Re: MTV Desi targetted for Desis
Published: June 19, 2005
(Page 3 of 4)
Ms. Desai was referring to Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan-English performer who goes by the stage name M.I.A. Clearing his throat, Mr. Durrani, who seemed to be charmed by Ms. Desai's irreverence, said simply: "I want to put you completely at ease. This isn't corporate America. And M.I.A. is so central."
M.I.A. is the daughter of a Tamil militant whose family fled the violence in Sri Lanka and eventually settled in a housing project outside London. There, she said in an interview that will be shown on MTV Desi, she started over as refugee "scum," with hand-me-down clothes, in special schools, on the lowest rung of the English social ladder.
Ms. Arulpragasam is a mesmerizing entertainer who cuts and pastes musical genres - old-school electro, futuristic dance hall reggae, Bhangra, punk, hip-hop - while moving from Cockney to Tamil to American slang and back. Her sound is catchy and full of political attitude, and her videos mix urban grime and guerrilla war scenes. The one for her single, "Sun Showers," puts her in the jungle, on an elephant, washing clothes in a river, dangling on a tree limb as she rhymes and cracks open a mango.
"It's an awesome video," Ms. Desai said after watching it in preparation for a screen test in which she would "throw to," or introduce, "Sun Showers."
Mr. Durrani agreed. "M.I.A. is MTV Desi," he said.
Actually, it is Mr. Durrani who is really MTV Desi. Not only is he an immigrant - he was also lured to this country by MTV.
As Mr. Durrani describes it, in the early 1980's, while an M.B.A. student in Lucknow, he received a gift - a tape with the first music videos he had ever seen, including David Bowie's "Let's Dance," which he found "magical and transporting." Years later, when Mr. Durrani was married and working in Dubai as a marketing director for Honda, he watched MTV for the first time. And he needed to be part of it, he said.
He traveled to New York, making a cold call to the human resources department at MTV headquarters in Times Square. Told that he did not possess the qualifications for a job there, Mr. Durrani was undeterred. He and his wife, Afshan, a fashion designer, discarded their comfortable expatriate life in the shopping capital of the Middle East and moved to New York to start over as students. In the summer of 1996, Mr. Durrani, while working on a master's degree in communications, secured a foothold - an unpaid internship - at MTV and never let go.
IN a recent interview in his Times Square office, Mr. Durrani sat in front of a Bob Dylan poster and discussed his father's scratched vinyl 78's of Indian divas like Begum Akhtar, his own exposure as a youth to Western music ranging from Sam Cooke and Dean Martin to Dylan and Bowie, and his passion for discovering a new generation of bicultural musicians in England and America.
Most of these artists have not enjoyed the success of M.I.A. or Jin, a Chinese-American rapper with a song shouting, "Yeah, I'm Chinese, and what?" and proclaiming, "The days of the pork fried rice and the chicken wings/ coming to your house five years is over/ Y'all gonna learn Chinese!" Both of them have already gotten air time on the regular MTV.
But Karmacy, a vibrant hip-hop fusion group composed of self-described "bicultured individuals" of Indian origin, has not. Karmacy is something of a cult band based in Los Angeles, and, as Sammy Chand, 30, the lead member and producer of the group, said, "We've been in our own little universe for such a long time." MTV Desi changes that. "You can always go city to city, club to club, but MTV Desi will really give us a way to speak to our audience in a unified manner," he said. "It will be like a Grand Central station for everyone into our kind of music."
When Karmacy introduced a new music video at the Key Club on Sunset Boulevard in May, MTV Desi was there to record it. "Blood Brothers" is percussively rapped in English and Gujarati, with synthesized sitar and flute. In three acts, it tells the story of the conflict between two Indian brothers when one emigrates to the United States to seek fame and fortune. "How do I move on, bhai (brother)?" the chorus goes, then repeats the question in Gujarati. "Cuz no matter where I go/ My soul is in the same place."
Ms. Taufiq, the V.J. applicant who works at Hewlett-Packard, said she had opened as a singer for Karmacy.
For her audition, Ms. Taufiq was shown a Bollywood music video, an extravagant number from "Happiness and Tears," a huge hit film in 2001. She knew it well, and her head bounced along. When Mr. Durrani exclaimed that the leading man, Hrithik Roshan, was a seriously handsome man, Ms. Taufiq recoiled somewhat, saying, "But he has six fingers!"
Mr. Usman viewed the same video, watched it with a progressively widening smile, laughed robustly at the end and said, "Are you finding this ridiculous?"
Given several minutes to prepare an introduction to the video for a screen test, Ms. Taufiq decided to pretend that she was broadcasting from Jackson Heights, in front of Kebab King, whose quality, she said, could be measured by the long line of yellow taxis in front.
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Mr. Usman decided to go with: "My uncle in India says desi stands for 'doctors earn significant incomes.' My relatives in Pakistan say desi means 'Don't ever say India.' Here on MTV, desi means South Asian flavor, style and music. Check this new video out. It's going to knock your socks off. You've heard of a big production budget. How about 500 backup dancers? This is like 'Grease' meets desi, making it ...greasy. No, that doesn't sound right."
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Mr. Lopez grinned. "That's absolutely on the money, man," he said, and then Mr. Usman broke into broken English as Vijay the V.J.
"People think in my country everybody so sad, crying, terrorism," Vijay said. "We not terrorism, we dancing. Not dancing like panties falling down .... What is this panties falling down" the buttocks? And so on.
In the end, the choice of a starting V.J. was difficult. Mr. Durrani said that he worried that Ms. Taufiq was too much of an Indian-American stereotype (beautiful overachiever) and that Mr. Usman would be straitjacketed in a V.J. role. Ms. Desai had no experience in front of a camera but she was cute, hip and sassy, and this captivated, as she put it, the Man.
And so Niharika Desai - a fresh take on Carson Daly, if ever there were one - will be the first face of MTV Desi, the first to introduce this channel to its audiences and then, perhaps, to introduce their vibrant, hyphenated culture to the larger world