For those who don’t know, Neha Kakkar has been getting a lot of hate for remaking the classic song ‘Maine Payal Hai Chhankai’ that was sung by Falguni Pathak.
The hate Neha Kakkar has been getting for remixing a song, shows multiple uncomfortable attributes of us as a generation.
The first is the obvious misogyny that seeps into the tone and choice of insults thrown at her.
The second is the willing dissociation and also disdain of our generation from our present realities that make us rely heavily on a romanticized past for our cultural existence. The slew of substandard remixes threaten the “good ol’days”, and we feel uncomfortable about it.
The third and the most worrying is the blindness we have for the capitalist institutions and the false sense of satisfaction we draw from battling its lackeys. The hate should be directed towards T Series. This mammoth has been exercising a monopoly over India’s music industry and has made it into a money-making machine at the expense of the evolution of the art form.
The obsession these corporates show for formulae of success, be it in cinema, news, music, sports or even politics, is sickening. Recently I was reading about a data analysis agency which monitors the editing process of mainstream Bollywood movies to guarantee them box office success. That’s absurd!
Any artist, no matter how bad they are, has an innate desire to create something that they could call their own. But I don’t think that there’s a space for it anymore in the mainstream.