Pazhassiraja director debunks Raja charge

The musician had stirred a hornet’s nest when he said last week that he was not happy with lyricist O N V Kurup’s verses of the main song handed out to him. The occasion was the audio launch of the movie’s Tamil version. “When Hariharan came to me with O N V’s lyrics and asked me to score the music, the tunes just did not fit in with the lyrics. The lyrics had the rhythm of a march-past and that was not what I intended, as I had to alter the tunes,” he had said.

Even though the much-revered poet O N V Kurup or anyone connected with the film refrained from reacting to the charge, hundreds of O N V’s well-wishers took on Ilayaraja’s ‘skewed’ interpretation of the situation. It was in this context that Hariharan said in Chennai on Thursday that Ilayaraja had no such complaints when he was handed over the lyrics. “The verses were meant to go with the marching warriors and not as he wished. Also, it is not his business to decide how the song should be conceived, that’s for me and M T Vasudevan Nair (script writer) to decide,” he said.

The multilingual movie featuring Mammootty and Sarat Kumar, which was released in Tamil last week, is the costliest Malayalam film ever made and has been receiving rave reviews.