Bizarre memories
The food here is great, I couldn't recommend it more highly, but this is what I heard over lunch last week:
Mere piya
O mere piya gaye Rangoon
Kiya wahaan se tally-phoon
Tumhaari yaad sataati hai
Tumhaari yaad sataati hai
For the Hindustanically / Nanshunt-Bollywoodically challenged amongst us, that would be:
My belowed
O my belowed went to Rangoon
And from there did tele-phoon
The memory of you
Drives me up the wall
The memory of you
Drives me up the wall
So I think I might go back there today. For the tabakhmaz and goshtaba.
Mere piya
O mere piya gaye Rangoon
Kiya wahaan se tally-phoon
Tumhaari yaad sataati hai
Tumhaari yaad sataati hai
For the Hindustanically / Nanshunt-Bollywoodically challenged amongst us, that would be:
My belowed
O my belowed went to Rangoon
And from there did tele-phoon
The memory of you
Drives me up the wall
The memory of you
Drives me up the wall
So I think I might go back there today. For the tabakhmaz and goshtaba.
posted by Tabula Rasa | 8/01/2006 01:30:00 PM
13 Comments:
This sort of songs were popular in Telugu during the Brtish time when many went to work there on all sorts of jobs (labourers to merchants). One example: "I am going to Rangoon Narayanamma!
What will you bring me Nayudu bavaa'.
Of course, there were no songs with 'telephone'.
I wonder whether the song you mentioned is a take off from the earlier songs.
"The memory of you drives me up the wall"
said Spiderman to Mary Jane?
(and how delightfully archaic that song is: Rangoon, "telephoon" - quite another world. BTW, wasn't it Uma Devi, aka, TunTun who sang it?)
I hear you've been accompanied by a Ghost for these lunches? :)
My grandma grew up in rangoon and my grandpa used to sing this song to bug her.
please dont tell me that the first time youve heard the song?
swarup:
that's funny :-)
it's possible this was a take-off, but it may have been a contemporary take-off. i know nothing about these things but the sound of the song, plus km's and m's comments, make me pretty sure that this is a very old song too.
km:
sure, picture spidey swinging to that one - heh heh heh.
not quite re: Ghost, though. we spent the day missing each other before finally getting together as the sun went down.
m:
that's hysterical! sounds just like something i'd have liked to do :-D
szerelem:
okay, i won't :-) actually, last week at the restaurant was the first, second, and third times i heard it. and today as i walked into the restaurant was the fourth. i now know that song from *nothing*.
It's odd that you haven't heard it before...they used to play it a lot on the radio. Ad, KM's right. It is Tun Tun who has sung this. But, as for your translation...great!
"The memory of you drives me up the wall"
:-)
Did u sit in the old car waala table? I love the food but isn't it a bit pricey and the potions too small?? Or were u converting in dollars :P
PS: I love that song and that BEEEUDIFUL nasal voice. hehehe
*tabakhmaz and goshtaba*!! rock on :)
ghost:
thanks for the corroboration. my ignorance is actually not odd at all -- i very rarely listened to the radio or watched tv as a kid, the main exception being for sports. as for the translation, i toyed with putting in the word "thought" instead of memory, then decided to be more faithful to the original :-)
sudo:
hey, of *course* dollars! think of all the tasteless rubber cafeteria chicken sandwiches we've lived through before this.
nix on the car, though. this was in gurgaon. here the car is where they have the buffet.
gift:
and rista. divine. almost as good as the 1.75 kg padma'r ilish i had in cal yesterday :-)
Indian food really makes me nostalgic.
But I salivate over the memories of Bangalore's seedier dives more than it's fancy restaurants.
Ghee rice and chilli chicken at Nagarjuna, masala dosas at Shantisagar, Ceylon parathas and bheja fry at Empire. Ahh! just the the thought of it...
not to forget the jumbos and mumbos at fanoos, and the biryani at impy's. good stuff.
"Tmhari yaad satatati hai" --> "Drives me up the wall", now that is lost in translation!
life is about ambiguities, innit? :-D
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