Kolaveri Di Takes Europe by Storm

 Kolaveri Di takes Europe by storm, as predicted by Limca Cuts from Planet Earth.

Kolaveri Di and the Eurovision Song Contest

Kolaveri Di has lived out fourteen out of its fifteen minutes of fame. So, one final thought to occupy that last minute: Kolaveri Di has what it takes to win the Eurovision song contest.

This thought comes straight from Only Mr. God Knows Why, an article by Anthony Lane (which, refreshingly, is still visible to the public on the New Yorker website). Anthony Lane's thesis is that a Eurovision contestant's main problem is reach out across a continent which doesn't know your language or culture. Consider these extracts:

“Europe has a problem...if you don’t speak English, you’re immediately at a disadvantage. The Greek guys? Good song, but it’s in Greek. Will they play that on the radio in France?"

...of the songs that have reached the finals over the years, two hundred and sixty-three have been in English, the lingua franca of pop. French, with a hundred and fifty, is the only other language in triple figures; the rest lag far behind...

On the one hand, the contest is an obvious chance for European nations, especially the less prominent ones, to flaunt their wares by singing in their native tongue. On the other hand, when you sing in English, you may be blasting through the language barrier to reach a wider audience, but are you not abasing yourself before the Anglo-American cultural hegemony...

 ...there are three well-established methods for avoiding it.

One is to be France, whose performers, as you would hope, grind away in French, year after year, repelling all intruders, giving only the barest hint that other languages, let alone other civilizations, even exist...

The second method is to be Ireland, the nation that has won the contest more often than any other. Seven times it has struck gold, and no wonder; if you can sing in English without actually being English—all the technical advantages without the shameful imperialist baggage—you’re halfway to the podium already.

The third method, which is by far the most popular, and which has brought mirthful pleasure to millions on an annual basis, is to sing in Eurovision English: an exquisite tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the poetry of heartfelt but absolute nonsense to a level of which Lewis Carroll could only have dreamed. The Swedes are predictably fluent in this (“Your breasts are like swallows a-nesting,” they sang in 1973), and the Finns, too, should be hailed as early masters, with their faintly troubling back-to-back efforts from the mid-seventies, “Old Man Fiddle” and “Pump-pump,”

 ...hence such gems as Austria’s “Boom Boom Boomerang,” from 1977 (not to be confused with Denmark’s “Boom Boom,” of the following year), Portugal’s “Bem-bom,” from 1982, and Sweden’s “Diggi-loo Diggi-ley,” which won in 1984. The next year’s contenders, spurred by such bravado, responded with “Magic, Oh Magic” (Italy) and “Piano Piano” (Switzerland). Not that the host nation relinquished the crown without a fight, as anyone who watched Kikki Danielsson can attest. Her song was called “Bra Vibrationer.” It was, regrettably, in Swedish.

Kolaveri Di fits this third formula perfectly. One doesn't need to really know either Tamil or English to get into the spirit of Kolaveri Di. "Distance-u la moon-u moon-u, moon-u colour-u white-u", is right up there with anything the Swedes, Finns or Portuguese can create. Please note: it is entirely conceivable that India will participate in the Eurovision song contest one day, last year's winner was Azerbaijan.

On an aside, maybe the Punjabization of India I posted about last week is because Punjabi is the most onamatopoeic of Indian languages. I don't know Punjabi, yet, I have no problem understanding "Chak de India" or "Tootak tootak tootiyan hey jamaalon". The language used by Premchand, Tagore, Bharatiyar, or for that matter, Shakespeare, is necessarily for narrower audiences.

Kolaveri Di and the Punjabization of India

Once upon a time, grown women in Madras wore sarees. No longer. Now, the default outfit is a salwar kameez, especially among younger women. The saree is gradually becoming formal wear, for special occasions. One of my aunts thinks this is because of the coarsening of Tamil culture – the saree is too revealing for today’s nasty world, women feel safer in the more fully covered-up salwar kameez – and there surely is some truth in her viewpoint. But the more popular interpretation is that this is a part of a wider cultural phenomenon: the Punjabization of India.

Vir Sanghvi wrote this nice piece about the Punjabization process. The passage which stuck in my mind was:

I went to shoot at a small hotel in the Wayanad region of Kerala. I had been looking forward to some good Kerala food. Instead, the buffet was full of black dal, butter chicken, paneer and seekh kebabs. I remonstrated with the manager. He was helpless, he said. This was what his largely south Indian guests wanted to eat when they were on vacation.

To put this nationwide Punjabi influence into perspective, the distance between Kerala and Punjab is about 1500 miles, which is the distance between London and Moscow. Arguably, the cultural differences within that span are even greater in India than in Europe.

The Punjabi influence isn’t limited to South India. For instance, this Bengali blogger was upset at the wedding sequence in the movie Parineeta. The movie is based on a classic Bengali novel by Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay. However, in the Bollywood version, the bhadralok wedding acquires a Punjabi flavour, with garish costumes, dolaks and song and dance sequences. Parineeta’s leading man was Saif Ali Khan, a son of Bengal’s revered Tagore family, which can’t have helped ease this blogger’s angst.

However, there is a flip side to being offered butter chicken in Kerala: it is not so hard to find a good masala dosa in Chandigarh or Lucknow. Bombay-style bhel puri is consumed with gusto in Calcutta, plenty of rasagollas are enjoyed in Bombay. Indian identity is sometimes compared to a salad bowl. As the salad bowl gets shaken, cultural elements get juxtaposed in unexpected, surprising, random ways. It isn't one-way traffic. What goes around comes around.

This is precisely why "why this kolaveri di" is so refreshing. It is in Tamil, or at least, it is Tamil-flavoured. The video features a bunch of losers in lungis who can't dance. It isn't Punjabi. It doesn't sound Bollywood. Yet, Kolaveri di is going viral right across the country. India just bit into a chilled-out southie ingredient in that cultural salad bowl, and enjoyed it. So did Japan.

Kolaveri Di's refrain translates roughly to "why this murderous rage?", the tone implies that the rage is so not worth it. So the next time a fellow south Indian gets worked up about the cultural imperialism of the north Indians, I can respond in song with "Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri... why this kolaveri di?"