Songs for a political satire

The music of Kallara Santhe, Agni Sridhar’s latest offering, was released in the City recently amidst must fanfare and even more intellectual banter. Producers Syed Aman or Bachchan and M S Ravindra, Director D Suman Kiththur, Music Director V Manohar, Actors Yash and Jaya Jagdish, among others associated with the movie, presented the music to the audience made up of The Kannada Film Chamber of Commerce, fans, friends, family and mediapersons.

Manohar spoke about the music of the film and said, “The movie is a political satire, so the songs have been composed keeping that in mind. The music mocks the system. There are six songs in the movie, four written by me, one written by Suman and one by the acclaimed poet G P Rajaratnam. We’ve used his famous poem Tuththuri. The songs have been sung by Guru Kiran, Rajesh Krishna, and Shamitha Malnad. We are also introducing a new singer, B K Mohan, who is singing for the very first time and has done a very good job. The music is contemporary and trendy.”

Speaking about the song Tutththuri, Agni Sridhar said, “When we contacted Rajaratnam’s family for the rights of the song, they informed me that the licensing fee would go towards the education of female students in rural regions.”

From this point on, the evening took a dramatic step away from music. Getting progressively more agitated, Agni Sridhar declared that enough was not being done to save Kannada cinema. He spoke about the influx of movies in other regional languages like Tamil and Telugu and complained about the government not banning them. He suggested that this was the reason for the decline of the Kannada film industry. He argued against the idea that if good movies were being made in Kannada, then they would draw in audiences claiming lack of infrastructure and capital.

This oft repeated rhetoric though met with some opposition.
   While one media person wanted to know why the large non-Kannadiga population in the State not have access to movies in their language, another wanted to know why Kannada films be saved at all. Many in the audience complained about being unable to watch a Kannada movie for longer than 10 minutes and demanded that better movies be made. Agni promised the audience that his next venture with Shivrajkumar would stand up to competition from movies of every other language.
The evening turned out to be more of an intellectual, battle of wits than a music release but nobody was complaining.