For lovers of Tamil film music and lyrics, this Saturday will be a big day. When the date reads: 7.1.17, Tamil cinema’s first palindrome song will be released. Written by lyricist Madhan Karky for the film Vinodhan , every line in this romantic number — which starts with the word ‘Megharagame’ — is a palindrome.
The film, directed by Victor Jayaraj and produced by Prabhu Deva’s production house, features a character with obsessive compulsive disorder in the lead role.
“One of his OCD traits is being curious about symmetry. That sparked the idea for this song,” says Karky, who is the dialogue writer for the movie as well.
“We first figured out about 35 palindromes from the Tamil dictionary — common ones like ‘paapa’ and ‘thaatha’. But we had a romantic song to work on, and so decided that every line in the song should be a palindrome.”
For the lyricist, who normally takes just a couple of hours to finish a song, ‘Megharagame’ was a challenge — he worked on it for eight hours at a stretch. “We didn’t want to feature regularly-used palindromes and wanted to portray love in every line; doing that was an arduous task.”
The song has been composed by D. Imman and sung by Haricharan and Shashaa Tirupati.
