Vannakkum You're on Rainbow

I love the radio in Chennai. When I'm driving around the city I always tune into FM rainbow and listen to a daily game show called Aantakshri. The game is really simple. One caller starts singing a few bars of a song. They stop and then repeat the last sound from the last line of the song. The second caller starts singing some other song that starts with that last sound. It's sort of like musical chairs, but with singing.

A few weeks ago I convinced the good people at NPR that it would be a good idea to let me play parts of the show on American national radio. I interviewed the show's host and a couple other people around the city about why a show like that would become so popular. I also dropped in on a sound studio in the Amirami Mega Mall in Purusawakkam that lets people come in off the street and get a a quarter of an hour of studio time to hear themselves sing. I took some photos of the sound booth, it's pretty professional, check it out.

The show aired today all across the United States. If you missed it you can download it off the NPR website here. One word of caution for the Tamil purists who read this blog: when I was setting up the sound for the piece I didn't have any popular Tamil music on my computer, so the background music is all Hindi.