Why this Kolaveri Di vs. Team Anna, Ramdev and 2G Scam

By Dhanush Kumar

(CHAKRA) As many nations  in the Middle East were busy with the ‘Arab spring’, India also found itself occupied with nationwide anti-corruption protests. New faces and heroes emerged into the spotlight with names like Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev making daily headlines. We also confronted emerging government scandals and accusations such as the ‘2G Scam’, helping to snowball the anti-corruption movement against the Indian government.

Fast-forward to the end of the year, December 2011, a new spontaneous movement has surfaced. Only this time it is a viral movement of slapstick comedy and stereotypical integration of western and traditional Indian music called ‘Why this Kolaveri Di?’. In less than 3 weeks this song has taken over India. Songwriter and singer Dhanush made this song for an upcoming Tamil movie ‘3’. This song can be seen as healthy and as comical relief for Indian society, which was flooded by corruption-related news all year. However,  a statistic pulled from Google’s search engine tells a sad and uninspiring story.

In short, when looking back at all search results typed on Google India; searches related to ‘Why this Kolaveri Di’ in the month of December were more than the entire year’s worth of searches related to all Baba Ramdev, 2G Scam and other anti-corruption protests.  Also,  in the start of December, Kolaveri Di’s highest point in searches was twice as much compared to the highest point of searches for all  of Team Anna’s protests and news (see below).

Thumbs up to the Indian youth. India’s connected generation definitely have their priorities straight and should expect their own spring and defeat of government corruption,  just like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.