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Ramayana – A Picture Story

You may ask as to why I would be referring to a picture story of Ramayana in this age where Ramayana is available in so many forms and media. May be it is nostalgia or that I have not seen the epic being presented in a picture book or that my wondering about what motivated the publisher in printing this story close to a hundred years ago. It is an impressive representation of the huge epic which has been depicted thru pictures in 108 slides!

I had this picture story as pages organized as inserts or slides in a book for a very long time; I wonder how this was actually printed originally for it seems that my maternal grandfather moved the pages into a book in order to preserve it more than anything else. Many years ago, I transferred these pages into plastic sleeves to protect them from further decay. 

You can see that this was published close to 100 years ago (1928 or around) and I am glad that they are in decent shape. The discolorations you see are because of scotch tape or variations there of used to fix the tears and other reasons that could have happened while they were being inserted into the book and plastic sleeves. There are a few missing pages.

This PDF files is a scan of these sheets.

You can also read it using this link https://archive.org/details/ramayana_202202

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A surprise find – partial concert of K J Yesudas

Recently, I started reviewing the recordings of Emani Sankara Sastry so that I could share his recordings on this blog. And surprisingly tucked away among the various concerts of Emani (solo, with MSG and with Lalgudi), the third part of a concert with the tail end of the concert had a recording of K J Yesudas with M S Gopalakrishnan and T V Gopalakrishnan (not named but easily determined). There is no information on the date of the concert or its location and unfortunately not complete either.

Here you have Yesudas with his wonderful voice and great accompaniment which I enjoyed very much and hope you will too.

  • varNam – nATTai
  • vAtApi gaNapatim – hamsadwani
  • brOva bArama – bahuDari
  • manasulOni marmalanu – hindOLam
  • illAdadai virumbi kETTugirAi  – mAyAmALavagowLa

Having mentioned Emani at the onset, I will be sharing the recordings of his in the near future.

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Updates to Madurai Somasundaram

I have updated the page for Madurai Somasundaram page, resulting a whole lot more concerts that you will be able to listen and enjoy.

I have created two sub-pages for concerts with Lalgudi Jayaraman and M Chandrasekaran, who seem to be his preferred accompanying violinists. I also added a bunch of concerts with other accompaniments and unknown accompaniments in the main page for Somu.

Click here to get to Madurai Somasundaram page.