When the Sun Sends Its Ghosts: A Reader’s Question on Neutrinos

🌞 When the Sun Sends Its Ghosts: How the Sun Forges Neutrinos — and How We, on Earth, Have Learned to Make Our Own

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Preface

In February 2024, I had written “Neutrinos: What Are They?” — a humble attempt to introduce these ghostly travellers of the cosmos. Among the thoughtful responses was a reader’s question that deserves not merely a comment, but a continuation:

“Interesting article. Also, I would love to see more about how many neutrinos are generated by the Sun and how long does it take? Is it possible to artificially create on Earth?”

This essay is both an answer and a reflection — a journey from the Sun’s fiery womb to the laboratories of humankind, following the paths of particles so elusive that most will cross the entire Earth without leaving a trace.

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I. How many neutrinos does the Sun create?

Deep in the Sun’s core — a realm of unimaginable pressure and heat — hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium through the proton–proton chain reaction. In this furnace of fusion, neutrinos are born.

Each second, the Sun produces approximately 10³⁸ neutrinos — that is, ten thousand trillion trillion trillion. It is an absurdly vast number; yet, like most cosmic truths, it feels both remote and intimate.

To human scale:

• Roughly 60–70 billion neutrinos pass through every square centimetre of your body each second.

• Through your thumbnail alone, about 100 billion neutrinos flow per second — silent, invisible, unstoppable.

They are the shyest of nature’s children: hardly any interact with matter, and fewer still are ever caught by our detectors.

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II. How long do they take to reach us?

Neutrinos are created in the solar core, nearly 150,000 km below the surface. Once formed, they flee outward at nearly the speed of light, escaping the Sun within seconds.

Then, across the 150 million km of interplanetary space, they race to Earth in about eight minutes and twenty seconds — the same time it takes sunlight to arrive.

But there is a cosmic twist:

• The light we see from the Sun today began its journey as photons trapped in the dense plasma of the solar core — a random walk that can take hundreds of thousands of years before the photon finally escapes to space.

• The neutrinos, however, leave immediately.

So, every neutrino detected on Earth is a direct messenger from the Sun’s present moment, not its ancient past. They allow us to glimpse the nuclear furnace as it burns now, eight minutes ago by the cosmic clock.

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III. Can we create neutrinos on Earth?

We can — and we do. But compared to the Sun’s torrent, our human efforts are but gentle ripples.

1. Nuclear Reactors

Every operating reactor on Earth emits a steady stream of electron antineutrinos, born from the radioactive decay of fission fragments.

• These reactor neutrinos are crucial for experiments such as KamLAND (Japan) and Daya Bay (China), which study the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation — the ability of a neutrino to change its “flavour” (electron, muon, tau) as it travels.

2. Particle Accelerators

At laboratories like CERN and Fermilab, high-energy protons are slammed into metal targets, producing pions and kaons that decay into muons and neutrinos.

• These accelerator neutrinos are fired through the Earth towards distant detectors — experiments such as T2K (Japan) or MINOS (USA) — enabling physicists to measure neutrino masses and mixing angles with precision.

Thus, while we cannot rival the Sun’s cosmic abundance, we have learned to summon neutrinos deliberately, in controlled environments, for the sheer purpose of understanding them. It is one of science’s quiet triumphs — that we can recreate, in miniature, what the universe does effortlessly at stellar scales.

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IV. The cosmic connection:

Every second, as you read this, billions of neutrinos are passing through you — through the walls, through the planet, unimpeded. You are, whether you realise it or not, transparent to the universe.

The Sun sends them as if in benediction: silent proof that we are continuously in communion with the stars. And on Earth, when we create our own neutrinos in reactors and accelerators, we are, in a way, replying to the cosmos in its own language — translating awe into experiment, and mystery into measurement.

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Epilogue: The Dialogue Continues:

So, to the reader whose question sparked this essay — thank you.

Yes, the Sun produces an unimaginable flood of neutrinos each second, and yes, they reach us in barely eight minutes and 30 seconds. And yes again — humanity, ever curious, has found ways to create these same particles here on Earth, not to mimic the Sun, but to learn from it.

