There’s an Indian restaurant here that I like because it has both Kashmiri nan (my favorite) and a giant-screen plasma television that usually plays music videos,  often taken from Bollywood movies. The songs are typically cheerful and energetic and the choreography elaborate and inventive, so I’ve taken to looking for more of the same on YouTube.

Here’s a fun example from the south-Indian Tamil-language film Thirumalai. The performers are Joseph Vijay on the left and Lawrence Raghavendra (who did the remarkable choreography, I believe) on the right:

No, I haven’t a clue what they’re singing.

Here’s another one, also in Tamil, from the film Pennin Manathai Thottu.

This version of the clip has gone viral because of the addition of subtitles by YouTuber Buffalax (Mike Sutton), who invented an English “translation” based on the sounds of the words. The result is occasionally vaguely obscene (and as Ned Brooks says, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s vagueness) but also reasonably funny. The male performer is Prabhu Deva Sundaram, better known on YouTube as Benny Lava after the first line of the Buffalaxed lyric, “My loony bun is fine Benny Lava.” The original lyric, which you can find on line various places, involves the guy pleading for affection while the woman says sure, as soon as we’re married.

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