Searching for fuel to support my insomnia (I couldn't read any more), I was YouTubing, when I happened upon this Tamil song - "Merke Merke", sung by Shankar Mahadevan, and composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja. Even though my comprehension of Tamil is very marginal, this song has such a strong melodic line that I kept playing it repeatedly, in a loop.

Yuvan, as I learnt this morning, is Mastero Illu's (Ilaiyaraaja's) youngest son, and has been making music in the South Indian movie scene for the past three or four years. My preliminary auditory experience tells me that Yuvan is a chip off the old block; this is evident in the way he welds Carnatic raga-influenced melodic lines with western orchestration, and in the way he layers his melodies with very desi sounding rythms. Further, he doesn't let the rythm section in his compositions overwhelm and supercede the basic melody, as it often happens in A.R. Rahman's music[1].

This became even more evident to me as I listened to "Kanpaesum Varthaigal" from "7/G Rainbow Colony"[2] (a movie for which he won a Filmfare Award) with glints (especially that rustic sounding beat and melody following the brief rain interlude, and the accordion's embroidery) of Ilaiyaraaja's best music[3]. I will now be on the look out for more of this kind of nice - Raja nice.

[1] I don't know if it is only me but this obscuring of melody, I think, might be the main reason why I rarely recall any of Rahman's songs from memory unlike many of Ilaiyaraaja's songs.