In these ghostly messengers lies something profoundly poetic: the universe speaks not in words, but in whispers of energy and time — and every neutrino is a syllable of that eternal speech.

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References & Further Reading:

1. Bahcall, J. N. Neutrino Astrophysics. Cambridge University Press, 1989
2. Super-Kamiokande Collaboration – “Solar Neutrinos” (University of Tokyo) 
3. Fermilab – “Solar and Artificial Neutrinos”
4. National Research Council (USA) –– Neutrinos and Beyond: New Windows on Nature. National Academies Press, 2003.
5. Big Think – “Eight facts about the Sun’s most ghostly particle”

#SolarNeutrinos #Astrophysics #ParticlePhysics #NuclearFusion #CosmicMessengers #NeutrinoScience #SunAndSpace #AstronomyForAll #CosmicWonder #ScienceAndSoul #GhostParticles #StarbornStories #WhenScienceSpeaksPoetry #TheUniverseWithinUs #DhinakarRajaram #ScienceBlogIndia #WhenTheSunSendsItsGhosts #NeutrinosExplained

When the Cosmos Turns Back

 

🌌 The First Light and the Last Star Remember Themselves

 

🌠 Preface

For several years, I have looked skyward — not to find answers, but to listen. Every telescope I’ve leaned upon has been less an instrument of measurement than a conduit of memory. Somewhere between data and devotion lies that fragile space where science becomes remembrance.

This reflection began as three distant glimmers — a young star nursing its planets, a world still in the act of being born, and an ancient wanderer older than the calendars of creation. Together, they tell a single story: of beginnings that never quite end, of endings that quietly begin again.

What follows, then, is neither chronicle nor commentary, but a meditation — on how the universe remembers itself. For even as the cosmos expands outward in silence, perhaps it is also turning inward, fold on fold, to recall the first light it ever knew.

 

Inter ortus mundorum et lassitudinem temporis,
Universum in se reflectitur — ut meminerit unde coeperit.

(Between the births of worlds and the fatigue of time,
the universe bends back upon itself — to recall whence it began.)

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I. The Cradle Rekindled — Beta Pictoris and the Birth We Witnessed Twice

The Beta Pictoris system, observed over four decades — from a faint dust halo to a structured planetary nursery. (Credit: NASA / ESO / Hashem Al-ghaili)

In April 1984, the du Pont Telescope in Chile caught a strange glimmer around a young southern star. The object — Beta Pictoris — would become astronomy’s first stage for the unfolding of creation itself. There, in that faint, flat disk of light, we saw what our ancestors could only intuit: a planetary system in formation. For forty-one years astronomers watched it age. Dust became structure; ripples hardened into rings.

By 2024, its halo had grown a feline appendage — the now-famous “Cat’s Tail.” Each decade turned Beta Pictoris into a living chronicle of how order rises from chaos, how starlight learns to sculpt its debris. The universe, it seemed, had handed us its time-lapse of genesis.

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II. The Infant and the Ember — WISPIT 2b and the Light of Becoming

The newborn planet WISPIT 2b, glowing in hydrogen-alpha light within a dusty cradle 437 light-years away. (Credit: NASA / Magellan / LBT Observatories)

In September 2025, that chronicle received a new page. Astronomers using the Magellan Telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope captured, for the first time, the direct image of a planet being born — WISPIT 2b. A mere five million years old, five times the mass of Jupiter, it glows like a coal mid-kindling.

Seen through hydrogen-alpha filters, its blush is not reflected starlight but matter in motion — gas collapsing, dust surrendering to gravity. Its orbit has carved a clean gap through the bright disk of its parent star, proof that planets do not merely arrive; they assemble themselves from imperfection.

From Beta Pictoris to WISPIT 2b, our telescopes have become witnesses of becoming — not the fossil of creation, but its very rehearsal.

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III. The Paradox of the Elder — HD 140283, the Methuselah Star

HD 140283, the “Methuselah Star,” a relic seemingly older than the universe that shelters it.
(Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / Big Think)

And then there is one that refuses to be young. Barely 190 light-years from us shines HD 140283, the so-called Methuselah Star. By early estimates, it was 14.5 billion years old — impossibly older than the universe itself.

