Nityanand, who had been following Krishna's experimentations, decided to bring the singer on board as well.

To do that, he wanted the song to be very colloquial ' 'the Tamil that I would speak with my friends while hanging out in a tea kadai' ' as it had to be relatable to everybody. I didn't know the history of the word and the idea of reclaiming it was very interesting,' says Kebar. 'What struck me the most was how we prioritise what we (the educated and middle-class) need right now, without thinking about history and the consequences. He turned the piece into a 10-sentences or something song. Nityanand wrote a 10,000-word piece on this issue and gave this to Kebar, a songwriter from the Tamil rock band, Kurangan, who's been organising concerts under the title, Justice Rocks. The problem has become a cultural problem, and so it needed cultural intervention if you want to try and reclaim the word poromboke.' In cities like Chennai, the people who are living in, and utilise poromboke land, are now being considered worthless. How did land that belonged to all of us become so worthless that we are using it to dump garbage? By doing this, the economies that were supported by poromboke ' the economies of the marginalised (like the fisherfolk, farmers, potters, basket weavers) ' are hit. But today, poromboke has become a dirty word ' a cuss word. In ancient Tamil, one of the land use classifications is poromboke, which meant a shared-use commons. For an urban city, we decided that buildings and IT industry were more important than water bodies.

Talking about how it came about, Nityanand Jayaraman says, 'For many years, I have been seeing that what we call as 'development' has been taking place at the expense of certain kinds of people and spaces. The project is a collaboration between Krishna, journalist and social activist Nityanand Jayaraman, director Rathindran Prasad (of Kodaikanal Won't video fame) and songwriter Kaber Vasuki. The song, titled Chennai Poromboke Paadal, seeks to create awareness on the importance of poromboke areas, which are being usurped in the name of development, and will be launched by writer Perumal Murugan today at a special event.

He is considered the enfant terrible of the Carnatic music world, and true to the description, TM Krishna is now coming out with a Carnatic song that is in Chennai Tamil.

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