New Delhi: The best thing that can be said about K. Chaudhry’s voice is that it is strident. It emerges strongly and substantially from his larynx. But really, that is all. Otherwise, it only frequents those positions on the musical scale that are absolute No Man’s Land for notes, positions from where there is no music to be derived at all.
Click here to watch Dr. Chaudhry’s rendition of Skater Boy
None of this, however, has impeded his rise to fame as a singer. In 17 months, Chaudhry has recorded and uploaded on YouTube 1,116 videos of himself singing not only Hindi film songs, but also Haryanvi-accented American numbers such as Avril Lavigne’s Skater Boy, Bob Marley’s Bad Card and Madonna’s Frozen. Almost without exception, they are all YouTube hits.
Amateur feat: K. Chaudhry is a popular YouTube singer, with his version of ‘Skater Boy’ being viewed 47,310 times. The 65-year-old spends nearly 17 hours on his computer and has uploaded as many as 12 videos a day. Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint
Six hundred people subscribe to his channel, and most of the time, he is being awarded titles such as “#10–Most Viewed (This Week)–Musicians–India”, having outranked even authentic music videos from new films. His version of Skater Boy has been viewed 47,310 times; Lavigne’s own version has been viewed 130,482 times. His hottest videos sit atop pages of comments, and perhaps most surprisingly, not all of them are snarky. (luqman1265: “when im sad i listen to your voice it brings me joy. carry on singing uncle your great.”)
As broadband rates have dropped and familiarity with the webcam has improved, YouTube’s popularity in India has exploded. ComScore reported that 6.3 million Indians had visited YouTube last May, a 131% increase over May 2007, the most for any Google property; in April, the number stood at 9.8 million. Along the way, YouTube has become a perfect vehicle for video kitsch, giving forgotten B- and C-movies a magnificent second life and creating improbable new stars such as Chaudhry.
Last May, when YouTube officially launched in India, Chaudhry was invited to make the welcome speech. “We were looking at different examples of people who had uploaded videos and had experimented with YouTube, and he was one of them,” says Arvind Desikan, head of consumer marketing at Google India. There was an amateur magician and some others, he added, but none quite in Chaudhry’s realm.