Malayalam music reality shows on TV

You might have read my previous posts about the Malayalam reality show – Idea Star Singer (ISS) on Asianet. However I had missed out following or even being aware of another great reality show on Malayalam TV – Super Star Global (SSG) on Amrita TV.

I was introduced to SSG by Preethi (my wife; thanks, dear!) yesterday when she played the awesome rendition of the great Hindi movie song “Kuhu kuhu” [1957!] by the eventual winner Roopa Revathi on an episode from last year. It just blew me away, and so did her medley, not to mention her other efforts!

I am once again thankful to God for having made me someone who can naturally follow both Tamil and Malayalam, and with training — thanks to Kerala schools where you have to learn three languages and Dakshin Bharath Hindi Prachar Sabha — Hindi as well. Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi industries are lucky to have witnessed some of the highest quality film songs made in the last fifty years in India. I would rate the songs in Tamil and Malayalam of the last 30 years even higher than that of Hindi, thanks to men of such calibre like Ilayaraja, Ravindran, Johnson, Yesudas, SPB, Janaki, Chithra and Rahman.

Then I stumbled upon this wonderful wrap-up of these two reality shows by Balaji Srinivasan in this blog post. Nothing much is left for me to say. I hope you would get to enjoy a few hours of high quality music. A quick and dirty way to listen to Roopa’s songs are by visiting the audio page on her alternate site (strange a person having two sites whose address differ literally by a dot!).

The only problem I have now is to convince Airtel Digital TV to start transmitting Amrita TV. If that happens, it would be great to immerse myself in music between 8 and 10pm whenever time permits.

Oh, yes, thanks to Balaji, got to read this great piece on Roger Federer by the NYT as well. The happiness I derived from music and reading today was moving enough to inspire me to write something on this blog after a few extremely hectic weeks. I do hope I get to experience more such days, thanks to perhaps the most useful invention of the last century — internet. It would be great to hear your comments.

Update: A comprehensive dissection of Roopa’s SSG 2008 performance is available over at Subash’s blog.