāyi, female Kalyani in higher sthāyi, stitched by lush interludes and eloquent BGM.

This was not “fast-food music” but a banquet steeped in Carnatic tradition yet served on a cinematic platter. Kaalam kaatchi koduththadhu—time itself has testified to Bharadwaj’s marvel.

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10. Appendix: Rāga Scales

• Dharmavati (59th Melakarta)
• Ārohaṇam: S R2 G2 M2 P D2 N3 S
• Avarōhaṇam: S N3 D2 P M2 G2 R2 S
• Kalyani (65th Melakarta)
• Ārohaṇam: S R2 G3 M2 P D2 N3 S
• Avarōhaṇam: S N3 D2 P M2 G3 R2 S

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11. Appendix: Western Notation Illustration

Simplified staff notation illustrating octave placement contrast:

• Male Phrase (Dharmavati, Unnikrishnan) → Around Middle C & below (Mandra/Madhya).

Bass clef: C – D – E♭ – F# – G

 

·         *       Female Phrase (Kalyani, Harini) → Octave above Middle C (Tāra sthāyi).

Treble clef: C' – D' – E – F# – G' – A' – B' – C''

This visually demonstrates the vertical separation that produces subtle dialogic tension.

 

12. Hashtags

#EnakenaYerkanave #ParthenRasithen #Bharadwaj #TamilCinema #CarnaticMusic #Dharmavati #Kalyani #RagaAnalysis #IndianFilmMusic #Musicology #CounterpointInCinema #TamilSongsClassic #CarnaticInCinema #Unnikrishnan #Harini #25YearsOfEnakenaYerkanave #IlaiyaraajaComparison #FilmMusicAnalysis

 

English: The Glorious Mongrel That Conquered the World (and Why OMG Isn’t NASA)”

The World’s Most Successful Mongrel (and Why OMG is Not NASA)

Language, that most mercurial of human inventions, is forever evolving — slippery, inventive, and gloriously impure. Many years ago, my late friend Frank F. Moore — “Tio Franco” to his circle in Denton, Texas. He was a scientist with Poco Graphite in Denton, Texas, a man trained to measure carbon structures rather than turn phrases.  — put it more pithily, bluntness he declared: “English is a mongrel language.” He passed away in 2017, but the quip lingers, echoing in my mind every time I stumble upon the quirks of acronyms, initialisms, and our Indianised flourishes. 

At first blush, the phrase may sound ungenerous, as though our lingua franca were some scruffy street-dog skulking about alleyways. But in truth, his description was spot on. English is a mongrel of the noblest sort: resilient, resourceful, and gloriously unashamed of its mixed heritage.

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A Patchwork Parentage

English has never been shy of borrowing, pilfering, or adopting wholesale from every tongue it encountered. Its patchwork parentage is a veritable museum of world history:

Latin and Greek gifted it scholarly gravitas — philosophy, radius, auditorium.

The Saxons and Norsemen gave it the bread-and-butter words — sky, bread, winter, house.

The Norman French added aristocratic sheen — judge, court, beef, mutton.

And then comes India, which has contributed far more than the oft-cited bungalow, curry, and pyjamas. Its gifts run into the hundreds, spanning flora, fauna, food, textiles, and everyday life. Some gems include:

Animals & Nature: cheetah (Sanskrit chitraka, “spotted one”), mongoose (muṅgūs, Marathi), jackal (from Persian via India), banyan (Gujarati vāṇiyo, “merchant” — for traders who sat under the tree!).

Food & Drink: curry (Tamil kari, “sauce”), chutney, toddy (tadi, palm sap), punch (Hindi panch, “five ingredients”), ginger, mango (Tamil maangai).

Everyday Life: pyjamas (Hindi pae jama, “leg garment”), shawl (Urdu shal), khaki (Urdu khākī, “dust-coloured”), verandah (from Hindi via Portuguese).

Other Curiosities: loot (Hindi lut, “to plunder”), thug (Hindi/Marathi thag, “swindler”), jungle (Hindi jangal, “forest”), pundit (Sanskrit pandita, “learned man”), guru.

