This is a song that I would have gone ga-ga over…I could smell Nizhalgal’s ‘Poongadhave’ from a distance, when I heard the opening music.
I could not find it again now (and couldn’t find the film’s name either!), but I recall it featured Chiranjeevi, Radha and a horse, if my memory serves right. Just to give you an example of the way I found the random search disappointing – I stumbled on this song, ‘Chiki chiki cha…’ on YouTube, after searching for desperate keywords like ‘Ilayaraja Telugu hit song list’ (amongst others). And I haven’t even entered Raja’s Malayalam repertoire yet! I couldn’t find another Jotheyali or Emani ne and this could be entirely my wrong choices in random sampling. Yes, I did love Geetha’s entire soundtrack, but could not find as many gems as these songs…though, I have to admit – Geetha’s title song went ahead of Jotheyali in my mind! The problem was that there are way too many songs to sift through and it was like trying to live a 20 year period in 1 day, with a lot of bad, average songs thrown in. Think of like how Marty McFly felt when he traveled back to the past, in Back To The Future.īut, my enthusiasm was short-lived. As is my usual habit, I went on a massive hunt of other songs from these films and other Ilayaraja songs from the same time period…in the silly hope of recreating my childhood memory of listening to a wonderful, new Ilayaraja song for the first time, but with the complete awareness of everything I have heard since. I’m not very pleased with this serious lapse, obviously, since I was hooked to both these songs, hopelessly, for weeks. Yes, last year…for the first time in my life. I heard ‘Emani ne’ from the 1983 Telugu film Mantrigari Viyyankudu…in 2011. Despite having been a massive fan of Ilayaraja ever since I remember, I heard ‘Jotheyali’ from the 1980 Kannada film Geetha…for the first time in my life…in 2008.