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Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Mile Sur Mera Tumhara

You know how sometimes governments try to propagate their own agenda with er...propaganda (pun intended)? There was such an effort a few years back by the Indian Government, and the agenda was to promote national unity and broadcast a message of goodwill and cheer among the diverse masses of India. Yes, it was a good agenda.

As part of this they got some musicians together and created a video clip. The clip was both simple and profound (most times you will see this connection. There was a two line well, song or couplet or whatever you may call it, that was sung throughout this presentation, but in different languages, using the same tune but varying the instrument based on the culture/language being represented on the screen. I am not going to describe the whole thing since that's why I am uploading the original video but I'll translate it for those of my readers who don't understand any of the languages in the clip. I myself understand only a couple of them.
They are singing, literally translated:
My note (musical note, not banknote hehe), when merged with your note (again musical note) becomes our note.
The rivers of notes, from every direction, flow down and merge into the ocean,
they turn into clouds and fall gently down as rain.

That's it. But the musical composition is quite haunting (not in a scary way) and recently when I downloaded this clip, purely on a whim, I found that I still remembered some non-Hindi parts of it, the parts that had been etched in my memory without an effort because I had seen it so many times between TV programs as a filler.

But on the whole, I liked how it presents a nice message with nice music. Simple yet profound.

Watch it if you have the patience for most people, even most Indians won't understand most of it, but it's still watchable. Do tell me if I am wrong.



Oh one more thing, prominent personalities of India appear throughout the presentation, mostly, I suspect with the langauge of the region they belong to.

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