Do they have a problem with Sri Venkatesa?
That is a question that arose in my mind when I saw a tweet some days ago. The tweet was a screen shot of a translation of a popular Tallapaka Annamacharya Kirtana “Manujudai Putti” posted by a fellow tweeple. Since it is a song that I had heard from my childhood, from the album of M.S.Subbulakshmi I thought, am I missing the line “ andamaina Sri Venkatadrisu sevinci ”. I had the book with me for long, but had done only a cursory browsing as I have been using the translations only as a reference. Whenever I heard a song, had a doubt over the lines that I can’t understand I refer to translations. I do that with two books I have, one a Tamil translation of Tyagaraja’s and another for Swati Tirunal compositions. I hardly ever referred to the Annamayya translation volume ‘God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati’ by Velcheru Narayan Rao and David Shulman. One reason perhaps is that the book had only a handful of the popular songs. To get back to those lines in Manujudai Putti:- ...