In Kerala, two medical college students dance their technique to therapeutic hate and hearts

TILL two weeks in the past, Janaki Omkumar and senior Naveen Razak have been simply common college students at Thrissur Medical College in Kerala, busy with exams. Today, they’re social media stars and quick turning into mascots for communal concord in a state that simply completed voting in a bruising election with sharp overtones of faith and a lingering undertone of alleged “love jihad”.
It began with a 30-second video that Janaki and Naveen posted of them dancing, of their navy blue scrubs, to Boney M’s basic Rasputin, within the empty corridors of their school, that went viral. This week, a lawyer put up a Facebook put up referring to their completely different spiritual backgrounds and cautioning Janaki’s dad and mom. The outrage throughout the state in response has seen pupil unions in faculties organise related dance competitions as their message towards hate; a ‘Rasputin Challenge’ by the scholars’ unit of the Indian Medical Association inviting video entries on Instagram; and Milma, Kerala’s largest milk cooperative, that includes Janaki and Naveen in a Facebook put up titled “when you set hearts on fire”.
An overwhelmed Janaki, who has been besieged by telephone calls and requests for selfies, in addition to gained hundreds of followers on social media, says she and Naveen by no means anticipated this response. Speaking on the telephone from Thrissur, the third-year medical pupil says, “I read his (the lawyer’s) comments just when our exams had started and we didn’t take it seriously. Later, we realised that it had snowballed into a huge controversy. But right from the beginning, we were very cool about it and so were our families. The remarks show his (the lawyer’s) thinking.”
In his Facebook put up on their video, lawyer Krishna Raj wrote: “There’s something fishy. It would be good if Janaki’s parents are careful. They won’t have to be sorry later as the case of Nimisha’s mother proves. Let us pray for Janaki’s father Omkumar and his wife.” (A local of Thiruvananthapuram, Nimisha had transformed to Islam and joined the Islamic State in Afghanistan in 2016 along with her husband.)
Among those that have responded to Krishna Raj in variety is the scholars’ union at Janaki and Naveen’s institute, Thrissur Medical College, which posted a video of extra college students dancing to Rasputin, with the title, ‘If you are planning to spread hate, we intend to resist it’. At the top of the video, Janaki and Naveen seem, this time the one ones who usually are not in scrubs. Listing the names of the scholars who danced within the video, the union added in a comment alluding to Raj’s remark, “If you go around searching the head and tail of names of these students (implying names and surnames), you will get more reasons to put up a post on Facebook.”
The college students’ union on the Cochin University of Science and Technology in Kochi, led by the CPM’s Students’ Federation of India, introduced a dance problem with money prizes in solidarity with Janaki and Naveen. A member of the union, Abhinav Krishna, stated, “We also borrowed the term ‘Entho oru panthikedu (there’s something fishy)’ from the lawyer’s comments for our dance challenge. We want to register our protest at those making such hateful comments to show that these have no place in Kerala.”
Inviting entries, Krishna added, “Anyone irrespective of age can send in videos of them dancing to the Rasputin song to us till April 14. The best video, to be judged by Naveen and Janaki, will get a cash prize of Rs 10,000.”
Janaki says she was thrown at first by the truth that Raj talked about her father in his put up. “I didn’t know what to think or say. But then we realised that it was just one negative comment in a sea of positive comments. We decided not to care about it. My parents hold the same view as well.” While Janaki’s father is a scientist with the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, her mom is a radiologist.
Naveen didn’t reply to a number of makes an attempt to succeed in him.
Janaki says it was an impromptu determination by the 2 of them to shoot the video, primarily for “fun”, as each of them love the 1978 tune by Boney M. “We practised for two hours and shot the video on the top floor of the Medical College Hospital known as the house surgeon quarters. Since we had just finished classes, we danced in the scrubs itself. We uploaded it the same day.”
She provides, “I can’t quite explain why it went viral. Maybe all (factors) like the hospital background, the scrubs, the evergreen music came together and it looked good. We realised it had gone big when Brut India (a digital video publisher) featured us.”