{"id":1280,"date":"2015-02-26T08:35:38","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T03:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/?p=1280"},"modified":"2015-02-26T08:35:38","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T03:05:38","slug":"bollywoods-queen-of-trolling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2015\/02\/26\/bollywoods-queen-of-trolling\/","title":{"rendered":"Bollywood&#8217;s Queen of Trolling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, almost a year after actually watching\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt3322420\/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1\"><em>Queen<\/em><\/a>, I realised that the lyrics of\u00a0its\u00a0opening song, London Thumakda, are\u00a0blowing big, big, raspberries at\u00a0<em>Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Before I\u00a0start explaining how it does this, let&#8217;s check out the song itself.\u00a0In fact, I might get carried away explaining, so anytime you get tired or need a break, come back and check out the song which is a\u00a0hugely fun song.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/udra3Mfw2oo\" width=\"80%\" height=\"150\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Right. So.\u00a0<em>London Thumukda<\/em>. Long before I had this sudden realisation,\u00a0I had thoroughly liked the song.\u00a0Admittedly, a lot of this liking\u00a0came out of familiarity, because it is such a Delhi Punjabi song, and I am\u00a0myself a Delhi Punjabi.\u00a0And\u00a0<em>Queen<\/em>&#8216;s use and depiction of the Delhi Punjabi culture is quite genuine. I wouldn&#8217;t call it accurate, because\u00a0I thought it exaggerated Punjabi culture instead of playing it straight &#8211; but at least\u00a0it started with something genuine and exaggerated it. This is much preferable to abominations like <em>Singh is Kingg<\/em> and <em>Jab We Met<\/em>,\u00a0which\u00a0both featured Hindi speaking sardars with token &#8220;tussis&#8221; and &#8220;mainus&#8221;.\u00a0<em>Jab We Met<\/em> even had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2007\/11\/02\/punjab-is-oppressed-yet-again\/\">an entire &#8216;Punjabi&#8217; family incapable of pronouncing\u00a0Bhatinda<\/a>\u00a0the correct way. So Queen is\u00a0a fairly genuine depiction of the Delhi Punjabi culture. And\u00a0<em>London Thumukda<\/em> is itself\u00a0very much in the tradition of wedding sangeet songs, though not actually a traditional wedding sangeet song.<\/p>\n<p>A note about the tradition of wedding sangeet songs.\u00a0In the nineties, the malign influence of Hindi movies that were effectively three hour long wedding videos turned weddings themselves into movie style extravaganzas. (Though\u00a0I note from reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Manners-Guide-Surprisingly-Dignified-Wedding-ebook\/dp\/B0037TPMS6\">Miss Manners advice columns<\/a> that this problem isn&#8217;t unique to the Hindi movie watching world.) Since the nineties, wedding sangeets have been vulgar\u00a0events\u00a0where people wear expensive outfits and\u00a0dance to movie songs. However,\u00a0back in the day,\u00a0sangeets themselves were\u00a0simple, low-key events &#8211; but events which involved extremely vulgar songs.<\/p>\n<p>How vulgar? Well, they fell into two categories: songs\u00a0that had suggestive lyrics about sex, and songs which were either\u00a0daughters in law singing about how useless the mothers in law were, or the other way around.\u00a0The songs in a traditional sangeet\u00a0have\u00a0the potential\u00a0keep the moral police so outraged that they would be filing FIRs for a year.<\/p>\n<p>That the moral police has not yet done this is perhaps because traditions usually get a free pass that newfangled comedy collectives don&#8217;t, but also perhaps because Punjabi ladies sing so terribly that it is impossible to actually make out the lyrics.\u00a0When my brother got married about a year ago, \u00a0we had one such traditional ladies sangeet at home, and it was a traumatic experience on many levels.\u00a0Apart from the sheer concentration of family members, there were also around twenty\u00a0ladies singing tunelessly and out of harmony in a confined space.<\/p>\n<p>My feelings towards my female relatives are very much like those of Fulliautomatix towards Cacofonix. I am fond of them and will go berserk if somebody else tries to do anything to them but I refuse to let them sing.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway. Back to\u00a0<em>London Thumukda<\/em>. It falls into the first category\u00a0&#8211; that is,\u00a0songs going nudge nudge wink wink about sex, what with that entire verse about transparent muslin kurtas and\u00a0inadequately sized bed linen. But it&#8217;s composed and sung professionally, which means that it has far more going for it than traditional\u00a0sangeet songs.\u00a0So much going for it, in fact, that for over a year I utilised it as the perfect background music for such tasks as waking up and showering, pricing conveyor belts, and checking spare stocks of\u00a0raw material against unexpected orders. And last week,\u00a0while pricing one such conveyor belt &#8211; about six hours after I had watched the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TOZyX3bv2Hc\">Pretentious Movie Review of\u00a0<em>Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein<\/em><\/a> &#8211; I realised that the song\u00a0didn&#8217;t just have a catchy beat and innuendo filled lyrics, it was mocking <em>Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein<\/em> mercilessly.