S P Balasubramaniam’s music concert in city

S P Balasubramaniam’s music concert in city

S P Balasubramaniam’s music concert at Palace Grounds took a different turn on the evening of August 25th. Inspite of heavy rains, 10,000 people who gathered at the grounds to enjoy SPB’s musical journey were disappointed as the legendary singer was given permission to sing only two songs.

Reason? Recently the Commissioner of Police, B G Jyothiprakash Mirji’s office had stated that there will be no events held at Palace Grounds that attracts big crowd because it was causing huge traffic jams.

The evening was filled with apologies to the crowd which included bigwigs like Venkat Subbaiah, RK Srikantan, Cricketers Chandrashekar, Syed Kirmani and senior actors like Saroja Devi, Jayanthi and Srinath.

We spoke to one of the members of Samarathan, which organised the event, and on condition of anonymity, the member said, “We were sincerely unaware of the ban and when we got permission on August 1, it was only for the launch of the T20 logo which was a fund raising event for the T20 blind cricket World cup to be held in December 2012 in Bangalore.

We later clubbed it with SP Balasubramaniam’s concert.”

He further added, “We took it for granted as we promoted SPB’s show more than the fund raising event only to pull more crowd and that did not go down well. Though the cops were aware of the event, they became helpless on the day of the show. In fact few police officials took away more passes for friends and family to attend the show but never bothered to tell us that no shows of such magnitude could be held at Palace Grounds.” They were in for more shock, when Mohammed Sanaullah, Principal Secretary, Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR) refused to even meet the organisers who went with an apology and a request letter. “We went to the DPAR office at 3.45 pm after learning that the show had some restrictions

but Sanaullah did not even come out to meet us and sent word through his person that he doesn’t wish to meet anyone. Only later, we had a circular from their office saying that SPB can sing only two songs,” said the member. Balu was quite disappointed when he heard that he could sing only 2 songs out of his 40,000 collection. “Even the film fraternity tried to interfere in the matter, but the authorities were not ready to listen. The crowd understood our plight and ended up listening to just one Kannada song — Ee Kannada mananu maribeda oooh abhimani,” said the member.

Related Stories

No stories found.
The New Indian Express
www.newindianexpress.com