COLOMBO: A young Jaffna Tamil music composer and lyricist has put on YouTube a song to counter what he describes as “lust for the blood of Tamil” evident in Dhanush’s Tamil-English Kolaveri.
Disturbed by the craze for Dhanush’s Kolaveri across the globe, 28-year-old S Jerry Stalin wrote and recorded Yarlpanathilirunthu Kolaverida (Bloodlust From Jaffna) to extol the Tamil language and the Tamils’ heritage. Written in pure Tamil, the video has so far got 1,80,000 hits.
“The response has been unexpected. People have written to say that the quality of the music and the recording matches that of Dhanush,” Stalin told Express here on Monday. A former student of St Patrick’s College in Jaffna, Stalin is a computer professional, who composes advertising jingles in his spare time. “I am also working on albums of my own compositions,” he said, in his residence-cum-studio in Colombo. Yarlpanathiliriunthu Kolaverida is set to the tune of Dhanush’s Kolaveri, but the lyric conveys the anguish of a young Tamil who sees the Tamil language disappearing in its heartland - Tamil Nadu. Through cleverly-inserted visuals, the video also shows the stress that Tamils are facing in post-war Sri Lanka.
The most telling visual is that of a signboard at the entrance of Jaffna, which gives a pride of place to Sinhalese lettering. The song ends with a call to Jaffna, the ‘home of pure Tamil’, to protect the language.