The paradox has since softened: refined Hubble measurements grant it a margin of ±0.8 billion years, enough to bring the ancient wanderer just within the cosmic calendar. Yet its very possibility unsettles us. Metal-poor, racing through space at 800,000 miles per hour, HD 140283 is a fossil of the first generation of stars — formed when the universe still tasted of hydrogen and awe.

Here the cosmos shows its other face: that of endurance, where matter clings to existence long after reason says it should not.

(Sources: NASA / ESA archives; Gundy C.S., “Oldest Known Star Gets a Birthdate Update,” Penn State Eberly College of Science (2013); Siegel E., “Is the ‘Methuselah Star’ Really Older Than the Universe?” Big Think (2024); NASA Discovery Alert, 2025.)

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IV. Between the First and the Last

The infant planet and the elder star form the two termini of time’s spectrum — one aflame with potential, the other burning through memory. Between them lies everything that has ever wondered, measured, or prayed.

To watch them both is to realise that creation is not a moment but a continuum of remembering.
Each orbit, each pulse of fusion, is the universe rehearsing its first word again and again until it understands what it said.

Perhaps that is what it means when the cosmos turns back — not to reverse itself, but to see how far wonder has come.

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🪶 Closing Note of Gratitude: 

🔭 Acknowledgements and Source References: 

My sincere gratitude to the many hands that turned photons into stories — to the astronomers who labour at telescopes in Chile, Arizona, and beyond; to the instrument teams of Magellan, the Large Binocular Telescope, and the du Pont Telescope; and to the archivists at NASA, ESA, and STScI who make high-quality imagery and data accessible to everyone with an asking eye.

Primary Inspiration and Media Sources

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center — Discovery Alert: “Baby Planet Photographed in a Ring around a Star for the First Time!” (Press release, 30 September 2025).
European Southern Observatory (ESO) — Archival observations of Beta Pictoris from the du Pont Telescope (Las Campanas Observatory, 1984–2024).
Magellan Telescope Consortium and Large Binocular Telescope Observatory — Hydrogen-alpha imaging of WISPIT 2b, 2025.

Instagram Science Communications

Special appreciation to the science communicators whose online narratives inspired sections of this essay and provided the illustrative vignettes below — for translating complex observations into a language that welcomes both public curiosity and scholarly reflection:

• 🌌 41 Years Later, We’re Still Watching a Planet Being Born

 — (Beta Pictoris, four-decade observation thread)

 • ⭐ The Methuselah Star Seems Older Than the Universe

 — (HD 140283, the Methuselah Star discussion)

 • 🪐 Scientists Just Photographed a Planet Being Born for the First Time Ever!

 — (WISPIT 2b, newborn planet announcement)

Additional References and Data Repositories: 

Further indebtedness is acknowledged to:
• NASA and ESA press archives and image libraries
• Hubble Space Telescope parallax and photometry datasets (STScI)
• ESO and Magellan/LBT public notices, observing logs, and image releases
• Contemporary analyses by established researchers on the Beta Pictoris system, HD 140283, and recent protoplanetary discoveries

Images: NASA / ESA / STScI / Magellan Observatory / ESO
References: Penn State Eberly College of Science · Big Think · NASA Discovery Alert (2025)

To colleagues, telescope operators, data curators, and the anonymous coders who bind metadata to memory — thank you. Your patient stewardship allows both amateurs and scholars to stand, however briefly, at the lip of the cosmic forge.

Epilogue: Cosmic Recollection

Between the birth of worlds and time grown old,
The cosmos gathers back its scattered soul;
Inward it folds, dream upon dream again—
Not to cease, but softly to begin again.
Within its heart, remembrance deep,
It hums the first light it vowed to keep.

© Dhinakar Rajaram

(All rights reserved. Quotations and citations used under fair academic practice.)

All images used under educational and scientific fair use. Sources acknowledged individually. 

