Greatest love machine

Illustration/Uday Mohite

This week, even as everything was going to hell at high speed, I fell in love with a map of geographical musical bubbles, on pudding.cool.

A musical bubble is the geographical area where the same song is a number one hit. The interactive map showed how one song may be no. 1 in and around Bombay, but completely different songs ruled the charts in say, Mysore or Chhattisgarh. And Dhaka's musical bubble might look more like Bombay's than say, Indore's. Some years ago, while tracing the history of Munni Badnam Hui for a film on copyright, I discovered that different places had completely different hit versions of this hit song, mini musical bubbles.

The world, as the article notes, "is a musical cornucopia of ‘hits'. Some songs are national exports, crossing cultural and linguistic boundaries", while others stay at home and interestingly, what's popular culture in one place, isn't in another if people there don't know it. Yaniki, what we love is sometimes determined by what's around us, but there's no saying what we can love, should it float across our horizon, as bubbles do.

People often dismiss love saying it is a transient bubble. But it's love that keeps fragile bubbles afloat. That's how an old song, about a certain man who lived in Russia long ago, floated up from the past last week - in a love-bubble?

For reasons unknown, Boney M and Abba were the only ‘English music' bands most pre-lib babies knew. When I mentioned them to someone abroad at 13, their amused look was a cold shower of embarrassment. Rasputin may have been such a lovely dear to the Moscow chicks, but in the - allegedly - real world, I realised Boney M was not really Daddy Cool.

I am glad Naveen K Razak and Janaki Omkumar, two medicos from Thrissur, didn't feel this, and created a gotta-watch-22-times-more video featuring thrilling dance moves and electrifying eyebrow waves, across hospital corridors, in scrubs, to the Boney M song, Rasputin.

The video went viral, prompting a lawyer to post it on Facebook while conjuring up a "dance jihad" conspiracy. Perhaps he lives in a musical bubble where the hate-machine is the hit-machine, because it takes something to see doctors with such small eyes, in a time when medical workers have emanated grit and grace. My friend told me this story about her doctor friend. A 17-year-old buried his father who died of COVID-19 and came to the hospital burning with fever. "He came prepared to die. I was overcome and in my PPE, so I just hugged him. Later, he told her "it's your hug that made me think I might live."

The dance video, too, was like a hug in hard-hearted times. So, even as the dance-jihad rap began, medical students started uploading #RasputinChallenge videos to #StepAgainstHate, more videos than bubbles on Juhu beach, a love-machine surpassing Russia's greatest (Mr Rasputin).

Friends on social media voiced their frustration with toxic school or college WhatsApp groups. I joked to my friend N, "My school and building groups are rather positive, as is my social media feed. I guess I'm living in a bubble, not reality ya?" "Who is to say yaar, that your bubble is less real than their bubble?" Who indeed? The world is a cornucopia of bubbles. My eyes are on the ones made of love.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com