Visuals of thousands of workers from other States walking home as a result of the nationwide lockdown is bound to haunt us for a long time.
Chennai-based music director Shakthikanth Karthick, who works in the Telugu film industry, was so deeply disturbed by what he witnessed that he locked himself up in his room one night, after his elderly parents and two young children had fallen asleep, and wrote a song on the plight of the workers and their families. Called ‘Migrant Song: Nadakiren’, it is four minutes long and was uploaded to YouTube last week.
“It all came together in one night,” says Shakthikanth, adding, “I felt anger, sadness, and frustration when I saw these people [walking]. The song is an expression of these feelings.”
Composed by Shakthikanth, the video is made up of telling images that were published in print media, of the many men, women and children walking the highways in the hope of reaching their homes located hundreds of kilometres away, after they had been rendered jobless due to the lockdown. ‘How much longer should we wait… how much further do we have to walk?’ go the starting lines.
The 37-year-old Shakthikanth, who was working on two Telugu films before the lockdown, says that he just went with the flow in the hope that his music inspires some empathy in people. “Music has that power,” he says, adding, “A lot of people are coming forward to feed the workers and their families. This is my way of helping them as a musician.”
