Harimau
The sultan analogy are inappropriate and can be turned back on you.
The vandal sultans of delhi were the upholders of Islamic orthodoxy who prided themselves in vandalizing, terrorizing and destroying anything heterodox including other religions and forms of Islam different from that practiced by themselves.
This is pretty much the story of Harimau with respect to Carnatic orthodoxy. Exclusive orthodoxy of a private live-and-let-live kind, say like Vaishnavism is harmless. Orthodoxy that seeks to destroy the "other" like Islamism or "Harimauism" could lead to stagnation.
We could take a poll as to who think Ravikiran and Anil Srinivasan are vandals when it comes to their collaborative efforts and who thinks that Harimau is not a net vandal
.
If it is the case that Nalinakanthi is the subject of an RTP (I hate the very idea), then so be it. It cannot be destroyed by ranting on the web. Just don't go to those concerts. If nothing but that is available, then don't go to
any concerts. I would be more than happy to share (or point to in rasikapriya) my awesome MP3 recordings of Madurai Mani Iyer and Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer accompanied by Lalgudi Jayaraman singing ragas like Kamboji, Bhairavi and Shankarabharanam. This is how I mostly derive my own happiness. There's not much life in contemporary concerts.
Again I cannot blame the artists. The loss of innocence and the concurrent apparent decrease in earnestness is the bane of modernism...its the decline of spiritual life and the difficulty of holding unwaveringly to beliefs. If musicians cannot believe unwaveringly in the "anugraham" of "Tyagarajaswami" or the "Gurunathar" or "Bhagavan", the music lacks "uyir" or life. It may be slick and full of virtuosity but lacks "uyir". There is so much fawning on the part of musicians and rasikas falling over themselves about Tyagaraja and Dikshitar but a lot of it gives the appearance of being nothing more than clueless show.
So the problem is how to bring back the "uyir", how can the musicians be less slick, more genuinely devoted to values, more innocent, etc... Once such things happen, they will automatically realize the shallowness of singing a Nalinakanti RTP.
Then there is also the case of overdose. If musicians performed fewer times and rasikas listened less, there would be a freshness to items that are worthwhile. I personally am very judicous and spare in listening and hence am able to come back to the same Semmangudi after a while and derive the same pleasure. Also I switch genres like WCM and even rock (Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull) sometimes. This way I avoid having to listen to the shallower forms (i.e., Nalinakanti RTP) of a single genre like CM.
Overdose on the part of performers and rasikas may lead to jadedness and the constant quest for something "new" leads to shallowness. One of the ways to seek something new and avoid shallowness would be to seek a bridge, however nascent and imperfect, between the genuinely good and serious in different genres, say Purvikalyani in CM and chopin in WM
. This is not vandalism.
Last but not the least, if musicians got paid a lot more per concert, then perhaps they would perform less but with greater quality.
) take: