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May 25, 2009

| The Editor as Wizard >>

Two Houses, Both Alike in Awesomeness

Nav over at Scrawled in Wax just blew my mind, twice:

  1. 17-year-old beatboxer Julia Dales. Whaaaaaa?
  2. Merey Mathay by Kiran Ahluwalia. Sure, I love Hudson Mohawke; sure, Passion Pit sounds great. But I’m pretty sure when we ascend, Bill-and-Ted-like, to join the Intergalactic Orchestra, the music there is going to sound like Kiran’s.
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Posted May 25, 2009 at 12:08 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Briefly Noted

Comments

Merey Mathay (english lyrics)

The lines on my forehead seem to predict
that we are not destined to be together.
Beloved, don’t pursue our love,
without a lamp the oil can’t spring out into flames
This world is a double-edged sword,
it doesn’t tolerate the meeting of two hearts;
It curses them to be apart
like the sun and the moon.
I suffocate in these tall walls
How will I bear this life sentence.
My desires will stay strangled in my heart
my youth will wither away
Time will fade the sparkle of my bangles
Everyone said, “don’t drown,
love is a difficult game

Posted by: Betty Ann on May 25, 2009 at 01:45 PM

Delayed response but I was just chatting to my mum about this, who is a native Punjabi speaker, and for some reason it was only then it struck me that, as Betty Ann has implied, such a happy song has such mournful lyrics.

The neat thing about Ahluwalia though is that she often does a sort of 'hidden fusion' where the significance of what she's doing requires one to be equally fluent in 'both' cultures - i.e. that the 'meaning' or whatever can be found in the slippage or gaps between perspectives. It's neat and, once I get this whole Punjabi language thing down, I hope to return to.

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