My third encounter with a live Balu was in 1979, when my school decided to have a concert to raise funds for a new block. The ’70s being the ’70s, the school authorities permitted an elite gang of insane, unsupervised schoolboys to run amok on the streets of Madras

xI saw S.P. Balasubrahmanyam for the first time in the late ’60s, when he came to visit my grandfather. We had just moved from Hyderabad to Madras. He had come in a yellow-and-black taxi that he had kept waiting, I distinctly remember — a trim young man, little more than a boy, really, come to think of it, with big eyes and little bunny teeth. I was four or five then. I don’t remember what the visit was about. But I remember the buzz in the house. He had by then sung Grandfather’s “Medante Meda Kaadu” in Sukha Dukhalu and many

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