#WhenTheCosmosTurnsBack #BetaPictoris #WISPIT2b #MethuselahStar #ProtoplanetaryDisk #PlanetFormation #StellarEvolution #Astrophysics #CosmicChronicle #BirthOfWorlds #StarlightAndMemory #AstronomyInVerse #ScienceAndWonder #CelestialContinuum #CosmicForge #LightOfBecoming #EternalGenesis #NASA #ESA #ESO #STScI #MagellanTelescope #LargeBinocularTelescope #DuPontTelescope #HubbleHeritage #SpaceResearch #ScienceWriting #AstroPhotography #CosmosAndCulture #AstroJournal #PublicAstronomy #ScienceCommunication

When the Abyss Turns Our Way

 

🌀Sagittarius A, Spin, and the Celestial Dance of Extremes

By Dhinakar Rajaram © 2025

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Image courtesy: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT), via NSF / ESO / NASA.

Preface

It began, as many fascinations do in our century, with an image on social media. A striking visual on Instagram — this post — showed a luminous whirl at the centre of the Milky Way, captioned with the audacious claim that our galaxy’s black hole is “spinning near the speed limit of physics and aimed right at Earth.”

Curiosity, that old Newtonian apple, struck again. What did this mean? Could the cosmic engine anchoring the Milky Way truly be rotating at relativistic extremes, its axis inclined toward us, as though we were peering down the barrel of creation itself?

Thus began this essay — an amateur astronomer’s reflection on a discovery that blurs the line between the empirical and the ineffable.

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Image courtesy: NASA / ESA / ESO Composite Visualisation.

I. The Heart of Darkness, 26,000 Light-Years Away

At the heart of our galaxy, cloaked in the constellation Sagittarius, lies a gravitational monarch: Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”).
It is a supermassive black hole, weighing about four million times the mass of our Sun, and situated roughly 26,000 light-years from Earth.

In 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) gave humanity its first direct glimpse of this behemoth’s silhouette — a golden ring of radiation encircling a central void. The image, a synthesis of global radio telescopes working in concert, confirmed what theory had whispered since Einstein: the abyss exists, and it glows.

But seeing, as astronomers well know, is only the overture. The symphony lies in motion — in how that monstrous core spins, feeds, and breathes energy into the galaxy around it.

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II. The Spin that Scrapes the Limits of Physics

A black hole’s spin is expressed as a dimensionless parameter, $a_*$, ranging from 0 (no spin) to 1 (maximum theoretical spin under general relativity). Recent analyses — employing neural networks trained on millions of simulated EHT images — suggest Sagittarius A* boasts a spin of $a_* ≈ 0.9 ± 0.06$.¹

That is, it pirouettes at roughly ninety percent of the relativistic limit. At such velocities, spacetime itself is dragged around the black hole in a phenomenon called frame-dragging — an effect so severe that matter near the event horizon cannot remain still even if it wished to.

In essence, the very fabric of the cosmos is caught in its whirl.

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III. Pointed Our Way: The Axis of the Abyss

The same study reveals something even more serendipitous — the spin axis appears to be inclined at less than 30° relative to our line of sight.²

That is not to say the black hole is “aimed at Earth” in the sensationalist sense, but it does imply that we are observing it nearly face-on, rather than from the side. In celestial geometry, that’s a privileged vantage.

We are looking almost straight down the whirlpool.

This orientation, described elegantly in Astronomy & Astrophysics (June 2025),³ grants us an unusually clear view into the maelstrom — where magnetic fields writhe, electrons spiral at near-light speeds, and gravity distorts time and space into a perpetual hallucination.

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Image courtesy: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration — Polarised Light Study (2021).

IV. A Chaotic Halo, Not a Jet

Curiously, despite its ferocious spin, Sagittarius A* does not hurl colossal jets of matter like its famous cousin M87* in Virgo.

Instead, the radio glow we detect seems to emanate from superheated electrons gyrating in tangled magnetic fields within the accretion disk — that incandescent storm of gas and plasma circling the event horizon.⁴

Earlier theoretical models predicted a more ordered magnetic structure. Yet the 2025 EHT deep-learning analysis unveiled a chaotic field, fluctuating in time and intensity.⁵
This disorder is not failure — it is revelation. It tells us that the microphysics of accretion, magnetohydrodynamics, and energy transfer near black holes are far more intricate than even our most sophisticated simulations imagined.

Ignoramus et ignorabimus, as the Latinists would sigh: “We do not know, and perhaps shall never fully know.”

