Minor bun engine fun

Unless you are a YouTube regular, you wouldn't have heard of this man called Buffalax. His real name is Mike Sutton. He's American, 24, and a connoisseur of kitsch. He has attempted to decipher a couple of Indian movie songs, and come up with stunning nonsense verse.

Here's what Buffalax does: He plays a video over and over again and makes up his own words for what he hears, or mishears, on the audio track. He has zeroed in on at least three Indian songs by popular heroes: Prabhudeva, Chiranjeevi, and Daler Mehndi, subtitled their videos, and posted them back on YouTube. He does not translate the songs; he hears the sounds and finds English approximations for them.

It is astounding how words in one's language sound to someone from another language. Take two lines from Prabhudeva's Tamil song: Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?/Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo? (Are you the moon in the pale college sky? Are you the moon that pierces boys' hearts?) And here's what it sounds like to Buffalax's American ear: My looney bun is fine Benny Lava/Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!

Needless to say, Buffalax has earned fame for his scramble efforts. Nonsense verse is described as poetry written for humorous effect, "intentionally and overtly paradoxical, silly, witty, whimsical or otherwise strange." Buffalax has some competitors on YouTube, but most are tasteless, and lack the consistency that makes him king of video whimsy.

I watched the song first with Buffalax's lyrics, and quite a few of his lines sounded true to the sounds Prabhudeva and his heroine mouth on screen. My designer-friend Suresh Kumar, an avid film buff, got me the Tamil words, and I heard the song again with the original words. The lyrics sounded perfectly Tamil! It appears our aural perception is similar to our visual perception: our brain can arrive at contradictory conclusions from the same inputs. The context is the thing!

Absurdly enough, the English words in the Tamil song sound like completely dissimilar English words to Buffalax. For instance, he hears April-May eppodum as Fill me up with doom! As the song progresses, the words get sillier. The woman sings: Who put the goat in there?/The yellow goat I ate!

Wired, the widely read tech magazine, profiled Buffalax and found out that he takes up to six hours to 'buffalax' a song. Since I sometimes struggle for hours to do the three Ayyo Rama wisecracks I have to deliver every day, six hours for a song, I would say, is quick work! So is it all just good fun, or is it offensive? Is Buffalax implying that his language and culture are better than ours?

What Buffalax picks to spoof is what the more serious sorts would scorn. Much of popular culture can be spoofed wonderfully, and Hollywood, for all the awe it inspires, can be made to look ridiculous if only you have the intelligence to do so. The Chiranjeevi video Buffalax has subtitled is already a spoof (I hope!) of Michael Jackson's Thriller, so is popular culture everywhere a recycled burlesque?

Personally, I am offended by the Lingo Leela, the Appukuttan Nair and Sister Stella spoofs that have ruled our FM radio waves. They RJs carry on as though they, and their audiences, are superior because their accents are not coloured by Kannada or Malayalam.

It's disturbing to see the privileged mocking the disadavantaged. But on the other hand, a poor man laughing at the rich, or a Dalit lampooning a Brahmin, has a healthy effect. Chaplin and R K Laxman never crack jokes at the expense of the distressed.

I couldn't help but laugh as I watched Buffalax's videos, and I found his style delectable. I suspect it's his teasing way with words. I'm not sure he's racist or bigoted, but I'd say a good response to him would be to take a hit pop song from the US, and fit absurd Kannada or Tamil words to it!

Watch a Buffalax song here: My looney bun is fine Benny Lava (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw)

How's business, doc?

Yesterday, a doctor complained to our reporter Sanchita Sen that the Indian Medical Association was making a fortune by endorsing Tropicana and Quaker oats, but wasn't willing to share the royalties with its branches.

Sanchita scented a story and perked up. When she filed her report, we asked ourselves two questions: Is it true that IMA Delhi is greedily keeping all the booty for itself? The second question bothered us more than the first: Is it ethical for India's premier doctors' organisation to suggest that one brand of fruit juice, or one brand of toothpaste, is better than another?

We did some calling up. A representative of the IMA in Delhi justified receiving money saying, "We have our own expenses to worry about." We called back IMA's Bangalore office-bearers with a simple question: Are you objecting to the ethics of endorsement or are you asking for a cut? It turned out they were more interested in the cash, although individual doctors did tell us the system of stamping products with "Recommended by the IMA" disturbed them.

Doctors are considered worthy of the greatest respect because they are believed to have the patient's interest at heart. But consider this: since the 1980s, pharma has transformed itself into the most profitable industry in the world, and has consistently outperformed traditionally more rewarding sectors like commercial banking. It has aggregated so much in profit that it funds thousands of university departments worldwide, and hires the brightest of talent emerging from medical and management schools. And these brilliant minds work towards formulating what a doctor reads, understands and believes.

Jacky Law, a journalist covering pharma, quit in 2004 to write a book on what she had seen of the trade. Her efforts yielded the book Big Pharma, which concludes that modern medicine has lost its way, and that "a relentless pursuit of profit is crowding out the public good".

Law reveals startling facts: Developing drugs is difficult, but once that is done, a company typically spends just $5 to manufacture a product that generates $100 in sales. Pharma spends up to 35 per cent on marketing, and yet delivers unbelievably high profits to its shareholders, sometimes to the extent of over 40 per cent a year.