Seafaring Culture: catamaran (Tamil kaṭṭumaram, “tied wood”), proof that Indian maritime ingenuity quite literally floated into English vocabulary.

The Americas, meanwhile, added tomato, chocolate, hurricane, and barbecue.

If words were dowries, English has been married a dozen times over. And the beauty is, it makes no attempt to hide its mixed parentage. Where the French wring their hands over la pureté de la langue française, English cheerfully shrugs and says: “Come along, old chap, you’re one of us now.”

This mongrel nature is precisely what makes English not merely a survivor, but a global conqueror. It can compose a Shakespearean sonnet, draft a High Court judgment, and order a plate of samosas without breaking stride.

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A Linguistic Masala

And let us pause for a moment to tip our hats to India — the generous benefactor of words that travel from spice bazaars to scholarly tomes. From cheetahs prowling in Sanskrit texts to catamarans floating on Tamil seas, English has absorbed it all. It’s as if the language has a passport stamped with the entire subcontinent. And yet, while English savours these exotic ingredients, it also welcomes the mundane — your everyday “verandah” or “khaki” — with equal relish.

Truly, if English were a dish, it would be a global thali: some tang from Latin, a dash of Norse, a dollop of French cream, and a generous sprinkling of Indian spice. And just when you think you’ve finished, it surprises you with a nugget from the Americas.

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Acronyms vs Initialisms: Do You Really Know the Difference?

And yet, for all its genius, English delights in sowing confusion. Consider the curious case of acronyms and initialisms — those little bundles of letters we fling about with gay abandon: BBC, NASA, OMG, WHO, ISRO. We use them daily, but do we really know the difference?

The Shared Parent: Abbreviations

Both acronyms and initialisms belong to the larger family of abbreviations. Where they diverge is in pronunciation.

Initialism: You read each letter separately.

BBC → Bee Bee See

USA → You Ess Ay

OMG → Oh Em Gee

WHO → Double You Aitch Oh

ISRO → Eye Ess Ar Oh

> “Yes, India’s pride ISRO is another initialism — launching satellites, not words, into orbit.”

Acronym: You pronounce it as if it were a proper word.

NASA → Nassa

FIFA → Fee-fah

SIM → Sim

WHO → sometimes Who (“the WHO declared…”)

Notice the trickster? WHO is a linguistic double agent, equally comfortable playing for both sides.

Why Does This Matter?

At first glance, this seems like a pedant’s parlour game. But it does matter. It shapes how we write, how we speak, and even how we teach. To call USA an acronym, for instance, is technically wrong — though no one will confiscate your passport for it.

 

The Indian Quirk

 

In India, of course, we add our own masala. We blithely say, “I am going to fill my SIM,” as though the poor card were a vessel for dal and rice. Or we solemnly announce that BCCI is an acronym, when in fact it is very much an initialism. Our English is flexible, forgiving, and fabulously inventive — but a pinch of precision never hurt anyone.

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The Larger Lesson

So, what do these quibbles reveal? That English is gloriously inconsistent, yes, but also gloriously forgiving. It thrives not on purity but on promiscuity. It laughs at linguistic gatekeepers and greets newcomers with an amiable shrug. That is why today you can text OMG, read a NASA bulletin, admire ISRO’s launch schedule, and then order tandoori chicken — all in English.

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Closing Thought

 

The next time someone tosses “OMG” or “NASA” into the conversation, you may gently enlighten them: both are abbreviations, but only one is an acronym. And if you wish to impress further, point out that WHO is both — a rare double agent in the world of words.

 

Yes, English is a mongrel. But it is also the most successful mongrel in history — resourceful, resilient, and utterly unashamed of its eclectic parentage. And perhaps that is why, when the story of human civilisation is told in centuries to come, it will most likely be told — in English.

In memory of Frank F. Moore (“Tio Franco”), who first reminded me that English is, and will always be, a glorious mongrel.

