to bee or not to bee

PLUG: Namaste Bombay is a one-hour amateur production that graces the Metro Atlanta channel every Tuesday night.

SLUG: It's probably also the only show featuring a newsreader demonstrating the boustrophedon technique of reading off the teleprompter. Apart from news (new and old: an interview with the late Majrooh on the occasion of his winning the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke award), they also present a melange of music from the present and the past. It was interesting to see a couple of rare Talat Mehmood songs at the tail-end of the show (including a duet with Asha from Sone ki Chidiya, picturised on-screen with Nutan and a very young and barely recognisable Balraj Sahni). The music segment (laden with films owned by T-series and cheap Shemaroo prints) started off with the energetic hit Bhumro from Mission:Kashmir, complete with subtitles. Now subtitles are usually hilarious to read, since the people involved in this task are rarely cognizant of the nuances of the source and destination languages. In fact, they probably don't give a damn. So the subtitles run by: Bumblebee, dusk-coloured bumblebee. Something told me that despite valid reason to roll on the floor laughing, the words had a ring of truth in them. Sure enough (thanks to the Wayback Engine). And there's even some controversy over plagiarism to boot (All this is enough proof that I didn't pay too much attention to the film when it was first released). To recap, this was regarded as one of the better films of 2000. The eagerly awaited DVD (the second Indian release from Columbia-Tristar after Lagaan) took two years to get to release, and received positive reviews (for DVD quality, of course).

Addendum: The lyrics for this song and more, translated (no claims for correctness, mind you).