October 17, 2004
Desi Culture March - WorldwideFilm
You guys probably know or can guess that I travel quite a bit for work. When you're the lonely business traveller, you end up spending a fair number of your jetlagged hours channel surfing the local TV. In between dubbed reruns of TJ Hooker in various languages, one ofthe things that's surprising me more and more is how much Desi culture I'm running into in random countries.
I was impressed, for ex., with the Desi quarter of Singapore (one of the cleanest cities in the world, and yet, Desi's have managed to make an entire street smell like Garam Masala ;-). But I think most folks generally expect to see (and smell?) the Desi presence there.
The spate of more surprising examples began about a year ago when I was in Stockholm and flipped out when I saw the video for Mundian To Bach Ke on Swede MTV.
A little over a month ago, I was in Amsterdam and Russell Peters was on TV (with Dutch subtitles). He appeared to be delivering his usual desi-themed material to a UK audience and the show was rebroadcast on a local TV station.
And now, I'm in Sao Paolo, Brazil and just a few minutes ago, a total 3rd tier ABCD movie - Bollywood/Hollywood was on the boob-tube complete with Portugese subtitles. The movie still sucked but it was sorta interesting to see a Brazilian announcer say something about the flick afterwards with a headshot of Lisa Ray in the corner of the screen.
vinod on October 17, 2004 08:38 AM in Film · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
Lisa Ray looks so much better in the headshot than when she acts ...
I too travel constantly for work (fotolog.net/exquisitedesi) I have noticed as well that in any country I go to there is tons of Indian influence... For instance in Greece I saw Monsoon Wedding with Greek subtitles playing on a local channel, Indian inspired clothing were practically in every shop in Greece & Cyprus.. Every country I have been to from Yaounde, Cameroon to Yerevan, Armenia-- in every club I have heard Mundiya to Bach Ke by Punjabi MC... It's actually quite flattering that Desi culture is spreading all over the world :) Did you happen to visit that 24 Hour Desi Mall in Singapore?
Well, friend of mine informed me that Monsoon Wedding was shown on Hungarian tv last week, dubbed into Hungarian (not the songs, thankfully)!
They also used words like 'beta' and 'didi' as proper nouns :(
I saw Koi Mil Gaya, the Hrithik Roshan movie, on christmas eve last year, on some German TV channel dubbed into german!!! Only the songs were in Hindi with german subtitles! I was soo surprised! And then they had an Asian week kind of thing going on in the city, and they were showing the movie Main Hoon Na there, again in german, and the Germans were watching intently!!! :D Pretty cool...