Warning : This post is about music !! And the title is not a gimmick!
I was listening to this album by Sikkil Gurucharan the other day and quite unlike the other times, I was paying some attention to the lyrics and to the swarams in between. Something was different about this song - not just the tune, which was very different from anything I had heard before, but something else, which was nagging even my not-so-knowledgeable mind!! I then heard the line ‘nInE harikEsha rAgjni’ and something clicked. I was not yet sure though, but paid more attention to the lyrics. Soon after I reached office, I did a Google search for the song and realized that my guess was right!! And I am such a shallow person that this made me very happy!! I heard this song again today morning and this post is a result of that!
This song is in a rare ragam called ‘Niroshta’ which literally translates to ‘No lips’ (Ushta = Lips in sanskrit). It was composed by a genius composer called Harikesanallur Muthaiah Bhagavathar. The ragam is so named because it does not contain the 2 notes - Ma and Pa (both requiring the lips to meet) in the scale.This by itself, is quite interesting, since we are talking about removing the 2 notes in the middle and calling this a ragam. Taking the Western Classical equivalent, this is like composing music in a scale that has neither the perfect 5th which is supposed to give some stability to the song, nor its neighbour, the 4th note. In simpler terms this is like a dosa or pizza without the center!! In spite of these limitations, the ragam is quite pleasant to hear and that is remarkable!
The beauty of this song is that the entire song is written such that the lips never meet, i.e., the labial consonants m and p are not used. Apparently the consonant v, as also the vowels “u”, “U” and “o”. “O” and “au” are also not used since this will cause the lips to meet . This is like being asked to write a short story or an essay in English with the constraint that the alphabets ‘e’ and ‘a’ are never used, i.e., extremely difficult. There are some interesting anecdotes about how the song was composed. Apparently Bhagavathar wrote this when he saw the Mysore Maharaja ill and had swollen lips*.Shri TN Seshagopalan has supposedly composed a ’tillana’ in Niroshta (which I have not heard), but this is supposedly the only song in this ragam.
There are a few other such experimental compositions in CM but this is the only one that I can recognize easily because I have finally managed to follow the ragam 
* http://www.rasikas.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=534&p=9887
