Belly Dance

The Delhi Belly craze refuses to die down — now it is the Bedardi Raja number that has reappeared in a suitably bold music video. It has been creating waves on the small screen for the past week. In the video,singer Sona Mohapatra matches her décolleté blouse,nine yards of Marathi-style sari,bindi and gajra with an electric guitar. The effect is desi rocker chic.

“Bedardi Raja comes from a long tradition of kotha songs. We’ve heard refined versions of these in Bollywood movies of the ’60s and ’70s,and I was keen on singing a brazen version of it. This is truer in spirit to what used to be performed in the later stages of kotha music,” says Mohapatra,whose husband Ram Sampath is the music director of Delhi Belly. Though the song is blazing up the TV screens,Mohapatra adds that the music video was meant not only to be suggestive and provocative,but also to show a woman in control and enjoying it. She adds that she too had to shed some inhibitions and get under the skin of the character,in order to do justice to the song.