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Image courtesy : Hashem Al-ghaili / Science Nature Page

V. Of Collisions, Counter-Spins, and Cosmic Memory

The comparative study of M87* — another EHT subject — found something astonishingly opposite. Its black hole appears to spin counter to the flow of its infalling gas,⁶ perhaps the residue of a galactic merger eons ago.

That contrast — Sgr A* spinning swiftly with modest accretion, M87* rotating oppositely yet projecting monumental jets — underscores a profound truth: black holes are no mere drains of matter. They are dynamic engines sculpting the very architecture of galaxies.

In their spins are encoded the memories of cosmic collisions, the whispers of ancient accretion, the fossil signatures of galactic evolution.

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VI. Reflections from a Blue Planet

For an amateur astronomer watching from a terrace under city light, these revelations are humbling.

We stand on a small world, 26,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s nucleus, yet our telescopes — and now our algorithms — have reached into the furnace of relativity itself.

There is something almost mystical in the symmetry: the black hole’s axis aligned roughly toward us, as if the cosmos itself were affording humanity a fleeting glimpse into its deepest machinery.

One is reminded of Pascal’s lament — Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.
And yet, in that silence, we listen more intently than ever.

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VII. Epilogue: When Shadows Teach Light

The study of Sagittarius A* has evolved from mythic metaphor into measurable science — yet its poetry endures.

Here lies an object invisible to the eye, governed by equations that warp intuition, yet illuminating more about the universe — and about ourselves — than any star could.

In that sense, the black hole is not a void but a mirror: of curiosity, of intellect, and of the human refusal to stop asking why.

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Sources and References

1. EHT Collaboration, “Estimation of the Spin of the Supermassive Black Hole in Sagittarius A*,” Astronomy Reports (2024), SpringerLink.

2. NASA / Chandra X-ray Center, “Sagittarius A*: Telescopes Support Event Horizon Telescope Results,” NASA.gov (2023).

3. Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, “Self-learning Neural Network Cracks Iconic Black Holes,” Astronomie.nl (June 2025); Astronomy & Astrophysics, vol. 683, A37 (2025).

4. ScienceDaily, “AI Unlocks Milky Way’s Black Hole Secrets,” (14 June 2025).

5. A&A, “Deep-Learning Inference of Black Hole Orientation and Magnetic Field Structures,” (2025).

6. EHT Collaboration, “M87* Polarisation and Jet Alignment Studies,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2024).

7. Event Horizon Telescope Public Data Archive, 2017 Campaign, UI ADS (2022).

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© Dhinakar Rajaram 2025
(All rights reserved. Quotations and citations used under fair academic practice.)

All images used under educational and scientific fair use. Sources acknowledged individually. 

#SagittariusA #MilkyWay #BlackHole #EventHorizonTelescope #Astrophysics #CosmicDiscovery #Relativity #Einsteinian #Spacetime #GalacticCentre #EHT2025 #CosmicPerspective #SpaceScience #ScientificBlog #AstronomyLovers #CosmosAndConsciousness #WhenTheAbyssTurnsOurWay #ScienceAndPoetry #CelestialMechanics #QuantumGravity 

Ilaiyaraaja’s Nenjaththai Killadhe — A Symphony Between Soul and Sky

From Guitar Whispers to Cathedral Crescendos — Three Songs, One Spirit of Reinvention

By © Dhinakar Rajaram

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I. Preface — A Listener’s Confession

Let me begin with a confession — I am no trained musician. My vocabulary is not weighed down by the grammar of ragas or the rhetoric of counterpoint. Yet, through decades of listening, one begins to hear what cannot be explained — the secret pulse beneath melody. Nenjaththai Killadhe (1980), in that sense, is not just a film soundtrack; it is Ilaiyaraaja’s private laboratory, a place where acoustic intimacy meets orchestral ambition.

Three songs — Paruvame Puthiya Padal Paadu, Uravenum Puthiya Vaanil, and Ye Thendrale Oru Raagam Pada Va — become, together, a triptych of emotional architecture: desire, turbulence, and surrender. Each track is an essay in reinvention, or, as the French might say, une métamorphose sonore — a sonic metamorphosis.

