[Mellinam] iPaatti Live on Radio Mirchi

An interesting day today. To think I was hesitating to do this, seems very ironic now! Last night, I had serious qualms about making it to Radio Mirchi for a show on iPaatti. Decided to sleep over it. Woke up this morning with the quote I read somewhere " Never say no to any experience unless you are sure you have nothing to learn from it". Glad my weird mind comes up with the right advice at the right times. This turned out to be an experience that I had so much to learn from.

From November 2009

To first elaborate on iPaatti's connection with Mirchi, we randomly made a call to them, a few months back when we were working on getting the blurbs from different organizations and people. It must be mentioned that all we had in hand at that time, were the lyrics, the music and some illustrations. All in distinct pieces. We tried our luck at many quarters. Some refused to hear us. But surprisingly, many people welcomed us with no idea about our product/background. They gave the most precious thing of all -their time! This long prelude is just to say Radio Mirchi was one of the latter. They(Hari and Batool) looked at our presentation, heard the songs and gave us a glowing blurb. In addition, they promised to get in touch with us once our product was released. To their credit, they kept their word and invited us to their studio and their world.

Madhan had initially told me that it was recording and they would do this show on Children's day but on arriving in the studios, Ajai( the non-stop talker of 'Hello Chennai' fame) and Maria (the show producer) enlightened us that it would be a live show with callers, et al. "Ah! the plot thickens", I thought! Nevertheless, it turned out to be a highly positive event.

From November 2009

From the very moment of entering the studios, the warmth and energy of the team was tangible. They made us feel completely at home and as he was going through, Ajai talked about how he does various segments of the show. A talk show is not just 'non-stop' gab, we discovered. Ajai brings an enormous amount of info - market readings for the day, the immensely useful traffic update for chennai's messy roads.. not to mention the various creative & spontaneous ways of bringing to light the day's special. I was amazed to see the vast amount of parallel processing that goes into the show..handle the calls, get the updates, punch these into the right slot, play music, wake up to tell the time in the studio! Experts that they are, Ajay and Maria seamlessly performed the various tasks and made it appear so simple.

We had the opportunity of talking about the ideals behind iPaatti, the conception process and even read our favorite songs from the book. The best part of it all was talking to some callers who pepped up the show with the rendition of their favorite nursery rhymes.."Old McDonald's Eeyah Eeyah o", "Dosai amma dosai", etc. It was so uplifting to see the child alive in these adults we spoke to.

From November 2009

All in All, we came back with new friends and an enriching experience!