Cinema Virumbi

Recently, I gathered the courage to decipher the lyrics of the Adnan Samy(AS)-Sadhana Sargam(SS) number ‘Boom Boom’ from Shankar’s ‘Boys’ (Released sometime in 2003 but was dogged by controversies from day one till it vanished from the halls in a jiffy! The Telugu version, surprisingly, was a super duper hit which launched one of the heroes, Siddharth, into a big league in Tollywood! I understand, in true Shankar style, they used 32 cameras for filming this song!). It goes something like this:

AS:Boom Boom shakrathaam shakrathaam thakka….…
SS: Kaathal athuthaan ithuthaan enRE kEtkumaa?
Kaathal idhayam ethaiyum ethirpaarkkumaa?

AS: MuLLin mElE kaakkaik kunju thoongavillaiyaa?
Kuppai mEttil rOjaa chedi pooppathillaiyaa?

SS:kotaanguchchik koorai pOthum, nam kaathal vaazhum;
thanga paspam thEvaiyillai thaNNeerE pOthum.

AS:kaathal nuzhainthaal kaaylaan kadaiyum KOlaar vayalaagum.

SS: Ottai udaisal kaathal nuzhainthaal pullaanguzhalaagum.

AS:maram izhaiththa suruL viriththu malarp padukkai seyvOm.

SS: kazhuththu aganRa (or mugam udaintha or some such thing) bottle-kkuL agal viLakkaay vaazhvOm.

AS:kaaLaan kudaikkuL kattith thazhuvum attai ena vaazhvOm.

SS: noolaam padaiyil poochchi iraNdaay oonjal aadi vaazhvOm.

AS: mazhai kuzhaiththa sERRinilE maN puzhukkaL nee naan.

SS: azhugi vitta maambazhaththil iru vaNdugaL naamthaan.

(I have done something similar to what they did in ‘Jurassic park’ i.e., use some filler material in the form of the DNA print of a frog to recreate that of a dinosaur! May be, given some more time, I can recreate the original T-Rex in all its pristine glory!)

I should say the following positive things first:

I liked the music and the novelty of using Adnan Samy’s voice in a Tamil song. To be fair to her, SS comes out with a decent enough Tamil pronunciation in this song. (She even gets a pass mark in ‘zha’. AS too has mustered the courage to say something like ‘zhhhha’!) It will be too much to expect the correct ‘thanga baspam’ as against ‘thanga paspam’ as pronounced by them, as there are much bigger bloopers!

Now, I don’t know the context of the lyrics. I couldn’t make out what they are trying to say. (By the way, are they admitting that this song is an ‘Ottai udaisal’ which is lapped up as a flute recital by the diehard fans?!)

This song raises some basic issues. Are lyrics (which demand good pronunciation) absolutely irrelevant? At this rate, one might as well bring Michael Jackson and make him mouth something remotely sounding like Tamil! If it is only for the novelty aspect, why didn’t they restrict AS from saying anything beyond ‘Boom Boom shakrathaam shakrathaam thakka…’ which he seems to excel in!

As Ramesh Prabha of (Ex) Sun TV once said, these are not Tamil songs but Tamil ‘maadhiri’ songs!

Cinema Virumbi 

Published with some minor changes in Zine5.com sometime back