Rocking in the Free World

Youtube is growing to be among one of my favourite websites of all time, thanks to the endless amount of content on it. Whenever I’ve wanted to see a random music video of some vague song that I had heard when I was in my teens, youtube helps me find the video, without fail. I’m no longer bothered about missing the latest videos on VH1 and one of the only reasons I watch TV is because my laptop is now suffering from frequent breakdowns due to old-age and overheating of the motherboard.

When I do invest in a super stud laptop, I think I might as well kiss my TV viewing goodbye for the most part, since all viewable content is generally being uploaded on youtube simultaneously. There are many situations wherein a lot of content put up is being taken down on the insistence of production houses and such, but then again, most production houses are also putting up their own official and verified youtube channels for public viewing.

Over the past week or so, after the end of term 7, I’ve had to stay back on campus to partake in the job hunt and it is during this break that I’ve managed to admire and respect youtube even more. When I was much younger, our family used to view or at least talk about some of the more popular regional language movies in Kannada, Tamil and Telugu and we’d also made visits to the cinema theater to watch a few of these movies.

As the years have gone by, most of my movie viewing has gravitated strongly towards English movies and to a small extent, to Hindi movies and other foreign language movies ranging from Iranian cinema to Korean and Japanese flicks, to those made in Eastern Europe.

However, thanks to youtube, my interest in south Indian cinema has now been rekindled. The features on the website, combined with some kind soul’s generosity has led to playlists being created that can now stream entire movies. Our internet speeds on campus are like a dream come true and as a result, movie viewing has been taken to a new level altogether.

In the past four days, I’ve seen movies like Billa, Kadhalan, Boys, Chennai 28, Alaipayuthey, The Angrez, Sivaji the Boss completely over youtube. Some of these movies have been seen previously and some others were viewed for the first time. But its nice to not have to run to the video library looking for older movies, since youtube, in all probability has them all. I wasn’t able to locate a complete movie playlist for Thiruda Thiruda however.

The kind souls that have uploaded said movies have also been generous enough to include subtitles in the movies to make life easier for those that don’t know the language completely. My extremely limited knowledge of Tamil and Telugu have been somewhat supplemented marginally over the past week due to these movie watching binges.

Not only that, I’ve also been reintroduced to all the A R Rahman tracks that I’d been crazy about when I was a kid and had then abandoned later on for other music that took over mindspace. The more I listen to ARR’s stuff, the more I think that his older work was more melodious and representative of his musical genius and that the rest of the world in general that has gone bonkers over his work in Slumdog Millionaire would have tears of joy in their eyes if only they’d listen to his entire discography.

I can’t really pick a favourite, but the music from the movie Thiruda Thiruda would definitely rank highly among the works of ARR.

I strongly admire people who’ve mastered multiple languages and I wish I could’ve done so myself too, though with 4 + 2 (partial knowledge) languages that I know, and a few words here and there in the others, I’m way behind where I’d like me to be.

If youtube were around when I were a kid and I’d been allowed movie binges like the ones I’m enjoying currently, I’d have probably been a true blue polyglot! What’s gone is in the past, and in the present, I have the second half of Alaipayuthey to watch before I go to sleep. So until next time, here’s hoping you are able to unleash the power of youtube to make life more fun.

PS – I swear google didn’t pay me for writing this post, although any gifts in cash or kind would be most welcome. I’m game for accumulating some good Karma as well, seeing as how much it might help in the afterlife.