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?"

Raj Rajaratnam: Nayagan?

தென் பாண்டி சீமையிலே
தேரோடும் வீதியிலே
மான் போல வந்தவனே
யார்  அடித்தாரோ
யார்  அடித்தாரோ


These lyrics are from the theme song of the Tamil film Nayagan. The refrain, "yaar aditharo?" translates to "who hit you?", which is a pretty accurate description of what this Mani Ratnam film is about.

Nayagan is an exploration of what hit a young Tamil boy called Shakti Velu, and turned him into Velu Nayagan, one of Bombay's most feared crime bosses. It tells the story a frightened boy who runs away from a crumbling home, arrives in distant, alien Bombay, gets caught up by chance with the criminal underworld, rises through the crime ranks with his smarts, and when needed, his decisive brutality, yet retains his innate integrity, his decency, his faith, a capacity for empathy. It is based loosely on the life of the real-life Bombay crime boss Varadarajan Mudaliar, and for my money, is one of the best films ever made.

This film came back to mind because I was reading about, and reflecting on, a similar contemporary story.

In this contemporary telling, the distant alien city the young Tamil boy finds himself in is not Bombay, but New York, the criminal underworld is Wall Street. The crime boss in question - the Nayagan - is Raj Rajarathnam. The story teller is journalist Suketu Mehta, who did several hours of interviews with Raj Rajarathnam shortly after his eleven year prison sentence was announced. These interviews contain a fair bit of new information. Rajaratnam was a very private man in his glory days, and these are the first interviews he has given since being charged.

Suketu Mehta's portrayal of Rajaratnam is generally sympathetic. Rajaratnam is portrayed as The Outsider, doing what he had to, to win at a game where the deck was stacked against him.

"He had grown up, as he tells it, in fear: of the Sinhalese majority in his homeland; of the skinheads in Britain where he’d studied; and of the established elites of Wall Street where he did business. At just about every stage of his life, there were people out to get him."

Mehta emphasizes Rajaratnam's community spirit and generosity:

"In New York’s South Asian community there are many stories of Rajaratnam’s generosity. He has given financial support to the Harlem Children’s Zone; the education reformer Geoffrey Canada testified in his support during the trial. He’s also given $250,000 a year for three years to South Asian Youth Action, a Queens-based NGO; his wife, Asha, is on the board..."

He emphasizes Rajaratnam's dignity in adversity: Raj refuses to wear a wire-tap, and refuses to be drawn into any immigrants vs. insiders conspiracy theory.

"Rajaratnam was...being asked by the government to turn on (Rajat) Gupta. But he wouldn’t wear a wire, he says, so he could sleep at night."

"Why so many Indian names in the indictments, I ask. “Because Roomy Khan’s network was Indian,” he explains simply. “They’re not being unfairly targeted. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. ” His brother Rengan sees it differently. “For years these guys were sitting around in sports clubs and exchanging information. That wasn’t a crime. And now we immigrants do the same thing and it is?”

Mehta emphasizes the contrast between the moral codes and norms of America, and what Rajaratnam grew up with in Sri Lanka.

"The whole story speaks to the South Asian–American community: its pursuit of success and money at any cost; the differences between immigrants and the first generation; and the immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S."

The picture that develops through Suketu Mehta's story is of a proud, big-hearted, dignified man, a spirited underdog, more a victim than a villain, who is facing an unprecedented jail term for doing things that he did not see as a serious crime, because so many others around him were doing the same.

The picture that also emerges if that of someone who comes from a familiar milieu, a milieu that I, and I guess most readers of this blog, would find easy to relate to. Rajaratnam is a Tamil, like me. His father was an upright executive, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company in South Asia. My father was also an upright executive, he worked for Unilever and Ogilvy & Mather advertising in India. Rajaratnam studied business at Wharton, I studied at the University of Chicago. Rajaratnam's face lights up when talking about PG Wodehouse. Mine would too, I come from a devoutly Wodehousian clan.

