Chennai music season 2025: The kutcheri where WhatsApp stole the spotlight

Nostalgia has a powerful voice at the December music festival in Chennai. (Image credit: Srirangam R. Kannan via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

If you have ever stepped into a Chennai kutcheri during Margazhi, you already know how the ritual unfolds. The tanpura hums. The singer takes a breath. The hall settles into that sacred pre-alapana quiet. What makes Margazhi magical is that everyone in the audience behaves in surprisingly similar ways. The 20-year-old with perfect eyesight and the 80-year-old with extra-large fonts are both busy searching Google for the raga the artiste just began. You can almost hear their thoughts. Is this Kharaharapriya. No, maybe it is Sahana. Let me check. Once they find the answer and nod to themselves with satisfaction, they drift back to WhatsApp. Such is rasikatvam in the age of blue ticks.

I grew up thinking concerts were places of stillness and a tribute to the divine. Many of my Margazhi concert visits to Chennai over the years have corrected that belief. I learnt Sudoku from mamis in their 70s who sat in front of me with screens shining like stage lights. I picked up word games from mamas who completed entire levels while the mridangam player built up to the tani. Even online chess from someone else. These seniors play with full confidence. When they win, they beam. I now quietly clap in my mind and try not to cheer out loud. It feels like poor etiquette to interrupt a kriti because the person next to me achieved a new high score.

The same rasikas who demand silence from anyone who dares to hum a line in joy, do not seem to notice how their own glowing screens light up half the row. Their gentle ‘shh’ to others never seems to apply to their running commentary with the mami in the next seat. Somehow their distractions are always cultural, while everyone else’s are considered an intrusion.

All this would still be forgivable if the sabha canteen food lived up to its myth. We all hear stories of the legendary bondas, vaazhaiphu vadai and the soulful sambar. Then you join the queue and reality arrives with a thud. The crowds still flock, insisting the declining quality is “just part of the charm,” much like people who buy into dubious crypto schemes and then passionately argue about decentralised finance while losing centralised money.

The snacks taste tired. The oil tastes a little overenthusiastic. You are treated like an irritated railway porter treats your bags. The food is over-rated and the annual FOMO is so strong, it deserves its own raga. But then, ‘tradition’ sounds better in Tamizh - we will call everything we have been doing ‘murai’. Nostalgia has a powerful voice.

Sometimes I wonder if Chennai sabhas are slowly learning a few tricks from Mumbai’s suburban trains. The way seats get “reserved” long before a concert begins could put the local train experts to shame. A shawl on one chair. A water bottle on another. A used hanky that looks dangerously close to needing disinfection. A handbag guarding an entire row with the confidence of a private security agency. The territorial pride is remarkable. People return after a long coffee break and glare at anyone who dared to sit on a seat that was apparently claimed through an invisible social contract. It makes me smile because the whole scene looks less like a classical music gathering and more like a gentle, cultured version of peak hour on the Western train line in Mumbai. Only here, the fights are sharper tongued barbs.

There is also a new ritual that has quietly crept into kutcheris. The photography of everything. The stage. The artistes. The audience. The chandeliers. The coffee. Even the leaf where the vadai once sat. Half the hall is trying to get the perfect picture to post later.

The irony is hard to miss. People forget to listen because they are busy proving that they were present. The music becomes background score for a pilgrimage of content creation. It feels as if Margazhi is turning into a giant digital darshan where the act of attending is more important than the act of experiencing.

Yet the moment the main artiste glides into a soulful alapana, phones come down for a second and everyone remembers why they came.

This is why Margazhi music festival endures. The artists give us something to rise toward. Their discipline reminds us that attention is still possible. Their devotion reminds us that art still deserves an audience, but one that is worthy of the art. The audience may drift between music and mobile screens, yet we return every year.

Margazhi is not only an estuary for musical devotion. It is also a sanctuary for human habits. We try to be rasikas. We end up being distracted humans. The miracle is that the music still reaches us.