Does anyone else do this too?   You’re on the train or bus to work and you’re reading a book, and then you start scrolling through the albums and playlists on your MP3 player, sommelier-like, trying to find the perfect musical accompaniment?

For Melanie Abrams’ sometimes very steamy Playing, I chose an amorous  playlist of  that included Bob Marley, Mary J Blige, Janet Jackson, Kailash Kher, and so on.

Then, while moving through Manil Suri’s The Age of Shiva – a lot of which takes place in film-drenched Bombay through the 1950s, ’60s and onward –  it was some five  CDs’ worth of historical movie music from a collection called 50 Golden Years, with oldies sung by the likes of Sonu Nigam and Anuradha Paudwal.

The last book read, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage was a bit more challenging.  

Aside from MIA, no other Sri Lankan Tamil artists came to mind, as my knowledge of Sri Lankan music is sorely lacking.   The next best solution I could come up with was the soundtrack to Mani Ratnam’s Kannathil Muthamital (the tale of an adopted girl and her search for her birth mother in northern SL), and after that I just wandered off to A.R. Rahman’s Golden Collection 1, and then finally the soundtrack to the Surya/Jyothika starrer Peralagan.  

True,  the connection between the music and the literary subject matter is tenuous,  but in does  help to create an aural environment.