New Delhi: Months after a Chandigarh cop reportedly went viral on social media with a video which showed him creating public awareness about no parking zones to the tune of singer Daler Mehndi’s 1995 hit, Bolo tara ra ra, the Punjabi pop artiste has inspired a purported traffic awareness campaign in neighbouring China.
Posted by Chinese comedian Brother Hao on the video-sharing platform Bilibili on 6 May, the clip appears to be a spoof of Mehndi’s 1998 song Tunak tunak Tun. It was subsequently picked up by China’s Ministry of Public Security and turned into a road safety campaign on Weibo, to caution viewers about the importance of wearing helmets and using seatbelts.
The video comes amid the ongoing border tensions between India and China.
The clip shows Hao dressed in a turban, riding on a motorbike along with two other similarly dressed men. None of the three wear helmets and their faces appear to have been darkened with makeup. Beside them in a car is another man in similar get-up. Behind the man in the car sit three women, who appear to be Chinese, dressed in what appear to be lehenga cholis.
As the men on the bike appear to engage in a verbal dual with the car driver, the women get down and start dancing with some of the bikers in an imitation of bhangra steps. The conversation is set to the tune of the Mehndi hit.
China’s Ministry of Public Security picked up the video and shared it with the message, “Seat belts should also be worn in rear seats on cars. Remember when riding a motorcycle, you can’t go on the road without a helmet.”
The video was also shared by ThePrint columnist Aadil Brar on Twitter, who not only mentioned details about Hao in the post, but referred to the Chinese ministry’s campaign saying, “It’s like someday FBI [America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation] woke up and started sharing racist videos of Chinese drivers wearing qipao [a Chinese dress]”.
While Indian social media users who commented on Brar’s post have criticised the video for being “racist” and “offensive”, many Chinese social media users defended it as an example of “Indian soft power” and the song’s “monumental” popularity in China, according to a South China Morning Post report published Wednesday.
The report also quoted one Chinese national as saying that “Indian men are regarded as clowns in China, but Indian women are regarded as beauties”.
It added that the video had garnered over 190,000 views on Weibo.
‘Crude’ vs ‘cultural export’
Brar also shared links to previous such spoofs made by Brother Hao, prompting social media users to comment on its “crudeness”. While at least one user chose to hail it as an example of India’s “cultural export”, another called it “amusing”.
India’s Information and Broadcasting Ministry had said last year that Bollywood films perform better in China owing to there being lesser theatres in India.
According to Apurva Chandra, secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the number of theatres in India has dropped to around 8,000 from around 12,000 five to six years ago, while the number of cinemas in China has increased to nearly 70,000 from around 10,000 during the same period, Indian Express had reported in 2022.
Hao’s latest video and the sharing of it by China’s Ministry of Public Security follows controversy around an illustration carried by German media outlet Der Spiegel, depicting the findings of the UN Population Fund’s State of World Population Report 2023. The illustration captioned, ‘Population: India overtakes China’, showed an Indian Railways train overtaking a more modernised Chinese locomotive plying on a parallel track.
Earlier this month, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence tweeted a controversial meme on Hindu goddess Kali that triggered outrage, prompting Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Emine Dzheppar to issue an apology and express regret over the depiction of the deity “in a distorted manner”.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)