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II. Paruvame Puthiya Padal Paadu — The Guitar’s Whisper and the Rhythm of Thighs

In this song, Ilaiyaraaja paints tenderness with an almost ascetic restraint. The orchestration is minimal — a duet led by the acoustic guitar, softly brushed percussion, and that signature thigh-tapping rhythm which evokes the raw immediacy of a live performance. One almost visualises the composer himself, tapping gently to sustain the pulse — the very heartbeat of the melody.

Here, the guitar does not merely accompany; it converses. Every pluck seems to trace the emotional tremors between the singers. The counterline of the bass flute enters like a breeze over still water, invoking the French expression je ne sais quoi — that ineffable something which makes a moment eternal.

For a lay listener, the effect is direct yet mysterious: it feels like love remembered rather than declared. Ilaiyaraaja achieves what most Western ballads attempt — simplicity without banality.

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III. Uravenum Puthiya Vaanil — The Symphony in Subdued Rage

If Paruvame was introspection, Uravenum Puthiya Vaanil is introspection in revolt. There is an unspoken anger here — not the outburst of a tempest, but the slow burn of an internal storm. The orchestration swells and recedes in layers, suggesting a hidden fugue. It is not Bach, yet the spirit of counterpoint breathes within it: multiple lines speaking, clashing, and resolving.

The string sections rise like oceanic waves, and the rhythm section — disciplined yet furious — grounds the chaos into poise. There’s almost a cinematic symmetry to how Ilaiyaraaja builds this piece: symphony meets solitude. One might call it doloroso con dignità — sorrow with dignity.

For the Western ear, this is akin to a restrained symphonic poem, a miniature Mahlerian lament. For the Indian ear, it is unmistakably Raaja — where harmony is emotion itself.

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IV. Ye Thendrale Oru Raagam Pada Va — The Cathedral in the Mind

And then comes the benediction. Ye Thendrale is not a song; it is an invocation. P. Susheela’s voice enters like a solitary beam through a church window — crystalline, almost sacred. The arrangement recalls a Western choral-orchestral form, evoking the serenity of an evening mass. One can almost imagine a chamber of light, where the organ hums in empathy.

Ilaiyaraaja transforms the familiar into the divine. The melodic progression carries the calm of a hymn and the yearning of a lullaby. The Latin liturgical mood — adagio cantabile — fuses with a Tamil soul. What results is a transcendence that bridges devotion and romance, art and prayer.

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V. Coda — A Symphony Between Soul and Sky

Together, these three songs are Ilaiyaraaja’s quiet rebellion against musical compartments. Between the guitar’s whisper, the symphony’s surge, and the choir’s prayer, lies the arc of a human life — from innocence to turbulence to surrender.

He does not lecture through notation; he converses through feeling. The listener is not a student, but a pilgrim. Perhaps that is why Nenjaththai Killadhe continues to echo: it is less an album and more a cathedral of sound, where every emotion finds its echo.

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VI. Ode — To the Eternal Composer

“O Raaja, you did not compose for applause, but for silence — the silence that follows when the heart recognises itself.”

In that pause, between note and void, lies the secret grammar of Ilaiyaraaja’s genius — a music not of the stage, but of the soul.

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Poove Sempoove — Two Versions, Two Lives

 

🌺A Lullaby of Love, A Lament of Loss

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Prologue — The Fragrance of Memory

The Tamil song “Poove Sempoove” from the 1988 film Solla Thudikuthu Manasu stands as one of Ilaiyaraaja’s most soul-stirring compositions — at once a gentle lullaby and a deep confession of love. Penned by Vaali and sung in two versions — by K. J. Yesudas and Sunanda — it transcends gender, era, and circumstance to become something eternal: an ode to love in its purest and most painful form.

I first heard it on AIR Vividh Bharathi and Doordarshan’s Oliyum Oliyum in 1988 — the era when songs lingered longer than memories. Over the years, I have come to realise that Poove Sempoove is not a single song but a dual revelation — two hearts echoing through the same melody, two souls bound by the same words, yet worlds apart in meaning.

