Mother's Day Special: Baby, it's time to sleep

Three languages. Two songs. One reason. Mother’s day. One of these was written by a young pregnant woman. “I wrote it when I was expecting my first baby, when the first kicks came. That is an incredible feeling,” says writer Indu Lekshmi who then gave her lyrics to a composer friend Mikku Kavil. By the time her son was born, Indu had a rough version of her song Ninte imayonnu chimmave. It is later, after Indu had her second child that they decided to make a video for the song. Anija Jalan who had first met them with the idea of a short film, became the director of the music video. Sangeetha Sreekanth sang the song and actor Saranya Sasi who heard it asked if she could act. And so, a song called Rareeram got made, a lullaby that they’d release on Mother’s Day.

On the same day, Ramanathan Gopalakrishnan of the band ‘Ethnic Hymns’ would bring out a lullaby in Hindi and Tamil. The Malayali composer has teamed up with a Pune lyricist and a Malayali singer Urmila Varma to bring out Gaom mein lori in Hindi and Vizhiyil mayakkam in Tamil. “Reshmi Prabha had sent the original lyrics in Hindi and I wrote the Tamil version. It’s just that my previous works have been in multiple languages, teaming up with musicians in other languages, so it was easier to go for Tamil than Malayalam,” says the Chennai-based man. His first album ‘Experience the feel of India’ had veterans like Hariharan, Sankar Mahadevan, and popular names like Naresh Iyer, Chinmayi and Harini sing. “It had different Indian classical forms including Carnatic, Thiruppavai and Qawwali. The songs were in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Marathi.”

His second work with Chinmayi had been for charity. Ramanathan is now composing for a Hindi film to be directed by Prince Rampal. The lullaby song comes before that. “There is perhaps a lot of change in the way we do things but as long as there are children, there will be lullabies,” he says. Somehow with all the technology around you, you find it difficult to imagine the old picture of a mother singing a lullaby to her child. “That’s not true. I have sung lullabies for both my kids, and all the new mothers I know do it too,” Indu says.

The lullabies on YouTube are viewed a lot, Ramanathan says. “Perhaps mothers use it to learn new songs or play it for their kids. But there are few songs with videos.” That’s how Ram thought of making a video, and got his wife and their two-year-old son to act in it, to be released on May 13. In Indu’s song the video shows the bonding of a mother (Saranya) and her child in different stages of life, as the child grows up.