You have probably seen Amitabh Bachchan endorsing Chyavanprash, and Wasim Akram and Naseeruddin Shah pushing blood glucose meters. Those are straightforward advertisements, but it emerges pharma giants have other insidious ways of raking in their millions (billions, actually).

Law reveals that the football legend Pele gave interviews encouraging men to discuss their sexual problems with their partners as part of a contract with Pfizer, manufacturers of Viagra, that wildly successful pill for erectile dysfunction. Shane Warne similarly received a secret packet to discuss in the media how he had quit smoking, and was furious when a fan took a picture of him clandestinely enjoying a smoke! And who were Warne's benefactors? Manufacturers of Nicorette "stop smoking gum"!

The dirty tricks department employed by pharma is more active than its peers in other industries. Take an example. Over the years, studies have emerged to scare huge new masses of people into taking statins for blood cholesterol levels (the cut-off point has come down from 280 mm per decilitre to 240 to below 100).

I frequently visit an online forum run by followers of a dissident diabetes doctor called Dr Richard Bernstein. He is one determined doctor who has taken on the establishment, and delivered what many believe is an effective, alternative approach to diabetes care. Of course he is unpopular among mainstream doctors. Need you ask?

I have personal reason to be sceptical about prescriptions. Ten years ago, I was told I had to take a pill every day, for as long as I lived, for my blood pressure. I took it for some years, and stopped for some reason I can't now recall. The last couple of times I visited a doctor, I was told my BP was normal!

Doctors are fallible, but they can't all be venal? I fervently wish modern-day healers who stumble on uncomfortable truths would speak out. Our lives are in their hands.

The novelist and the nawab

You can be sure Salman Rushdie’s remark about marriage, just two days old and already all over the media, will get into the quote books. The novelist told writer Kathy Lette of Elle magazine, “Girls like it, especially if they’ve never been married before it’s the dress. Girls want a wedding, they don’t want a marriage.”

Not many people can claim Rushdie’s expertise in matters of matrimony, considering he’s been in and out of it four times, but was that remark just “blather”, as a girl blogger described it? Perhaps. The world's funniest and most cynical quotes happen to be about marriage, and with this proclamation, Rushdie could unwittingly join the ranks of the bitter and the facetious.

Rushdie is among those who can joke about marriage. Not everyone can. For couples who’ve been through the matrimony wringer, being funny about marriage is as difficult as being funny about death.

Thoughts of marriage and death relate to a fear of the road ahead, and evoke demons that won’t go away easily.

Wajid Ali Shah, the nawab of Avadh, who was exiled by the British, makes the marriage-death connection poignantly in his famous thumri, Babul mora. The British portrayed him as a king given to song and debauchery, and threw him out of power. They forced him to leave his beloved city of Lucknow.

He wrote: O father, I'm forced to leave my home/Four men have arrived to lift my palanquin/My loved ones become strangers/And the inside of my home becomes unreachable/As I leave my father's home to go to my husband’s country.

Char kahaar mila/mori doliya uthave (four men gathered and lifted my palanquin) is the line that makes the marriage-death connection, and Wajid Ali Shah then extends the metaphor to other anxieties of leaving.

The four men who lift the wedding palanquin could well be the four men who carry the corpse to the burning ghats. The bride is gripped by the agony of having to leave behind people and places she loves dearly; she speaks in the language of one on the deathbed. And, of course, it is possible that these emotions sound fuddy duddy to those of us who grew up on Diana trivia and the wedding razzmatazz of Hum Aap ke Hain Kaun.

Rushdie said it would be nice to have weddings without marriages. He was kidding, of course, because weddings don’t address the demands of sex, companionship and children. It’s wishful thinking that you could have the ceremony without the trauma (and dare we say it, the joy) of living in a relationship.

Akka Mahadevi, the 12th century mystic, celebrated marriage in her exquisite poetry, but she was talking about a groom who only existed in her mind. She wanted nothing to do with flesh-and-blood men, and she considered herself betrothed to Channamallikarjuna, or “lord white as jasmine.”

Last week, MiD DAY ran a story about how weddings are collapsing because couples who hitch up online have unrealistic expectations, and feel betrayed when they see a side of the spouse they hadn’t imagined existed.

One story was particularly telling. A couple, married after an Internet courtship, started bickering when the woman realised her husband had lost his toes in an accident. She felt he had misled her by sending her photographs with his feet covered, and started insulting him for his “handicap”.

Would you blame this on the Net? The foolish desire to wear wedding finery? Or is it that just about anything can wreck a marriage?

The Independent reported that Rushdie was recently nuzzling an actress for a video shoot. Other papers have reported his romance with an athlete. After Wajid Ali Shah went to Kolkata, he spent his pension lavishly and contracted marriages with several pretty women. Both the nawab and the novelist got away without too much damage, and kept their sanity and creative urge.

So what’s Rushdie trying to say? Drape yourself in your splendid Kanjeevarams, but don’t imagine marriage is a katcheri?

Uh, it’s all very confusing, Sir Salman.