I am not a trained musician, nor have I ever studied the grammar of rāgas or harmony in any formal sense. Whatever little I understand comes from years of listening — from the things I have meticulously observed, or quietly tried to learn, through Ilaiyaraaja’s music since childhood. His compositions became my textbooks, his transitions my teachers, his silences my lessons.

Musically, the piece is a marvel of rāga architecture: it opens in Śaṅkarabharaṇam, flows into Nāṭabhairavi, brushes Kīravaṇī, wanders through Gaurimanōhari and and hints at Harikāmbhōji’s warmth before returning home again — like a pilgrim revisiting each shrine of emotion before resting in peace. The tonal transitions are seamless, almost cinematic, as if Ilaiyaraaja were painting feelings rather than notes.

 

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Part I — The Lover’s Lullaby (K. J. Yesudas for male protagonist)

Yesudas’s version is sunlight in sound — a lover’s lullaby draped in reverence. His voice glides through Ilaiyaraaja’s orchestration with devotional poise, carrying the gentleness of affection that seeks neither possession nor promise.

The lines —

Poove Sempoove un vāsaṃ varum / Vāsal en vāsal un poongavanam
Nizhal pōla nānum nadai pōda nīyum / Thodarkindra sondham nedungala bandham

— evoke love as fragrance, love as shadow, love as something that walks beside but never overwhelms.

Here, love is tranquil, not turbulent. It comforts rather than consumes. The rāgas flow like silk: Śaṅkarabharaṇam’s stability, Nāṭabhairavi’s meditative melancholy, Gaurimanōhari’s gentle wistfulness, and Kīravaṇī’s fleeting brush of pathos. Yesudas renders all of this with a serenity bordering on the sacred.

Within the film’s frame, this voice belongs to the man whose love has already crossed the threshold of regret. But beneath that composure lies the confession of a man who has loved deeply, erred silently, and now redeems himself through music.

Naan seitha pāvam ennodu pogum / Nee vāzhndhu nāan thaan pārthalē pōthum

This is love purified by renunciation — the selfless readiness to suffer so the beloved may smile. It is Ilaiyaraaja at his most Bach-like, weaving counterpoint and conscience into one seamless fabric.

If Yesudas’s rendition is a hymn, it is a candle burning steady in a quiet shrine — a flame of devotion, not desire.

And just when I believed I had heard all that this melody could whisper, another listener — from a world far removed — heard it anew. Through the lens of Western classical grammar, Russian - American pianist Lidia Kotolova found in Poove Sempoove what I had always felt but never named — that grief, when set to harmony, becomes a language beyond borders. 

Bridging Notes — A Western Ear to an Eastern Hymn:

Before the melody crosses from the lover’s heart to the mother’s conscience, it travelled once more — this time across continents. In the hands of pianist Lidia Kotolova, “Poove Sempoove” was heard not as language, but as architecture: harmony, modulation, breath.

Western Reading — A Classical Ear to Ilaiyaraaja’s Grammar - 

Kotolova, approaching the Yesudas rendition as a Western classical musician, begins with reverence for its home key — E-flat major, a favourite of Mozart for his most contemplative adagios. She likens the opening’s tranquillity to a Mozartian andante — music that invites stillness rather than applause.

She observes that every cadence, every seeming point of rest, resolves not to the home chord but to the subdominant — that half-resolved harmony that forever leans forward. Each phrase, therefore, ends mid-breath — love perpetually reaching, never quite arriving.

Her admiration deepens at Ilaiyaraaja’s distant modulation — a leap from E-flat major to G-flat major, a key rarely traversed so naturally in classical convention. She marvels at how naturally it happens: a harmonic pilgrimage mirroring the male protagonist’s own moral wandering — from certainty to contrition, and finally home again.

Even the interludes, she notes, converse in two dialects: Western harmony entwined with Carnatic phrasing, percussion meeting prayer. “You needn’t understand the words,” she concludes; “the music itself carries the emotion — sadness, then peace, as though it prays for forgiveness.”

To Kotolova, Ilaiyaraaja’s work is a translation of grace into geometry — a meeting of Bach and Bhairavi beneath the same breath.

 Analysis by Lidia Kotolova — tracing Ilaiyaraaja’s “Poove Sempoove” in E-flat major, where Mozartian grace meets Tamil melancholy.

