I was just going through the program list of the classical music season at the Fort High School grounds. What strikes me is that whenever two siblings in the same family are good at this kind of stuff, they pair up and advertise themselves after their town or something.
I don’t know who was the first pairing that started this, but now artistes naming themselves in this way has become way too popular. It almost seems like if one person in the family is good at carnatic music, he/she forces his/her sibling to take it up too – so that they can become a duet and give themselves a cool name.
The interesting thing is it’s always “X Brothers” or “Y sisters”. It’s never a brother-sister combination. Maybe “Velachery siblings” doesn’t sound that good. Other relationships, too, are taboo. There may be say a couple who always perform together, or a father-son pair who are usually a team, but they don’t usually advertise themselves as a team, and prefer to go by their individual names instead. Maybe the lack of elegant names (such as “brothers”) prevents them from doing so.
This trend of brothers and sisters is catchign on so much that soon you’ll have people deciding to become each other’s Rakhi brothers or Rakhi sisters or rakhi brother of a rakhi sister so that they could give themselves names such as this. Maybe the quest for interesting names might even bring in the band culture to Carnatic music (on a more serious note, one of the thrills of Carnatic music is watching people who’ve never met before getting together and creating music). Interesting times lie ahead.
Anyways here is a list of all the siblings that I found on the program list:
- MALLADI BROTHERS
- MYSORE NAGARAJ & DR. MYSORE MANJUNATH (sometimes they call themselves Mysore Brothers)
- HYDERABAD BROTHERS
- MAMBALAM SISTERS
- PRIYA SISTERS
Ok. There aren’t too many. But we are getting to a stage where the whole program sheet will be filled with names like this.
On another note, certain entries in the list read something like “WOWCTB and party”. This kind of nomenclature is extremely unfair to the “accompanists” (which is again a derogatory term). The violin and the percussion are as much a part of the concert as what is known as the “main instrument”. Just pick any singer. Any singer. And imagine him/her singing alone without any instruments.You get it right?