"Why this Kolaveri di??"

Everyone nowadays is familiar with this song "Why this Kolaveri di". However the first question that comes in everyone's mind is what is meant by this line. Two days a go my friend posted this song on my facebook wall. The first time I listened to it I was clueless and was annoyed because I didnt understand it. I thought it was some kind of a joke but in these two days, I see everyone in my friendlist posting this song to their friends and I realised that this is becoming so popular and a trend. So then I decided to search abit about this song and actually know the meaning of the word "Kolaveri".

There are so many disparities in this world. We should think of this as one world and we find hope locked in a consuming battle with despair. This struggle has produced an anxious world. Anxiety is the prevailing global mood. Widely felt anxiety is a modern unease. It often emerges from the rubbles of damaged reason. Reason entices modern societies to become ambitious about the limits of what we can achieve by efficiently organising the abilities of the mind. If only humans could put their minds together, they would unravel the world. There are limits to human reason, especially collective human reason.

The germs of inhumanity are found in collective human reason. Each tale of damaged reason returns a disenchanted world. As people lose hope in the prose of modernity, they recoil with anxiety.
Keen habits are also cunning habits. The cunningness of reason inspires us to the Why question even when we know an answer isn’t around. The "kolaveri di" phenomenon has become a rage because it speaks to that cunning habit. Asking why the soup song, the flop song, has become so popular is also, circularly, the reason why it is so popular. What else, and I fall in the trap here, explains the exponential growth in its popularity now that people know what kolaveri di means: it really means nothing.

But it must mean something if, in just over a week, over four and a half million people find an apparent nothingness interesting. The key cultural message of the chinna surprise may be that it is serving two functions. First, it is establishing that we live anxious lives, a tad wary of being able to know the answers of the Five Ws, the one H and their cousins. One opportunity to revel in the unknown and we will do everything to resurrect the magic of not knowing it all. If we put our mind to it, it would seem absurd why people are watching something that makes no meaningful sense, again and again and again.

Second, by going viral we are also trying to heal our anxious selves. There is often so much meaning around – created, contested, demolished, recreated – that we feel it is good to transition into zones of no-meaning; to zones where meaning is absent. Kolaveri di is one such zone of no-meaning. Let us ask not why, but ‘Why this kolaveri di’ because it has no answer.

And it is proper that it has no answer!!

Posted in: Ayesha Iqbal. BBAIII