Trailer, Tahaan continued ...

(Continued from my previous post on Tahaan: a boy with a grenade)

Came across the trailer of Tahaan on youtube at IDreamProduction channel
Have a peek at what the movie promises:
Yes the voice-over is irritating. Too HBOish!

(They removed this trailer. Guess the voice over was really over the top)
Here is the new trailer:



Here is one more with a better use of the soundtrack:


Since the movie is still not out in the theaters (it will be in October), I am going to pontificate about the 2 minute trailer. And here I go:


The little boy commanding his donkey in Kashmiri to Pakh! Pakh! (Walk! Walk!) is a fine linguistic experiment.

The background score just in the mid of the trailer is authentic Kashmiri music and absolutely stunning at that. These are the fast beats of Chakkri. The music is set by Taufiq Qureshi, son of Ustad Alla rakha, younger bother of Zakir Hussain and a person of Kashmiri origin. The soundtrack sounds brilliant.

Apart from all this, the thing that really took me with surprise me was: a simple dialogue uttered by a Kashmiri

Ye Ga'da ab tumhara nahi raha
Jao yaha se

How do I know it's a Kashmiri voice? Notice the tone of the voice and the way hindi word Gadha is pronounced as Ga'da by the character. This pronunciation is characteristically Kashmiri. It may seem a trifle little matter. A trifle matter of tongue. But...

Here is a little note taken by Godfrey Thomas Vigne, an English travelers who visited Kashmir in 1835. In his book Travels in Kashmir he wrote:

The languages now spoken, which are derived from the original and pure Sanscrit, are denominated Pracrit. The Italian is a Pracrit of Latin. The Hindu, Gujerati, Tirhutya, Bengali dialects, and others, are Pracrits. The language of Kashmir is a Pracrit. The Kashmirians, says Abu Fuzl, have a language of their own. I was told on good authority, that out of one hundred Kashmiri words, twenty -five will be found to be Sanscrit, or a Pracrit, forty Persian, fifteen Hindustani, and ten will be Arabic ; some few are also Tibetian. There is an uncouth rusticity about the Kashmirian pronunciation which is almost sufficient, at least I thought so, to betray the language as a patois, even to a person who did not understand it. The Sikhs, their lords and masters, are well aware of their erroneous pronunciation, and have a standing order against the admission of any Kashmirian as a recruit, on account of their almost proverbial timidity ; and if a man present himself for enlistment, and is suspected of being a Kashmirian, he will be told to utter some word, such as Ghora (a horse), which, if he be of the valley, he will pronounce broadly Ghoura or Ghura, and be thus detected.

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And now my close friends would certainly understand why sometimes I sound funny, why Gaurav becomes Ghaourav and why Sau Rupay becomes Saoo Rupaye.