Back to the future — Carnatic music on FM Radio

If you live in Bangalore and love Carnatic music, have long commutes in horrible traffic, there is something to keep your stress levels down. On FM 100.1 Mhz, you get several hours of great music everyday. It is 9:30 pm now and I am listening to Sanjay Subrahmanyan — first Poorvi Kalyani and now Mukhari. This brings back memories of listening to Carnatic music on the Radio — and trying to identify ragams.

Granted, this is the age of 40 Gigabyte ipods and you don’t need FM radio (that too a low powered one like 100.1 with limited range) in your car unless you use the ipod with a FM transmitter. So, why go retro? For one thing, no effort is involved other than turning on the radio. Then there is the “surprise me” factor — you find out about artistes and songs that are not in your ipod or cd collection. Yesterday I listened to a new (to me) artist Krishna Kumar’s vocal music and I was quite impressed. Also, to the relatively new experience of listening to T.N. Seshagopalan’s Hemavathi! If you are wondering whether I am talking about the Sangeetha Kalanidhi, I am, but I was listening to him playing that raga on the Veena 🙂

About Babu Srinivasan

My interests are in computer security, cryptography, functional programming and general aviation. I occasionally write articles on these and other topics in my blog.

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