 

#EnglishLanguage #Linguistics #WordNerd #Etymology #IndianEnglish #GlobalEnglish #LanguageMongrel #AcronymsVsInitialisms #OMG #NASA #ISRO #WordCulture #LanguageTrivia #EnglishIsFun #LanguageHistory

 

 

Pamban’s Subaqueous Diurnal: On the ‘Undersea River’ of the Palk Strait

 

Stand upon the storied Pamban Bridge — that elegant steel span linking Rameswaram Island with the Tamil littoral — and one may observe a marvel most unsuspected: beneath, the waters surge not with random caprice but with the gravitas of a river, flowing one way for half the year and then, like Janus turning his twin visages, reversing course for the next. Locals, with their penchant for evocative metaphor, have dubbed it an “undersea river.” Oceanographers, with their charts and instruments, term it more prosaically the seasonally reversing current of the Palk Strait.

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The Phenomenon Explained:

The narrow channel between India and Sri Lanka is the meeting ground of two mighty seasonal regimes: the South-West and North-East monsoons. Between March and September, the current flows northward — an aqueous conveyor belt carrying warmth and suspended silt. Come October, the wheel turns; the North-East monsoon asserts dominion, and the flow reverses, coursing southward until February’s end. This biannual oscillation is no poetic fancy; hydrographic measurements register velocities approaching 0.8 to 1.0 metres per second in the Pamban Pass.

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A History of Observation:

Though fishermen and ferrymen had long known of these reversals, it was under the British hydrographer James Rennell in the late eighteenth century that the first systematic surveys were undertaken. Admiralty charts recorded the quixotic currents, and Victorian travellers waxed lyrical about “a tide that runs like a river in the sea.” In modern times, oceanographic satellites and reanalysis datasets — OSCAR, HYCOM, and the Copernicus Marine Service — have confirmed the cyclic nature of this aqueous ballet.

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Why It Matters:

This “undersea river” is no mere curiosity. Its bi-directional flow modulates salinity, affects sediment transport, and influences the fragile geomorphology of Adam’s Bridge — that chain of shoals linking Dhanushkodi with Talaimannar. Marine life, too, responds to this ebb and flow; plankton blooms and fish migrations are subtly choreographed by this hidden conductor. Even the fate of harbours and fisheries along Tamil Nadu’s Coromandel coast is tethered to this hydrodynamic see-saw.

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The Science behind the Spectacle:

Oceanographers classify these as seasonally reversing monsoon currents, a singular hallmark of the Indian Ocean. Unlike the Gulf Stream, steady in its northward march, or the Kuroshio, constant in its eastward sweep, the East India Coastal Current pirouettes with the monsoons. In the lexicon of the learned, it exemplifies mare clausum in miniature — a semi-enclosed sea where atmospheric whimsy dictates hydrographic choreography.

 

Key findings:

• The currents in the Palk Strait / Pamban Channel / Gulf of Mannar are strongly influenced by the Indian monsoon and reverse seasonally: broadly, northward flow during March–September and southward flow during October–February/March.

• Measured current speeds in the Pamban Pass can reach 0.8–1.0 m s⁻¹. These flows are visibly perceptible from Pamban Bridge.

• First systematic hydrographic recordings were during the British Era (James Rennell, Admiralty surveys).

• Popular term “undersea river” is metaphorical; scientifically it is a seasonally reversing coastal current.

 

 

Epilogue:

Thus, what to the naked eye from Pamban Bridge appears a quaint curiosity — water flowing like a river beneath the sea — is in fact a grand manifestation of monsoon’s might. Here is India’s littoral geography at its most theatrical: the ocean itself bowing to the subcontinent’s atmospheric rhythms. Sic transit gloria mundi — the tide turns, and with it, the world in miniature.

 

References:

• Schott, F.A. & McCreary, J.P. (2001). The monsoon circulation of the Indian Ocean. Progress in Oceanography.

• Vinayachandran, P.N. et al. (2005). Indian Ocean circulation and seasonal reversal along the east coast. Deep Sea Research.

• Rao, R.R. et al. (2011). Sea level and currents in the Indo–Sri Lanka channel. Continental Shelf Research.

• Rennell, J. (1781). Chart of the Palk Strait and adjacent seas. Admiralty archives.

 

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