The viral YouTube video featuring charismatic Indonesian policeman Norman Kamaru singing an Indian song has surprisingly initiated a resurgent interest in Bollywood among Indonesian people. The Youtube video of Norman’s lip-sync interpretation of ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya‘ has spread from the small town of Gorontalo to make him an instant internet celebrity.
The remarkable side-effect here is that people in Indonesia appear to have become infatuated with Bollywood entertainment almost overnight. Facebook groups, celebrity fan sites, TV shows, live music — all now feature everything Bollywood. You can see in the graph below that Google searches for “Bollywood” spiked on April 7th, which was the very day that we reported on the video going viral.
With the spread of Norman’s video via other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, the people of Indonesia are paying more attention to Indian songs and films. The video has brought a new spirit to the Indonesian entertainment world, which had seemed somewhat monotonous with horror films and Malay songs.
It will likely come as no surprise that First Brigadier Norman is himself currently in the process of recording an Indian-style song, to be entitled Farhat’s Love. It will be interesting to see how much influence a born-on-the-net viral star can exert on the traditional entertainment world here in Indonesia.
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