We were on a road trip last week and my Android was constantly notifying me of messages regarding Kolaveri; Our constant movement prevented me from looking into what kolaveri was until my good friend Hareesh played it for me at his residence in Houston.
'3' "Why This Kolaivery" Video Song
I listened to it on youtube after returning to Cincinnati, just swooning over the 8 million hits that this clip had received on youtube within a week of its release.
Today, it is 13 million plus hits and it is only growing. Even a significant number of us NRIs (often branded as being cocooned in the era that we left India) are aware of this song, some of us are even humming it.
I caught myself humming ‘pappaapapaa pappaapa pa~a’ as I was waiting for a traffic light to turn green this morning.
13 Million plus hits for a youtube video of a ‘Tamil film song’. Plus all the kosuru versions in Gujarati, slap-your-favorite-politician version, instrumental version, tukkada versions and much more.
What is driving this phenomenon?
Is it the song itself? There have been many love-failure songs; this one doesn’t even sound sad.
Is it the singer’s voice? Dhanush doesn’t even aim to compete with the voices of legends such as SPB and others. His is a simple rustic voice that just holds the tune and expresses something.
The tune is catchy with a nice rest (arudi) falling on the beat ‘di’.
To us tamilians it sounds like it is in Tamil, to others it is probably just plain English cloaked in sambar or a South Indian version of Creole or broken English. And there probably lies half the attraction. Where does the rest of the attraction come from?
The key thing to note here is that apart from the song it is the youtube clip that has become the rage.
The contents of the youtube clip are different from what the picturized song will sound like.
The youtube clip is full of young twenty something’s; these folks are just portrayed as having a good time. There is pure happiness (nirmal anand)– and a sense of something new being created. And this joy is infectious.
The promoters are very smart in that they have tapped into this sense of ‘something being created’ and the joy associated with it and have chosen this as the flagship material rather than the footage of a lamenting lover.
Just watch the video once, and you feel that you are in the middle of something new and young being created. You want to watch it again.
Aishwarya, Shruti, Anirudh and Dhanush brighten up the space. The video is well made.
It has definitely made a thirteen million people happy and is bound to brighten up many more.
Will continue to write on the kolaveri phenomenon next week.
About the author
Kanniks Kannikeswaran
www.kanniks.com