A ‘creative dig’ on social networks

Duram unollu daggara avutunnaaru… Daggarunnollu duram avutunnaru are the closing lines of Raghu Kunche’s latest song ‘Social network andi babu’, a track he composed for upcoming film ‘Ladies & Gentlemen’. The line which translates to “Distant people are becoming closer… and distance is growing between people who are close” is a perfect ending to the song which is a very interesting satire on the social media.

What’s more interesting is that the hottest thing for the present generation – social media – is explained using a traditional folk art, the Burrakatha. And interestingly it is the Burrakatha format that seems to have caught

The song which is fast catching up with people is a peppy number and is a reflection of the social networking culture where people’s lives revolves around Whatsapp, Viber, Facebook, Twitter and the likes. As the composer puts it, it’s a “creative dig” on the social media.

Says composer Raghu Kunche, “ The film revolves around social media and we wanted to compose something on that topic. After a few discussions I suggested that we make a Burrakatha. The director was skeptical as he wanted all the songs in the film to be breezy with soft music. He was afraid this one song would give it a mass feel.”

However, Kunche managed to convince director Manjunath and the next step was to compose the lyrics and lyricist Sirasri was roped in for penning the song that was to be used while the titles rolled. But the song turned out fine and they decided to release it as a promotional video for the film.

Lyricist Sirasri says that the process of writing wasn’t a difficult task considering everyone from the team is active on social media these days. “Being active on various social media platforms, we obviously know how things works and that is where the lyrics originated from. With that experience we wrote so many lines and in the end took the ones we felt are best.”

The video which also stars Junior Relangi and Noel was shot in around four hours in a local train full fo people. It starts from the time when pigeons used to deliver messages, and then travel to the time of telegraph. It further goes on to the era of the STD booths and coin boxes before it finally lands in the present day social networking world.

While every line is a reflection of the times, the closing lines we talked about in the beginning make you think harder. Did those lines register hard? Yes? It seems the same for both the lyricist and composer who express their liking for that single line through the whole song and ponder over how much meaning it conveys.

But if we keep the liking aside, the lines do spell out some element of truth, don’t they?