Palghat Ramprasad: Cheer Singer

PALGHAT R RAMPRASAD IS a vocalist’s vocalist in the way we say someone is a scholar’s scholar. But he took pride in doing a viral bilingual video, which is not exactly pure music, but one that hails two-time champions India and wishes them luck in the ongoing cricket World Cup, which began on October 5 and will conclude on November 19.

“When we decided to make the video, my condition was that there should be a Carnatic part to it,” says the fifth-generation Carnatic musician who insists that he takes a break from classical music to appear for such videos only when there is something “inspirational or patriotic” about it.

The nearly four-and-half-minute video features Ramprasad, Sikkil Gurucharan, and P Unnikr­ishnan, all vocalists. The initial idea was to have Ramaprasad do it solo. They then arrived at the conclusion that anything to do with Indian cricket requires a “team appeal”. In Hindi, the video is titled ‘Cricket Hi Tho Bharath Hai’ and in Tamil ‘Cricket Endraal Bharatham’, both translating into ‘cricket means Bharat’ and pitched as a Carnatic cricket anthem. This ‘anthem’ highlights the names of players such as Ravindra Jadeja, Hardik Pandya, Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah etc, and affirms that India’s World Cup triumphs of 1983 and 2011 will repeat this year too.

Although it is cricket that has brought Ramprasad back into the news now, his achievements as a vocal­ist are incomparably high for any Car­natic musician of his generation. More importantly, he was someone who shot into the limelight with his first appearance when he was barely eight years old in 1988. He dominated the space until the early 2000s before he decided to take a break and finish his studies in applied economics from the US. This meant staying away from the mainstream, but he made a comeback in 2017 and painstakingly rebuilt his reputation as one of Carnatic music’s best vocalists over the next few years.

Ramprasad is the grandson of mri­dangam maestro Palghat Mani Iyer, great-grandson of the vocalist Shesha Bhagawathar, and great-great-grandson of Ramaswamy Bhagawathar, a noted exponent of Carnatic music of his time. Rampras­ad’s father—his only guru—is violinist TR Rajaram whose siblings include musicians TR Rajamani and Lalitha Sivakumar. Acclaimed singer Nithyasree Mahadevan is his cousin.

Fans remember Ramprasad being feted as a child prodigy in the 1990s and as an outstanding vocalist in the 2000s Chennai. His accompanying art­ists were of the stature of his own uncle Rajamani, an excellent mridangam exponent, TK Murthy, Palghat Raghu, TV Gopalakrishnan, Umayalpuram Sivaraman, Trichy Sankaran, MS Anantharaman and so on. Effectively, he was treated like a rockstar performer by the artists who accompanied him.

Even so, at one point in his career, especially after he passed his MA in economics from Chennai with flying colours, he began to have doubts, and considered choosing another career. He also thought about pursuing his studies further. As luck would have it, he travelled to the US in 2004 as part of a concert and then returned convinced that it was time to focus on his studies. He went on to do his PhD at the Univer­sity of Georgia. Though he continued to perform concerts in the US, he was soon snowed in with commitments to finish his assignments on time. Later, he plunged into creating another career for himself: as a quantitative economist and as a tutor.

In 2011, he returned to India to work with organisations such as GE and others. Shortly after, he did his postdoc at Harvard School of Public Health as a visiting fellow. In the process, he published several papers in economics and quantita­tive public health in peer-re­viewed journals. Dividing his time between Bengaluru and Chennai while in India, he became a sought-after con­sultant for international organisations such as WHO, World Bank and the United Nations and that meant a lot of travel. He says, “Travelling extensively is an understatement. I was on the road all the time.” It was also the time he was trying to raise two little daughters with his wife Sangeeta, a corporate honcho. The girls are now 12 and nine years old.

“When we decided to make the video, my condition was that there should be a Carnatic part to it. It needed to be inspirational or patriotic,” says Palghat Ramprasad musician

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Years passed by and Ramprasad went through an existential crisis about making a return to his music ca­reer. Of course, he admits, one blessing was that he did not have much time to dwell on it amidst all the travel and work across the world.

But by 2017, he told his father and his wife that enough was enough: it was time to re-launch himself. It was a tough decision, but it was something Ramprasad had prepared for long. Even so, the going was tougher than he had expected. It took him more than a year to re-establish himself in the highly competitive world of Carnatic vocals. “I decided that I would improve myself and I went about practising rigorously, knowing very well that I would be rewarded for that. It took a while, but it happened,” he says.

Ramprasad is traditional but also exceptionally innovative, says K Sanil Kumar, a music aficionado who has watched him mature as an accom­plished musician since the 1990s. “He follows the ‘Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyeng­ar-KV Narayanaswamy’ genre of sing­ing and yet he finds time to innovate and stand out,” notes Kumar. Rampras­ad had told Open earlier in an interview that he incorporates mathematical tools while organising concerts and compiling song lists. He also uses many works of Purandara Dasar, the father of Carnatic music, in his concerts. In fact, even when he wasn’t active as a profes­sional singer, he was teaching music. “Teaching never stopped,” Ramprasad says, referring to the school he runs for students from across the world: the Palghat Mani Iyer School of Music.

Kumar, meanwhile, adds that what makes Ramprasad unique are three qualities, which include his innovative streak. “The other two are proof of his finesse and prowess as a musical geni­us. One is his versatility with niraval (elaboration and improvisation of a line or a certain phrase in a song), which is the acid test for a singer.

Even the very famous often get rat­tled doing it. Ramprasad’s grandfather himself had said that niraval is the test of a true vocalist. The next is the power of his rendition in which shruti (minute note of pitch), laya (which defines the tempo) and sahitya (lyrics) must have excellent alignment. He has always been ingenious with that,” Kumar emphasises.

RAMPRASAD, A RECIPIENT OF several awards, including the prestigious Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Yuva Puraskar (2019), has performed live for the Indian Armed Forces. Re­cently, he says, he has patented an app called ‘Mani Pravaaham’ (named after his grandfather) that uses an optimisa­tion algorithm to help artists create and store song lists for their concerts.

The content of Ramaprasad’s You­Tube music videos is typically niche and academic. “I also make sure that there are some takeaways for students and connoisseurs,” he says and goes on to talk about how social media has changed music and how different the career has become now from the time he had started off. About the natural resistance he had to encounter when he made a return to the world of music that he had always treated as his first love, he says, “I was not offended personally.”

For someone who started singing when he started speaking, under the guid­ance of his father, the boardroom wasn’t where he wanted to confine himself to.

The 43-year-old isn’t someone to rest on his laurels after earning enhanced visibility in music. Instead, he pursues research work alongside, including how music affects brain activity and various other experiments he wants to keep private, for the time being. An academic, a trained economist and a remarkable vocalist, he is looking at ways to offer food for thought for those who wish to learn more about Carnatic music. His greeting for the Indian crick­et team is, therefore, a pleasant surprise for his die-hard fans.

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