For Unni, cricket and Carnatic music are alike

‘Cricket teaches you patience and temperament and it also builds character, just like Carnatic music’

Dressed in T-shirt and jeans, he can easily be mistaken for a youngster who works in an IT company. But, P. Unnikrishnan is highly respected in both classical and commercial music circles. Looking at least ten years younger than his age, the 49-year-old vocalist’s professional ilk has no match.

Mr. Unnikrishnan who was here to give a performance arranged by the Siddhartha Kala Peetham shared with The Hindu the secret of his fitness and glamour.

“The heady mix of cricket and pure Carnatic music is what keeps me agile and young,” he says.

Following in the footsteps his father K. Radhakrishnan, who played cricket for Tamil Nadu junior league, Mr. Unnikrishnan also played as a batsman in the sub-junior league matches. Even today, he has not lost touch with the game and attends net practice whenever he goes to the club. “We have a bowling machine at the club and half-an-hour at the nets is more than enough exercise,” he says. There are a lot of similarities between cricket and Carnatic music.

“Cricket teaches you patience and temperament and it also builds character, just like Carnatic music. Playing a Test match is like performing at a four-hour concert,” he says. The game, just like classical music, teaches aesthetics, he says, “There are so many ways to play a ball,” he quips listing out different types of strokes. In Carnatic music, the same piece can be performed in several different ways. He was the kind of batsman who plays in the ‘V’ but the batsmen of today have “no respect for the bowlers”, he says.

Mr. Unnikrishnan made it clear that he did not approve of cricketers who ‘play to the gallery’ and he feels the same about musicians too. Initiated into the classical music at the age of 12, he became a child prodigy. He also has several film hits to his credit. He says that singing for films taught him a few things about “sensitivity and modulation.”

No compromise He, however, prefers not to make any compromise in his classical performances. “I could have cut short my ‘aalap’ and put in more songs, but I sang only four songs of high classical value,” he says about the local concert at which he performed here.