These are days when music has become part of the promotional business like soft drinks and knitwear. The younger generation is increasingly addicted to foreign noises while the older generation is more and more attracted to the meretricious. Our values are so distorted that we like to see our beloved ragas suited and booted. One has to be a jet-set musician if one is to win plaudits in one's own country. In all this jazzy set-up how do we discover a place for M.D.Ramanathan and his music? M.D.R is different -- and looks different -- and from other musicians. His kutumi ("tuft of hair" as the word is usually translated) and his manner take him back to an earlier generation when Carnatic Music had the grandeur of a gopuram and the beauty of a Chola bronze or a sculptured Pallava panel come alive. There is a certain dignity and authenticity about the man and there is attractiveness even in his ungainliness.

Watching a recital by M.D.R the unsympathetic listener would think the musician was doing a comic act or making faces at unseen children. He contorts his face in manifold ways as if the very ecstasy of his music were agony to him. His hand gestures are such as to make us think that he is driving a bullock cart or wringing a wet towel. He draws, sketches, paints in the air, builds an unseen edifice swara by swara. When he does all this he is not aware of the audience: he is lost in himself and in his art.

In technical mastery - in virtuosity - there are musicians in the South who probably excel M.D.R. They excite audiences with their tonal acrobatics and their swaraprastharas (solfa rendering) are like firecrackers exploding. The audiences too react explosively and demand more excitement from the singer. But real music is lost in all this din and the listener leaves the performance with his sensitivity lowered and heightened. M.D.R is different from such musicians not only in degree but in kind. If some people do not listen to him it is because the South has forgotten the tradition of bhava in music and is hugging to itself a skeleton instead of music that has a personality and has a life and a soul.

For M.D.R music is music and not a vocal stunt to earn popularity. He remains unaffected by the gibes of critics and by the neglect of his art by a people who are today corrupted by the cacophony of film music. A popular Tamil magazine went so far to call him a clown.

M.D.R is a student of "Tiger" Varadachariar, but his music has no fangs - few musicians remember their guru with such fervor as he. Few musicians in India - I am here not excluding Hindustani vocalists - have the richness of his voice. His voice seems to originate from the depths of his being. It is not a mere oral or laryngeal exercise - and it seems to capture all the unheard melodies in the wind, in streams flowing past thickets of bamboo, the gurgle of pots filled with water by beautiful girls on the ghats of the Ganga.

M.D.R sings in vilambitam to Southern audiences who are used to musicians singing in tempi reminiscent of an express train racing past a backwoods station. His accompanists find him difficult because of his low shruti and the unexpected turns in his singing. He is one of the few creative musicians in the country, but his creativeness does not consist in discovering new ragas but in his very music. His alapanas are not excessively long and his solfa singing or swaraprasthara is always brief but full of original phrases and enchanting. The compositions of great masters are invested with classicism when he renders them and they become meaningful and not empty sound. Listen to him singing a thillana. There are others who make their thillanas intricate and complex structures. M.D.R's are playful, the swaras come dancing, they are like a scattering of flowers. The word often used by our music critics is "scintillating". No, no, M.D.R does not scintillate. He does more. He goes beyond other musicians to make his art aesthetically and emotionally elevating.
I have personally found M.D.R's music a liberating experience. If it casts a spell it is not to bind you but to free you from the limitations of time and space. In a little snatch of M.D.R's melody I have sought an eternity and I have been so moved as to be in tears. Music such as his makes one humble and listening to it one goes beyond oneself, one transcends oneself. This, I feel, is pure joy untainted by anything.

M.D.R became 60 years old last month. The seven swaras must have been gay on the occasion and the ragas must have lighted lamps if not candles, on the day. The Music Academy of Madras and the Sangeet Natak Academy of Delhi seem to be deaf to his music. Other musicians go to Paris and New York to propagate our music. M.D.Ramanathan lives in his little home in Adyar, Madras, and creates a world of music of his own. His only avocation is nadopasana. Tyagayya songs in Kalyanavasantham: Naduloludai Brahmanandamandave manasa (Immersed in nada you will attain, O mind, the joy of the Brahman). For him his Tyagaraja, his Muttuswami Dikshitar, his Shyama Sastri. Nothing else matters to him. And, listening to him, I have often wondered if anything matters other than music.