Includes a Canadian doctor surprising his Indo-Canadian wife at their wedding.
By Dileep Thekkethil
The universal acceptability of music and its power to heal and transform people remain powerful as ever. As Indians travel across the world, carrying along with them the country’s pop culture, it is only natural that a few Indian songs would excite foreigners who take time to learn it and try to sing with maximum perfection.
Here are 10 foreigners who have done justice with some melodious rendition of Bollywood and other Indian songs:
1) Natalie Di Luccio, an Italian-Canadian classical-crossover singer from Toronto, is a great fan of Bollywood songs and she is known for coming up with soulful renditions of some of the biggest hits through her official YouTube channel. Some of the popular Bollywood numbers that the Canadian singer has tried include, “Tu Jaane Na”, “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” and “Pehla Nasha”. Here she sings the evergreen Bollywood hit “Pehla Nasha”, walking through the city of Mumbai.
2) It is not always that we see a Chinese singer trying a Hindi song as it’s difficult for them to reproduce the pronunciation. But, during a Chinese TV reality show called Super Idol 13, a contestant named Luo Ping sang the super hit Bollywood number “Tujh main rab dikhta hai” from the Shah Rukh Khan movie “Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi”. The anchor of the show can be seen teasing the contestant, but one of the judges tries to boost the confidence of Luo Ping by singing the first line of the song himself. The contestant left the stage with a good score for his effort.
3) The Oscar-winning music director A R Rahman is the pride of every Indian and it’s natural that he has a significant number of fan followers in other countries too. But, when a US school chorus decided to sing “Balleilakka Balleilakka” one of his super hit Tamil song from the movie “Sivaji” during a yearly event, it needed a lot of training as the language is a hard nut to crack for people who are not used to it. The chore leader can be heard saying that the song was a real “tongue twister” for his young team. Also, among the young singers, you can find a few Indian origin students. At the end of the show, the students gave a real treat for the listeners.
4) A few years back, “Kolaveri” sung by Tamil superstar Dhanush for his movie “3” became a worldwide sensation and there were different versions of the songs made in many languages. But, a Canadian girl named Ary decided to sing the song in Tamil and she rendered it with nearly perfect pronunciation and made it adorable by adding a few good moves and a lot of funny faces in between her singing. The song was watched by 805,205 people on YouTube.
5) It seems like AR Rahman is a personal favorite of many non-Indians. A team of American students sang his famous song “Dilsere” from the movie “Dil Se” and made it big on YouTube. The girls who had no prior experience singing Hindi put in a lot of effort to learn the song and sing it. This shows that culture has no boundaries.
6) For a German engineer Bollywood songs are part of his life and even though he has no idea what the song really means he can’t think of a day without listening to songs. Here you can see him singing the great Mohammed Rafi’s “Chaudhvin Ka Chand” in front of a large dinner gathering of engineers from across the world.
7) What more can an Indian origin bride ask for on the wedding day when her Canadian groom surprises her by singing her favorite Bollywood song, that too with the support of a piano. Dr. Frank Gregoire surprised his bride, Simran, also a physician, on the day of their wedding by singing the super hit song “Tum Hi Ho” from the movie Ashiqui 2, making her teary-eyed. It took Frank six weeks to learn the lyrics and piano chords to the popular Bollywood love song, but going by the expressions on his love, Simran Malhotra’s face, his effort was certainly worth it.
8) A video that recently got publicized through WhatsApp has a Turkish boy singing the famous Awara Hoon song from Raj Kapoor’s movie “Awaara” during a reality show. The boy pours his heart out while singing the song and it makes us think about the magnificence of the 65-year-old song which is still adding more fans.
https://youtu.be/lg7NQvQddkA
9) It was a surprise for the audience at ‘Kairali Gandharva Sandhya’ in Kerala, when American singer Grady Long, born and raised in South Dakota and now settled in Texas, sang ‘Ayiram kannumai kathirunnu ninne njan,’ a super hit Malayalam song in the 90s which is a favorite song of many people even today.
10) Tanya Wells, a London-based singer and lyricist, is a great fan of Indian music, including ghazals. Her YouTube channel has a collection of soulful rendition of some of the hit Bollywood numbers. She has performed with great artists like Natacha Atlas, Anoushka Shankar, Joss Stone and Nitin Sawhney. Here is Tanya singing “Aaoge Jab Tum O Saajna” from the movie “Jab We Met”.
1 Comment
Thanks for singing Bollywood songs that may be occasionally we feel somewhere we & our songs worshipped.