However, unlike Rajaratnam, I did not attend Dulwich College, the south London public school that Wodehouse himself attended. Rajaratnam spent three years of his life in what once was Wodehouse's room. This is the point at which the similarity in our backgrounds starts to break down; I know several South Asian professionals, I don't know any who sent their children to public school in England. My parents were very well off by the standards of their time, but I don't think they could have dreamt of sending me to public school in England. If anything Rajaratnam seems to come from a background which is similar to mine, but even more privileged.

Understanding this background makes me see Rajaratnam in different light, makes it harder for me to see him as a victim. Yes, there are immigrants to the USA, say Mexican fruit-pickers, who have the "immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S", and may consequently break the law. Yes, there have been Sicilian immigrants who stepped on to American soil staring at a stark choice between joining the mafia and being killed by the mafia. A Columbian cocaine mule escaping from a drug cartel, like in the movie Maria Full of Grace, necessarily faces some very hard life choices, like Shakti Velu did when he found himself in Bombay. The choices Rajaratnam faced are just not comparable to the choices faced by these stereotypical, less fortunate immigrants, immigrants whose lives were hit by fate.

Rajaratnam, and his crooked henchmen from McKinsey and Company like Anil Kumar and (presumably) Rajat Gupta, were brought up to be a part of an elite. These guys had real choices. They were fully equipped - by their native intelligence, their privileged upbringing, and by their first rate education - to very quickly understand the "rigour of the law in the U.S.", with all its nuances of meaning. They were equipped to grasp just how sick and cynical Wall Street was. They had the option of trying to be a force for the good. At a minimum, they had the option of not playing and stepping away if the game got too ugly, and going on to live still very comfortable lives. Instead, despite all the privileges that they had been given, they chose to actively embrace the ugliest and most cynical aspects of life on Wall Street.

At the denouement of the movie Nayagan, Velu Nayagan's grandson asks him "Are you a good man or a bad man?". Choked up, Velu Nayagan replies "I don't know".

Velu Nayagan was a murderous mafia don. Yet, when one makes the effort to get into his skin, understand his back-story, and sees where he is coming from, it is hard not to be sympathetic. It is hard to be judgemental. His own moral ambiguity feels appropriate. With Raj Rajratnam, when one makes the effort to get into his skin, understand his back-story, when one sees all the privileges and choices he had, and the cynicism with which he chose to be a crook, it is hard to be sympathetic. Moral ambiguity doesn't feel nearly as appropriate as it did with Velu Nayagan.

Haimish, Gezellig and the Great Pumpkin

English is the world's most successful language because it is so rich, it has many more words than any comparable language. Yet, frustratingly, English still doesn't have words for so many useful, everyday concepts. Consider, for instance, haimish: a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.

I was looking up the meaning because it is in this (excellent) New Yorker article about IKEA: "IKEA believes that it can make your sleep better and enhance your family life...IKEA's vision of life in its environs is a safe and haimish one. In its rooms, people don't run late, the don't bicker; the have children, but they don't have sex."

The most interesting definition of haimish I found was by David Brooks, the NY Times conservative columnist, talking about why simple, wholesome, communal safari camps are more rewarding than elegant, luxurious camps that lack the haimish spirit. Understood this way, haimish feels a lot like another word I've blogged about before: gezellig, space and people coming together in harmony, that special spirit of cosy fellowship that animates Dutch life.

This sentiment is not unfamiliar to Anglophone cultures. For instance, I've long loved Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics for their haimish or gezellig character. Linus van Pelt lives in the hope that the Great Pumpkin will grace his pumpkin patch on Halloween night for being the most "sincere". I suspect the notion Linus and the Great Pumpkin are searching for is closer to haimish or gezellig than just sincere. Haimish and gezellig include sincere, and a whole lot else besides, except that it would be so ongezellig to use a foreign word like gezellig in Linus' pumpkin patch.

Is it just a matter of time before English co-opts haimish? The casual way in which the New Yorker used the word suggests that that is already happening. My wife and I couldn't find plausible Hindi or Tamil equivalents for haimish or gezellig either. Any suggestions?

