Whose Kala Chashma is it anyway?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Let's see, which Kala Chashma remix video is your favourite? I guess mine would be the one of people grooving in Peppa Pig costumes, at a kiddie party. I was disappointed they were not wearing sunglasses. I guess it's not easy getting them in Peppa Pig mask sizes. But, still. The one with Jimmy Fallon and Demi Lovato might be second. I mean that trademark goofy Jimmy Fallon expression, right? And kya karein control nahin hota excitement when Winner, the K-pop group, joined the trend in oversized PJs. Janam safal.

I remember when I first heard Kala Chashma, nearly 20 years ago. I had just moved to a new place. It was always on the radio, the soundtrack to my unpacking. Every time it came on, my colleague Jyoti would yell, ‘Paro, Kala Chashma' and raise the volume, and I would go running to the other room for a quick dance break. The bride in dark glasses is now, as feminist-ish folks might say, a trope, but surely owes a little bit to these songs about Chandigarh chicks in chashma and other such cool 90s girls, less polished but also less cookie-cutter - or so I'd like to think, being a 90s girl myself, a wild child of Madonna. It was a phase of discovering new songs by unknown singers via music videos on Channel V and MTV and, later, on FM. The brief, energetic post-liberalisation phenomenon called Indipop remixed a world of sounds and style and had everything from Anaida's perplexing Ooee Ooee to Bally Sagoo's dreamy remix of Chandni Raatein, Alisha Chinai's basic but iconic Made in India and Rabbi Shergil's breakout Bulla ki Jana Mein Kaun. Many were the cassettes featuring "Various Artists" which we would buy for one song only to stumble upon another which we loved even better. Some artists vanished after one hit. And eventually, it was all subsumed into Bollywood.

There was charm in the chance discovery of a singer or a song, but greater was the pleasure of the unpredictable meeting because who knew when the song might play on TV or radio. When it did, we would saturate ourselves with the beloved's brief presence, soaking up the song. The fan's sensual pursuit of a song is a little less, or perhaps just differently, sensual now, because we can seek it at will. The element of surprise is now in the constrained variety of virality, the most unexpected video remixes.

I did feel sad though to see the song referred to everywhere, as Sidharth Malhotra's Kala Chashma. Sure, he is indeed dancing to it, diligently, in a kala chashma. But I felt wistful that Amar Arshi, who initially made the song famous (old school word for viral) is barely mentioned in relation to the song - far less the lyricist Amrik Singh Shera, who apparently wrote the song when he was in Class 9, at age 15, a kind of precocious tik tokker of his time. He is now a head constable in Ludhiana.

The internet is bittersweet that way. It allows us to find so much, connect across so many gulfs. But it also makes it easy not to attribute loosely, not quite truthfully - and so obscures many people's creativity and original thinking. It wears its own kala chashma I guess.

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