Run DK run: dirty lyrics that ring perfectly true

By Palash Krishna Mehrotra Editor’s Note: This article contains profanities that have been left unedited because these words are necessary for it’s subject and argument. Last Saturday, I had a bit of a fall. There was a gash on my forehead, and the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. After struggling with it for an hour with cotton wool and Savlon, I knocked on a neighbour’s door for help. He’s new to town, and didn’t know where to take me, so we walked down to another friend’s place down the road. She took her car out and drove us to the nearest hospital. [caption id=“attachment_34187” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption="‘D K Bose’ has a punk feel to it.  Screengrab/ibnlive.com"]  [/caption] It was four in the morning. While walking past the reception, glancing at my reflection in a mirror, I thought to myself, Man, you look a bit like Imran Khan in the posters for Delhi Belly: ashen face caked with blood, a face that has seen better times, but has just been put through the wringer. The nurse and doctor on night duty immediately took me under their wing. Stitches would be necessary. “But I never got stitches in my life,” I squealed in horror. The doctor put a needle through my bloody flesh, the nurse went for the right buttock with an anti tetanus shot, and for a moment, lying on the hospital bed, I felt I had been abducted by aliens, though extremely friendly and well-intentioned ones. I began to giggle hysterically, partly because of the copious amounts of whisky I’d consumed that night, but mostly because of the pain. And then, suddenly, my instinct for self-preservation seemed to assert itself and I burst into song:

Oh by god lag gayi/ Kya se kya hua/ Dekha toh katora/ Jhaanka toh kuaa/…Kisne kisko loota/ Kiska maatha kaise phoota/ Kya pata….bhaiya we don’t have a clue/ Itna hi pata hai, aage daudein toh bhala hai/ Peechhe toh, ek rakshash phaade munh…

