The craze of “Kolaveri Di”…reaches NPR in the US

I was returning from office this evening at around 8 PM. I usually have my car radio tuned in to NPR (90.9 WHYY). In my view the most neutral source of news in the US. Anyway, It is very rare that I hear stories about any local Indian language movies or music on NPR. In fact, thanks to the success of “Slumdog Millionaire”, I heard about ARR’s Music tour in the US this summer.

But, when the news reader mentioned “Kolaveri Di“, I couldn’t believe it. Subha, my wife mentioned about this song a few days back. I reluctantly listened to it. I did not like it the first time. Usually I love melody music. However, I do like songs that have roots in folk music though. This song was the later kind. It was also an experiment with mostly English lyrics, mixed in with Tamil. This is not uncommon in India, where we mix a little bit of English in all our languages. Tamilians, I should say are kind of an exception to it. It was amazing to hear that this song went viral and is popular all over India. Last I checked, the Youtube video had 16 million hits.

Anyway, I am glad that things that happen in India are becoming mainstream news across the world and the creativity is being appreciated as well. I feel happy whenever a good story makes it out of India, into main stream news in the US and this was one such instance I thought of sharing.