It is 9.30 in the night and Srinivas is a tired man. He had flown in from Chennai that morning, had hours of practice with his daughter Sharanya and aunt Padma Narayanan before a Carnatic concert by the trio at the Padmanabha Swamy temple. Back in his hotel room, he hopes to catch a few hours of sleep before the morning flight back to Chennai from ThiruvananthapuÂram, a place he calls home.
“It is a great feeling to come home every time,” he says as his daughter listens. He looks at her and says, “She has no such connection, she doesn’t speak Malayalam.” Sharanya protests, “Hey, I have come here before. ThiÂruvanantÂhapuram is so much more calm and relaxed than the fast-paced Chennai and I like visiting the temple a lot,” she talks about the Padmanabha Swamy Temple.
It is near the temple, in East Fort, that SriniÂvas spent the first years of his life. It is here that he fell in love with the temple music he heard every day and listened to his aunt Padma, then a student of music, sing. “He would come and listen to me sing and pick up the verses even as a child of three,” says the aunt, who he regards as his only music teacher in life.
“I am her student too. My dad doesn’t teach. He is a very bad teacher,” quips Sharanya. But together, the three had sat and practised for many hours ahead of the temple concert. “We sang 'Swathi Thirunal krithis' in 'Kalyani', 'Sindhu Bhairavi', 'Thodi' and other ragas,” says Padma.
They unanimously agree that the temple atmosphere helped all three of them to stay calm. To Srinivas, it also brings back memories of his younger days in Arts College and University College. “We used to have a group called Blue Birds. K.S. Chitra, then very young, used to be part of our group. So was G. Venugopal (singer) and T.K. Rajiv Kumar (director). Venu and Chitra would sing in Malayalam and I would sing in Hindi. Rajiv Kumar would play the congo drums.” They would hang out at the Indian Coffee House in Statue. “It is not like how you see it now. It used to be a heritage building.”
But he has to leave all those memories behind and get back to work. He has just composed music for a Tamil film called 'Kangaroo', for which Sharanya too has sung a song. “It is because of a man called A.R. Rahman that I came into film music. A lot of new voices have been discovered because of him, mine being one of them.”
After decades of singing, SriniÂvas finds composing a less difficult job, and one that he enjoys.