The doctor didn’t find this funny, and proceeded to stitch me up with a grim face, shaking her head ever so slightly, but the nurse broke into a smile. I, the drunken idiot, continued to sing “Bhaag Bhaag D K Bose” loudly into the summer night. As far as I was concerned, it was all finally beginning to make sense. * * * It’s a catchy song, which has caught the fancy of the listening public mainly because of the pun on Bose D K. Try saying it rapidly, like it’s a tongue twister, and it starts to sound like bhosdi ke. The song is about several things, most of which it leaves deliberately vague. It’s a nihilist escapist anthem that’s telling us, “Run, motherfucker, run.” Run from what? [caption id=“attachment_34146” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption="‘Bhaag D K Bose’ is an excellent song. “Bhaag bhosdi ke bhaag” would have been even better. Screengrab/ibnlive.com"]  [/caption] There’s Daddy for one, who thinks his son is a pale shadow of himself: “Daddy mujhse bola, Tu galati hai meri/ Tujhpe zindagani guilty hai meri/ Saabun ki shaqal mein, beta tu toh nikla keval jhaag/ Jhaag jhaag jhaag/ Bhaag.” Then there are the mundane pressures of everyday life, of finding a lover, of putting a roof over one’s head, and food on the table: “Hum toh hai kabootarr/ Do pahiye ka ek scooter zindagi/ Jo dhakelo toh chale/ Arre kismat ki hai kadki/ Roti, kapda aur ladki/ Teeno hi paapad belo toh miley.” But there are other things too that we run away from, hostile friends and work mates, the passions and follies of our lives, the demons of our own making, the small kinks in our personality which we choose to ignore, and which might just blow up in our face: “Piddi jaissa chuhaa/ Dum pakda toh nikla kala naag /Bhaag bhaag/ D K Bose, D K Bose, D K Bose bhaag.” Ram Sampath’s music displays a self-conscious post- modern quality, especially in the way he parodies genres, both Indian and Western, and also a deep desi bilingualism which is comfortable straddling two distinct aesthetics, theirs and ours. ‘D K Bose’ has a punk feel to it; in the song video Imran Khan is made to look like Billie Joe Armstrong, the vocalist of neo-punk band Green Day. ‘Nakkadwale Disco’ sends up the filmi quwwali, while ‘Saigal Blues’ parodies the singing style of old Hindi film songs, in which the singer always sounded like he was singing without moving his lips. Indians have this remarkable ability to shuttle between idioms, as if they were two neighbouring balconies, joined by an invisible passage. The music of Delhi Belly moves from K L Saigal to punk, just like Indian girls today manage to slip out of a short black dress and into a sari with startling ease and self-confidence. Or like when Shekhar Kapoor made Mr India, a typical Bollywood potboiler, dutifully plagiarised from the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, before going on to direct a mainstream movie about Elizabeth I for a principally British audience. Here is the song.. Continued on the next page… Westerners find this bewildering for they just cannot do it, the only white director to have made a successful Bollywood film being Danny Boyle. When I played a French couple the D K Bose video (it features a rock band playing in its rehearsal space), they didn’t get it. They were bored. When I played them the rambunctious ‘Sheila Ki Jawani’, they clapped their hands, “Oh, but don’t I just love Bollywood!” Hinglish- The new mantra In order to understand the lyrics of this song better, one needs to appreciate how important Hinglish has become in the last two decades. When Zee began airing a daily Hinglish news bulletin almost 18 years to the date, it seemed like a bad joke. Nowadays, however, Hinglish is widely accepted as the lingua franca of the young, allowing advertisers and producers of TV reality shows to overcome language barriers and reach out to a pan-Indian audience. [caption id=“attachment_34153” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“The new wave of lyric writers like Jaideep Sahni and Bhattacharya are at the forefront of successful experiments with Hinglish. Screegrab/ibnlive.com”]  [/caption] Amitabh Bhattacharya, the lyricist of Delhi Belly, is one of the few in the industry who do not use Hinglish merely as garnishing. He doesn’t limit it to providing comic relief in songs as, say, Anurag Kashyap does in ‘Motu Master’ (Udaan): “ Kachwa bhi isse faster/ Chal Motu Master/ Hai total disaster/ Motu Master/ Chal daru pass kar/ Chup kar bastard.” Bhattacharya takes Hinglish seriously as a language, and treats it with respect. For him, it’s less a medium to elicit laughs by some clever juxtapositioning of Hindi words and English ones, but more a hybrid language that nails contemporary reality. The phrase ‘Emotional Atyaachar’, from the song of the same name written by Bhattacharya for the movie Dev D, has now passed into the vocabulary of a generation that, for the first time, is learning to deal with modern Americanized notions of love and lust in an Indian context. For years, the Hindi film song lyric remained slave to a different aesthetic and vocabulary, that of Urdu/ Hindustani. Mired in romantic clichés and abstractions about piya and sanam and ikrar, much of it somehow always sounded like an inferior and sentimental poetry. The new wave of lyric writers like Jaideep Sahni and Bhattacharya are at the forefront of these successful experiments with Hinglish, which has liberated the Hindi film lyric, allowing the film song to widen its ambit a wee bit; it can now talk about things other than eternal love and cloying romance. Even when the subject is as hackneyed as love, it is now approached in a more direct manner, like in the lyrics of ‘Jaa Chudail’, also from Delhi Belly, where a disgruntled lover spits out the following, “Ungli pe nachake tune/ Chuna jo lagaya mujhe/ Arey jaa jaa jaa/ Go to hell…./Arey jaa ja ja/ I want silence/ Jaa chudail, Jaa chudail.” [caption id=“attachment_34248” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“Even when the subject is as hackneyed as love, it is now approached in a more direct manner. Screengrab/ibnlive.com”]  [/caption] Given the fact that Hinglish has enabled the Hindi film song to shift gears, it’s disappointing to not see it doing more, pushing the boundaries even further. For instance, in ‘D K Bose Bhaag’ why can’t we have the singer just say ‘bhosdi ke’ straight up. Songs of the Indian rock underground, available only on the Internet, have long been doing this, from Bodhi Tree’s cult classic ‘Gaand Mein Danda’, to the relatively more recent ‘Balatkari’ and “Randi thi voh/ Maa ki lauri." Bollywood should do what Eminem and every other gangster rapper have been doing for years–put the original version on the CD, complete with explicit lyrics, and all the ‘bad’ words retained. And then, have a more sanitized version for television and radio. Radiohead did it with their first hit single ‘Creep’, where in the line “You’re so special/ So fuckin’ special”, the word “fuckin’ ” was replaced with the radio-friendly ‘very’. The childish kicks we get out of saying ‘Bose D K’ rapidly reminds me of being back in school when we would punch 8008 in our calculators, then titter over it because if one read it in a different way, it looked like BOOB. ‘Bhaag D K Bose’ is an excellent song. “Bhaag bhosdi ke bhaag” would have been even better. The writer is the author of Eunuch Park. His new book The Butterfly Generation is forthcoming from Rupa.