Exactly what i wanted to say as well! Open Letter: A Modrrraaasi rrrrites to Shah Ruk Kaan Dear King Khan, Badshah, Don...or should I go with Raj/Rahul? (Because I can’t recall any of your other screen names – sorry, I’m not as well-versed with your roles as you are, and therefore ill-qualified to identify the tributes to yourself that you sneak into every film of yours. Sniff. Okay, I seem to have begun this letter already. But we must make an official start.) Dear Raj/Rahul, First of all, accept my humble submission. I’m not South Indian enough for you to be able to quite identify with. I confess I have never been able to eat noodles with curd. Even worse, though I have curly hair, I don’t douse it with coconut oil and tease it into the ringlets that you wore in Ra.One. I am ashamed to admit I don’t cook everything in coconut oil either. Aiyo. Oh, wait, I have to tell you who I am. I’m not quite Tamilian mainstream – I’m Tam Brahm. The dialect of Tamil that we speak has been mocked by mediocre comedians in Tamil cinema since even before Mehmood began to portray “aiyo”-ing South Indians with hair coiled into oily buns and legs swathed in transparent dhotis. Street Tamil sounds about as jarring and bewildering to me as it must to you. Which is why I admire you for attempting to speak it. Before we go on to that, though, I must tell you that you have taught me so much about the Tam Brahm culture itself that I didn’t know about. In Ra.One, you had us observing karva chauth. Or, as Deepika Padukone might have said it, “korrrrrvaw chouth”. You will be horrified to know that we Tam Brahms were completely unaware of this custom. You will be even more horrified to know that not all of us sing “Vaathaapi Ganapathim” first thing every morning. And our children don’t get together and do the alaarippu at the time of night when flights from London arrive in Mumbai. I owe you for acquainting me with practices in my culture whose existence I was ignorant of. But that is not all I owe you. You are not the first Bollywood actor to speak Tamil. Nor were you the last. Akshay Kumar and Abhay Deol have spoken Tamil too, and I realised their vocabulary was clearly more expansive than mine, since I couldn’t decipher most of what they said. But, you ...you have expanded my vocabulary with discrete words. Like, this word “Rascalla”. I didn’t know it existed. It still sounds like a Spanish football club to me – think about it...Real Rascalla, Atletica Rascalla, Rascallona, FC Rascalla, Rascalla Club de Futbol, Rascalla Union Deportiva. But I say “rascalla” several times a day, hoping to work it into everyday usage, in the right context. I’m not sure what that context is, but I’ll get there. Just as I thought you had taught me everything I could learn about the Tamil language, you came up with a phrase that flummoxed me in Chennai Express. In the climactic scene, after squeezing out tears, after putting your voice through that shudder-and-strain routine you adopt every time you’re begging patriarchs for their swooning daughters, after throwing yourself against a lot of people with arms bigger than your face, you declared, “Ippodu oru appan iruppanaa?” I have consulted several dictionaries, and several professors, who are now hurling themselves into libraries, trying to trace the meaning of this phrase. But we only have bokwaas dictionaries here. It would be so wonderful if you could take the time out to enlighten us. You may already be aware of the Tamilian propensity for setting ourselves on fire for the most trivial reasons. And the fact that you have used a phrase whose meaning none of us can track is certainly not trivial. We Tamilians are also upset as a community that we could follow even less of the film than the rest of India could without subtitles. Our main problem is, since we don’t watch Yindi movies (sorry, I can’t say Yindi...I mean, Yindi...I mean, Yindi...damnit Autocorrect, please step in!...ah, Hindi!), we missed out all the references to your earlier films, which comprised more than half the dialogue. Next time round, can you please provide us with annotations? When this wonder of a film ended, with you screaming, lecturing and fighting, it was a call back to the Nineties for me – that’s how all Tamil films would end in that decade. I began to think about the Nineties’ version of you, and the remarkable career progress you have made. Not only have you started living longer – nowadays, you don’t die even at the end – you have also started living later. I mean, look at when you lost your v-v-v-v-v-virginity in Maya Memsaab, and look at this...you fell in louwe only at 40. Now, compare this with your contemporary, Aamir Khan. That bokwaas fellow has been in college since 1988, and still doesn’t want to graduate. I think he went back to school sometime in the middle, also. Despite this, you have found time for your continued obsession with Madrasis. We feel truly honoured, especially when the rest of India is not sure whether we are still part of the country or have floated away into Sri Lanka – that place also has Tamils only, no? But we are to you as college is to that rascalla Aamir Khan (correct usage, no?). In fact, it is your interest in cross-pollination that has encouraged the likes of Dhanush to enter the cow belt. And so you have been instrumental in our national integration. In a demonstration of unity-in-diversity, now we all speak each other’s languages horribly. So grateful to you. Loats of louwe, Nandini disbursedmeditations.blogspot
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 08:42:18 +0000
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