The ‘Fun with Slokas’ project began back in 2014, when Jaya Kumar came up with the first set of simple tunes for the slokas she was trying to teach her three year old granddaughter Disha. By that summer, Disha was belting out the sloka songs like a pro at family gatherings (including a particularly memorable session onstage at her cousins’ Upanayanam function!) and the Kumar family was convinced that these tunes were something special.
At the end of the year, she contacted R. Chandrasekhar, a relative of the family, and a musician of many years standing, to set them to lively music. The first batch of tracks he created made Disha dance along, and the project was well along the way as Jaya began formally recording the songs she had created on a whim for her granddaughter. It was truly a family affair in every sense — over the next couple of years, Jaya’s son Viraj and daughter Divya, both trained singers, added their backing vocals to the songs as well.
Friends and family members with young children loved the songs when they heard them, and wanted to know how they could get their hands on them. So that became the next question — now that the songs were recorded, how to put them out there so other parents and grandparents could share them with their little ones? The most obvious answer for this generation of kids was YouTube!
And so, in summer of 2017, Jaya met with the talented team of Suriya Narayanan and Sara Divya Mohan of The Studio Madras, to help create fun visuals to go with the lively tunes. And what ideas they came up with! Director Suriya’s creative vision brought the slokas alive with delightful, imaginative stories, complete with little actors dressed as Anjaneya or Shiva or Saraswathi.
The final step came when well-known pianist Anil Srinivasan, who himself works extensively with children, came on board to launch the songs. In September 2018, in the presence of relatives and friends, the twelve little songs and videos of the ‘Fun with Slokas’ project were finally launched, so grandparents and parents and children the world over could share in the fun!
If you’d like to be a part of the ‘Fun with Slokas’ family, check out our YouTube channel, or click on the links on the sidebar to watch, dance and sing-a-long to our slokas.
Fun with Slokas 