How to Play a Limca Cut

Perceptive readers have noticed that this blog's name has changed from Moon Balls from Planet Earth to Limca Cuts from Planet Earth, and have asked me what Limca Cuts are. Like a Moon Ball, which is a spinner's slower ball, a Limca Cut is an obscure cricket term. Unlike a Moon Ball, a Limca Cut comes from the street cricket played in Mylapore, Madras, back in the 1980s.

Here is a step by step guide to playing a Limca Cut:

1. Stride. Get fully forward, right to the pitch of a ball on an off-stump line, and fuller than a good length

2. Stroke. Bring your bat down towards the ball in a smooth, vigourous vertical arc, with your left elbow held high, and with the face of the bat towards extra cover

3. Bamboozle. Mystify your opponents by striking the ball with the inside edge of the bat

4. Bisect. Direct the ball past the leg stump, along the Limca angle, bisecting the wicket-keeper and the fielder at fine leg

5. Acknowledge. Raise your bat and pump fists in the air, as the ball races past the diving fielder at fine leg to cross the boundary line and bring up the winning runs. Celebrate with Lime and Lemoni Limca as the crowd goes wild.

The banter after this shot typically goes:

Bowler: What kind of a shot is that?
Batsman: A stylish cut shot.
Bowler: A cut goes that way, man.
Batsman: No no. This is a special cut, a Limca Cut.

This shot is also referred to as a french cut in some other parts of the world, but hey, we are like that wonley. Mind it!

Why do Dervishes Whirl?

Jalaluddin Rumi was wandering the streets of Konya, overcome with grief at the death of a dear friend, when he was captured by the rhythmic beat of a goldsmith's hammer. He started whirling, found consolation, and inspired a tradition that has continued for seven hundred years.

Sufi whirling has always been laced with lamentation. Though, arguably, the whirling in the cartoon above, whirling to lament a moment which is about to die, is even more poignant than traditional Sufi whirling. I found this cartoon at xkcd.com.

Incidentally, I did get to see a dervish sema ceremony on my last trip to Istanbul, at the Hodja Pasha Cultural Centre. Real dervishes do whirl counter-clockwise.

Hindi: Turkish :: Turkey : English?

I had been in Istanbul for a couple of days, gamely drinking Turkish coffee to keep my clients company. Now, my soul craved the familiar comfort of a Tall Skinny Hazelnut Latte. I spotted a Starbucks - on Istiklal Caddessi, in the Beyoglu district - and homed in.

The Starbucks had a mix of wooden chairs and cushy sofas, posters promising schools in coffee growing areas, a display of coffee beans in various stages of roasting, chocolate muffins, cinnamon swirls, an easy listening jazz sound, the Beyoglu Starbucks had it all. If a brand manager had dropped in as a mystery shopper, she would have glowed with pride. This Starbucks could have been in London, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Vienna, Athens, or at the Sainsbury’s next to my office. With one exception: they had something on the counter labelled “hindi sandwiches”.

I asked my Turkish colleague what hindi sandwiches were. He explained that the Turkish word for turkey is hindi, so hindi sandwiches are turkey sandwiches. I may have looked a little quizzical, so he continued, “Turkeys are oriental birds. They come from the East. So in English they are called Turkey, because Turkey is to the east of England, and in Turkish they are called Hindi, because India is to the east of Turkey, and Hindi means Indian in Turkish”. I checked with a couple of other Turkish friends, and they confirmed that this turkeys/ hindis-come-from-the-east theory has widespread currency among young Turks. It makes some sense.

I couldn’t buy this theory, because I just happen to know that turkeys don’t come from India. They are not called “chini” in India, either, in the belief that they come from China. There is no native Indian word for turkey. Even after decades of globalization, turkey is still almost unknown in India.

A more plausible explanation is that hindi came to mean turkey in Turkish for the same reason that native Americans were called Red Indians.

Turkeys are American birds. They were first domesticated by the Aztecs. The conquistadors introduced them to Spain, from where they came to Europe through Turkish merchants in Ottoman North Africa. The Turkish merchants called the birds hindi because they thought Columbus had discovered a route to India. Europeans called the bird turkey, because of the Turkish merchants who sold them.

Incidentally, the Portuguese word for turkey is "peru", which may be more accurate than either hindi or turkey.