New age IR's Raga Choices

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I have not been particularly attracted by this debate - but there is one thing I am utterly confident of : thumburu will never again be satisfied with a Raja album the way she was in 80s. Because she wants the Raja of 80s - specifically the tamil Raja of 80s. Good luck getting him back - wake me up when you do. The quotation of thaana vandha sandhaname is telling. You make the point that it is folksy yet satisfying the purist in you. Which precisely is what is being claimed for idhi pattabhi...except that it is telugu folk, not your comfy, accustomed tamil folk like thaanaa vandha. The terms of comparison you apply makes it impossible for you to be satisfied. If I had an objection to Idhi pattabhi, it would be that it doesn't have the inherent long-term appeal. It begins to wear off after a few listens. Which I could say for a good many folk numbers of yesteryear as welll, including thaana vandha. That goes with the territory. Folk is designed to be simple and easy on the ears - simple and easy tends to wear off quickly on the ears. That is from my perspective. From your perspective, you are not making an attempt to see SRR for what it is. This has been a problem for Raja - in his early days, he made music as he saw fit. Situations, competence of directors, storyline etc didn't matter and you had musical ideas flowing - essentially, pop music, elevated pop one might say, served through the medium of films. Sometime aroundmouna raagam, he seems to have become a slave to being driven by the story/screenplay/emotional needs of the movie. As we progress in his career, you can see that director's vision - even if the director is Valmiki director - matters the most. In that sense, he has become the Sivaji Ganesan of TFM. An artist too elevated for his environment but too respectful of it - that flies in the face of his image; but that reflects iin his work - the higher the artistic merit of the project, the higher the merit of his output. Exceptions could be there but I guess those would be the ones where the director failed to execute the vision as he narrated it to Raja. This being the case, without internalising the background of the movie, you cannot judge his score - especially for marquee projects like SRR. For those like suresh and myself, with a strong grounding on the background of Bapu, the folk songs sounded amazingly authentic - the raga details don't even matter to me - and served in a seductive Raja wrapper. You may ask "but I never had to make the effort in the 80s - he came over to me and seduced me". Fair enough - that's a choice you have to make. That pure Pop Raja, albeit elevated pop, who scored in multiple parameters irrespective of situations doesn't exist. You have to go to the mountain now. Mountain will not come to you. It was nice that the mountain came to you in the 80s but that's not the natural order of things - it is usually the other way around. Also, Idhi pattabi vs thaana vandha sandhaname may not be the right comparison. I listen to buddham saranam and Chinnari ponnari from Swathi muthyam and even they don't captivate anymore. That's the right comparison in many ways. Let's set the correct parameters of comparison first...