In Kotolova’s ears, Ilaiyaraaja’s lament finds kinship with Mozart’s grace — proof that grief, when transposed into harmony, becomes a universal dialect of the soul. From that universal grammar of redemption, the song turns inward — no longer the lover’s hymn, but the mother’s confession.

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Part II — The Penitent Mother’s Lullaby (Sunanda for the female protagonist)

Then comes Sunanda’s version — the same score, yet another world. Recorded not for the film but pressed quietly onto vinyl, it carries within it a different universe of ache. Her voice emerges from a duskier register — lower, earthier, unvarnished by glamour. It is the voice of one who has seen too much, borne too much, and still finds within herself the tenderness to sing.

What in Yesudas’s timbre felt like tranquil affection here transmutes into trembling contrition. The “Poove” she addresses is no longer the beloved — it is her own child, the unblemished flower she prays will never inherit her thorns. Every syllable is laden with unspoken pain, as if she dare not confess aloud the weight she carries within. The lullaby is her only permitted language — soft, evasive, but saturated with sorrow.

Between the words lie breaths heavy with history — the pauses themselves are poetry. Ilaiyaraaja’s orchestration recedes to the background, allowing the tremor in Sunanda’s tone to stand bare, unadorned, vulnerable. The song becomes a secret dialogue between mother and daughter: one too young to understand, the other too broken to explain.

When she sings,

Naan vaazhum vaazhvae unakaaga thaanae

it is no longer a lover’s pledge but a mother’s penance. She lives not merely for her child but through her — hoping that the purity she lost may continue in the life she gave birth to. The line

Naan seitha pāvam ennodu pogum

becomes her quiet confession; not shouted from rooftops, but whispered into a cradle.

This woman — perhaps once a mistress, perhaps merely misunderstood — is trapped between guilt and grace. She hides her tears beneath her melody, lest the child awaken. Her love is fierce but forbidden, her redemption half-earned. In that haunting refrain of “Poove Sempoove”, she plants the only legacy she dares to leave — a promise that her daughter will bloom in sunlight, untouched by her shadow.

Ilaiyaraaja’s raga transitions — from Śaṅkarabharaṇam’s maternal warmth to Kīravaṇī’s penitential dusk — mirror her own transformation. It is as though the music itself bends in empathy, bearing her burden when her voice can no longer do so.

If Yesudas’s version is a candle lit at a lover’s altar, Sunanda’s is that same flame trembling in a storm — fragile, flickering, yet holy in its persistence. Beneath its glow lies a mother’s unuttered prayer:
“May you sleep free of my sins, my little flower. May your dawn never remember my night.”

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Before the cradle quietens, listen to the two lives this melody has lived — the same song, two souls, two destinies:

 

Male version (K. J. Yesudas):

Female version (Sunanda):

🌸 Coda — The Cradle That Remembered:

When the violins fade and silence breathes again,
only a mother’s hum remains — unrecorded, unremembered.
She rocks her child in rhythm with her regrets,
singing softly so the past won’t wake.

Her lullaby is a wound stitched with love,
each note a teardrop disguised as comfort.
And though the world hears merely a song,
the heavens hear her plea —
“Let my daughter sleep beneath untainted stars.”

For in Ilaiyaraaja’s music, even sorrow kneels —
and every Poove still blooms,
not from joy, but from the courage to love again.

And thus, from Vienna’s salons to Madurai’s silence,
the melody completes its circle — returning, 
at last, to the cradle that remembered.

🌙 Epilogue — Beneath the Bloom :

When the song fades, what remains is not the echo,
but the ache that gave it birth.

Somewhere between the strings and her sigh,
a mother folds her sorrow like linen —
tenderly, so the creases won’t show.
Her voice trembles, not from weakness,
but from carrying too much silence for too long.

She does not wail; she withholds.
The world hears melody — she hears memory.
And in that private hush,
her love grows roots beneath grief,
reaching toward the one life
she prays will bloom untouched by her own ruins.

Perhaps that is what lullabies are —
not songs to put children to sleep,
but prayers whispered so they may wake
into gentler worlds than ours.

© Dhinakar Rajaram, 2025. All rights reserved.

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