Digitally devotional
For a spiritual Deepavali.
Remember the heyday of radio? One woke up at 4 a.m. on Deepavali day and having fired a single `patas,' one switched on the radio, where the southern stations of AIR could be depended on to broadcast the warm notes of the nagaswaram. If you were the devout kind, you rounded up the family for joint prayers before letting the kids get at the sweets.
That was yesterday.
Say hello to a new digital dawn of Deepavali, when it is perhaps considered bad manners to wake up the neighbourhood too early in the morning; when the senior member of the family who could lead the prayers is no longer around.
For those who still long for the sounds of a spiritual Deepavali as a background to the festivities, help is at hand: Times Music has just released a 2-CD (or two-cassette) album, Shubh Deepavali(CDs: Rs 390; cassettes: Rs 125), which brings together some 30 tracks of word and song appropriate to the festival of lights.
Veteran `bhakti' singers like Suresh Wadkar, Usha Mangeshkar, Kavita Krishnamurti, Shweta Pandit and others, render Gayatri mantra, surya prarthana, Ashtalakshmi stotram, Kuber stuti, Siva prarthana and other devotional songs and aarathis.
The album is a reworking of two albums released earlier, entitled ``Prayers of Diwali" and ``Shubham."
It is accompanied by a richly coloured booklet, with the full text of the prayers in the Devanagiri script, and a useful tutorial on the significance on the five days of the Deepavali festival.
Also seasonal, though not exclusively angled at Deepavali, is the other 2-CD album, ``Sampooorna Aarti Sangrah" (CDs: Rs 295; cassettes: Rs 150) — a sort of `aartis for all occasions' collection by mostly the same singers.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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