NY Nagaram w/o the City!

I must have listened to New York Nagaram Urangum… about 100 times a day and still couldn’t have enough of it. Rahman’s voice alone elevates the song so high; doing justice to it on film was going to be a tall order. I wanted to checkout how well Krishna, the director of Sillunu Oru Kadhal, was going to stand up to it. Man, did he let me down badly!

In my opinion, there were three things that were core to the song. The burden of loneliness, the state of mind of the characters at that point in the movie (beside the loneliness part) and New York City itself. I cannot comment about the second part. By ignoring the other two, Krishna essentially killed the soul of the song and the chance to translate New York Na… into a timeless classic, video wise.

I believe that a song should have a story of its own, even if it is severed from the movie’s narrative. Fine, give that to those guys, where is the pain in Rahman’s voice? Is the protagonist even feeling his solitude! What we get instead is the parading of an alpha pair in Surya, paradingflashing his outfit and Jyothika, trying to ooze cuteness.

What ticked me off further was shooting the song in a European non-American city and passing it off as New York. That’s got to rank among the worst form of deception there is in filmmaking. New York has so much sanctity to it; how could it be taken for granted. If you guys can’t shoot the song in New York, just dub the song to Zurich Nagaram Uragnum Neram… or something!

Please do not do this to a Rahman gem again. PLEASE.

New York Nagaram video is available here on YouTube.