When Pingu became Hyderbadi

How funny is it when you hear the female penguin ask a male one , "Kya ji kaisi paki macchi?" and the latter replies, "Akhri maze ki banaye begum tum.Tumhare haatha chumna dil bolra mereku."

It was nearly a year ago when two cousins Mukheem Hannan and Zubair Khan used a boring evening to garner city-wide fame. Wonder how? By turning popular animation cartoon Pingu into a Hyderabadi!

So what exactly did the cousins do? They duo took the videos of the popular cartoon Pingu and dubbed it in Hyderabadi lingo! Sounds interesting, isn’t it? But that’s not it. Buoyed by the success of their first video, theycontinued to create a few more series using the videos of other cartoon shows which went on to become a hit, so much so that their YouTube channel titled ‘Zubair Mukheem’ now has 1,152,364 views.

Asking about how the concept came to their minds Zubair, a student at Al Habeeb College of Engineering, Hyderabad, mentioned that on a lazy evening when he and Mukheem were getting bored, they decided that they should do try their hand at dubbing. “We searched for many cartoon characters and as Pingu doesn’t have dialogues, we choose to start with that. Elucidates Mukheem, “Pingu has no voice and so we decided to give it a voice and that’s how Hyderabadi Pingu was born.”

But the duo never thought that a fun evening thing would give them fame. Mukheem, who has completed his education and is pursuing a job right now, says, “We thought we’d get around 1,000 views but today we’ve crossed a million! It’s a great feeling.” Zubair echoes him as he says, “We turned into celebrities overnight. The response was amazing. We never expected anything on such a huge scale.”

The duo has attained fame at a young age, but Zubair seems to have got used to being a celebrity now. He says, “Initially it was exciting when people recognised me and all. But now it all feels normal.”

Also Zubair (19), the younger among the two, has got a new name, “Many people in my college call me Pingu! Initially I was known as a singer but now that has changed.”

With nearly 3,144 subscribers for their channel, the duo wants to keep going and make their fans laugh. Mukheem says, “We did it just for time-pass. But since people liked it so much, we continued to make other videos.”

After a series of six videos, they continued to make another series of ‘Oggy and the Cockroaches’. Then, they turned more creative and started dubbing famous advertisements and the first among them was ‘Shubh Aarambh’ which again turned out to be a hit with YouTubers.

The duo has meanwhile moved on to Facebook and have 5,608 fans on their page titled ‘Hyderabadi Rocks’ on which they share funny cartoons and videos – all in Hyderabadi lingo.