By Ila Ananya
We’ve established by now that everyone loves to hate Dhinchak Pooja, especially after her ‘Selfie maine leli aaj’. The song isn’t full of deep meaning or anything, but I don’t vehemently hate her like this group of people who’ve made a song about her seem to. In all their fun and games, they’ve thought it’s still fun and games to sing about how Pooja is such a “joke” who shouldn’t show her “stupid face” on YouTube. And that she should know she can “only blow”.
We saw the video when TLF reader Ashwita Mukundan wrote in to us about it. The music is produced by Allrounda, and the video basically has two men, one of whom grossly sings again and again about how Pooja should show her blowing skills because she doesn’t have any singing skills. “Bitch why you gotta open your mouth, only open your mouth when you gotta go south”, he says, and by the end we see another man falling off his chair and onto the floor appearing to have fits because he’s watched Pooja singing. Basically it’s just guys being guys who think they’re funny.
Unsurprisingly, the men seem very oblivious to how sexist and classist they sound. They know that their video is much more slickly produced, and that everyone’s going to love it because it’s cool to say you think Pooja sucks. It doesn’t matter that nobody should be telling someone to “go south” because they don’t like her. Or that they’re telling her she shouldn’t be making her music because that space isn’t for her. Even everyone commenting on it seems to have nothing better to say than how much they love the lyrics (which is very telling of how problematic this whole thing is getting), while someone else is saying the video is in English so Pooja (who’s tagged in the Facebook post) won’t understand anything. Another person says Pooja shouldn’t even blow because she sucks so badly. All the people making these comments are men.
We know everyone’s going to say it’s just a group of boys having fun. But it’s also just a group of boys being entitled and gross because they’re guys and know that the can be.