Telugu film music

[SenorJalapeno]

I've been out of the country for more than a decade and mostly in places where Indian Movies are impossible to find. There are a few sites where one may listen to a decent selection of Telugu Music and I frequent a few of them quite often.

I have to confess that I am not qualified to critique a certain song, its melody or even its lyric. I think I am more interested in the esoteric and the assorted memories that each song evokes in me. For instance, Siri Malle Neeve a song from the Movie Pantulamma is one of my perennial favorites. I have never seen the movie but for some strange reason, each time I listen to the song, I remember being at an exact place and at an exact time. Probably because that was where I first heard the song. I remember being in my school uniform, in a rickshaw, a few hundred meters from the Kondayyapalem Railway Crossing in Kakinada. Its around four in the afternoon. I see a temple and people sitting on the small verandah in front and a few buffalos tied next to this small well. Are all these memories exact or have I inadvertently chosen select images from my distant past and forced them together to form a cohesive -albeit nonauthentic- memory? Honestly, I don't really care. Each time I hear the song, I re-live a small tidbit of my childhood and that memory opens the floodgates for so many others -of friends and cricket and tadpoles in shallow puddles in between the roots of the banyan tree and the sompapidi in the small glass case with a solitary light bulb and the toothless old-woman that sold small mis-shapen guavas...

Some songs mean nothing than mere music and more noise. Then there are those songs that warm your soul and add zest to life.