It is amazing what O.N.V. Kurup could achieve in mere 12 lines. In those few lines, he painted a picture that fired your imagination. And he did that in over a thousand songs. Many of his songs are poems, much more than songs. Few in Indian cinema could bring in poetry so beautifully to a song.
His lines showed how you could make the line between a poem and a song invisible. Just as Vayalar Rama Varma and P. Bhaskaran did.
With his demise, we have lost the last of the great masters of words in Malayalam film music.
It was our great fortune that ONV was around, and at his peak, for much longer than Vayalar or Bhaskaran. From the 1980s, it was mostly on his broad shoulders that the meaningful Malayalam songs journeyed on.
The 1980s and 90s produced some of his finest and most popular songs, such as Arikil...(Neeyethra Dhanya), Oru vattam koodi... (Chillu), Mizhikalil nirakathirayi... (Yavanika) and Ente kadinjool... (Ulkkadal) . Many of such songs were composed by M.B. Sreenivasan.
“Though he did not know Malayalam, he enjoyed my poetry, which I used to translate to him,” ONV once told this writer.
“When I explained the meaning of Oru vattam koodi ..., he ran around the Marina Beach in Chennai like an excited child.”
That song, which ONV adapted from his own poem, had some strikingly beautiful lines:
Veruthe ee mohanangalennariyumbozhum veruthe mohikkuvan moham? (To wish is futile I know/ I wish to wish, yet).
With so many great film songs, you may tend to forget some of the brilliant lines he wrote for theatre ( Madhurikkum ormakale..., Ambiliyammaava..., Thunchan parambile ...) and elsewhere.
A song he wrote for Dooradarshan, Onnini thiri thazthi ...., is the greatest lullaby a man could write for his wife.
Shravana chandrikaa pushpam. .. (for a non-film album by Tharangini) is the finest piece written in Malayalam about the irresistible beauty of night.
His songs indeed have that irresistible beauty, to which we can go back, over and over.
Many of his songs are poems, much more than songs
