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)