<\/p>\n<p>To a small extent, the movie <em>Queen<\/em> itself is a sort of antithesis to\u00a0<em>Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein<\/em> considering its lead character moves from being a romantic who wants a\u00a0big wedding and a European vacation to someone who gets that vacation and then realises that she&#8217;s an independent woman who don&#8217;t need no wedding. But that is mostly at a philosophical level.\u00a0<em>London Thumakda<\/em> gets blatant about it. How, you ask? Well, I&#8217;m sorry to make you do this, but cast your mind back to the beginning of DDLJ.<\/p>\n<p>We see Amrish Puri telling us in voiceover that he lives and works in Southall but that actually London is rubbish, and what his heart thirsts for is India because fuck yeah India! India is the greatest! This raises two questions:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>If Amrish Puri hates London and loves India so much, why doesn&#8217;t he just go back to India? Even if his finances are straitened, he surely owns either his shop or his house, if not both.\u00a0And even in 1995, London property\u00a0had to be massively expensive. And\u00a0although the\u00a0rupee hadn&#8217;t sunk\u00a0in value to a single British penny by then, he could still have cashed out, bought property in India, and retired to a life of ease and having Farida Jalal and impoverished Biharis at his beck and call.\u00a0As it is, he liked rural Punjab, where land is far cheaper than Gurgaon, where most other NRIs were buying property.<\/li>\n<li>If he was walking home from Southall to Southall,\u00a0just how did his route take him past so many landmarks of Central London? (This question came courtesy RoKo.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Now, in swaggers\u00a0<em>London Thumakda\u00a0<\/em>with these lyrics:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Saanu te lagta, Southall toh changi<br \/>\nJaga koi nahi hai badiya<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Translating for make benefit non-Punjabi speakers: &#8220;To us it looks like,\u00a0out of all the good places, there&#8217;s none more amazing than Southall.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>What a slap in the face for Amrish Puri! After his extended monologue about the\u00a0wretchedness of Southall and the awesomeness of India, a bunch of Punjabis in Rajouri Garden, who actually live in India and so have a better idea about India snap back that actually, no, Amrish Puri is wrong, and Southall is just amazing. Not just amazing, it&#8217;s the greatest place in the world.<\/p>\n<p>Even that might\u00a0just be coincidence, you say. But look at how that verse starts:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Trafalgar de<br \/>\nKabootar vargi, O meman phir di<br \/>\nGootar goo kardi<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s a DDLJ opening reference right there! The song isn&#8217;t just doing nudge nudge wink wink about wedding night bonking, it&#8217;s doing even more nudge nudge wink wink in the direction of Amrish Puri!<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s so obvious when you look at it that at first I was ashamed of myself for not realising this earlier. And then I googled to see if anybody else had written about it and found nothing. So\u00a0now I&#8217;m amazed that I seem to have come up with an original insight. Whatay.<\/p>\n<p>Having googled to see if anybody else had made this connection, I then googled to see who was responsible for this masterful trolling, and found that the lyricist of\u00a0<em>London Thumakda<\/em> is Anvita Dutt Guptan.\u00a0That name sounded familiar, so I googled her, and realised that, holy shit, she was also the lyricist for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2013\/02\/11\/that-radha-song\/\">the last song I was moved to write a long, rambling, blogpost about: Radha<\/a>. Which makes perfect sense: once you&#8217;ve undermined the Bhagvad Gita by\u00a0means of a catchy dance number, undermining\u00a0<em>Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenegein<\/em>\u00a0(also extremely popular and also about a powerful authority figure)\u00a0the same way is\u00a0probably all in a day&#8217;s work. Maybe even an hour&#8217;s work.<\/p>\n<p>What is most charming about the whole affair is that hardly anybody notices the trolling that Anvita Dutt Guptan carries out. As I wrote in the earlier blogpost, people were outraged not that the song\u00a0was refuting the Bhagvad Gita, but that it\u00a0was calling Radha sexy. And with London Thumakda, nobody except me seems to have noticed, or at least been moved enough to write about it online.\u00a0So Anvita Dutt Guptan is not just\u00a0irreverent, she&#8217;s also extremely subtle about it. What a woman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, almost a year after actually watching\u00a0Queen, I realised that the lyrics of\u00a0its\u00a0opening song, London Thumakda, are\u00a0blowing big, big, raspberries at\u00a0Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein. Before I\u00a0start explaining how it does this, let&#8217;s check out the song itself.\u00a0In fact, I might get carried away explaining, so anytime you get tired or need a break, come [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-movies-and-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-kE","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1284,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}