Chennai’s Ennore Creek is still revivable and T.M. Krishna’s appeal through the ‘Poromboke’ song is doing its bit to create awareness.
When you translate, you dive into a dictionary, driven by a restless desire to find the mot juste that fits all the connotations a word adorns – feeling delighted if you do and giving up if you don’t.
Poromboke, in Tamil, is one such word whose meaning gets diluted in translation. It is part of a quintessential vocabulary of invective which when spat out, denotes something of no worth – utterly worthless. Carnatic music’s unorthodox practitioner T.M. Krishna has used poromboke, one of the choicest swear words in Madras bashai (language), in a music video to point to the effects of industrial pollution in Chennai’s Ennore Creek. And staying in character is his current profile photo on Facebook, where he trades the kurta and white dhoti for a bemused self-caricature in a shirt and printed lungi held aloft.
Normally, a regular Carnatic professional musician is caught in the matrix of the genteel settings of the December music season circuit, voice preoccupations and the Fabindia kurta. Social responsibilities and kutcheris don’t collude unless it’s a fundraiser. But Krishna, who has long given up the first one-third of the aforementioned matrix, released a video a few days ago that has gone viral. He has used the fabric of Carnatic music to sing of the violation of the commons, of communal spaces. In its original meaning proromboke refers to land left fallow for rivers to flow, for cattle to graze and for ecosystems to flourish, but the word currently is only known as an expletive. Its original meaning has been forgotten.