A 19-year-old Pakistani student, who shot to fame after her five-second video went viral across the subcontinent, hopes numerous renditions of her monologue will translate into more dialogue between rivals India and Pakistan.
The video, shot by Dananeer Mobeen in the Nathaigali mountains of northern Pakistan and uploaded onto Instagram, shows a group of youngsters enjoying themselves by the roadside.
Seemly innocuous, she deliberately mispronounces the English word “party” as “pawri” to poke fun at South Asians who adopt Western accents. It immediately struck a chord in both India and Pakistan, sparking top trending hashtags on social media, and garnering millions of views and hundreds of spin-offs.
“It was the most random video. I initially had no intention of uploading it,” Mobeen said, expressing surprise at how viral it had gone. She added that the trend showed the power and reach of social media.
Since then, “pawri” monologue renditions have been used by police in India and the Delhi Commission for Women in their social media outreach campaigns.
In one video, two Indian soldiers deployed in snowy mountains give it their own spin with “This is us, this is our gun, and we are patrolling here”, while popular Bollywood actors Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone each did a version that also went viral.
