A parody music video, based on Nicki Minaj’s risqué hit Anaconda and performed by a Tamil Nadu-based rapper, went viral online after the Grammy-winning US rapper retweeted on Saturday an article with a link to the Chennai-based activist’s video.
“Wow,” wrote Minaj, who has close to 20 million followers on Twitter, as she shared an article by a hip-hop magazine with a link to Sofia Ashraf’s Kodaikanal won’t. The video by Ashraf, as of Sunday night, had garnered over 7 lakh views in under 3 days of being posted on Youtube and after being shared on social media sites likes Reddit.
Sofia Ashraf had earlier released a rap song attacking Dow Chemicals for the Bhopal gas tragedy. In the song which has completely new lyrics Ashraf employs the occasionally crude idiom of the genre to argue that Hindustan Unilever has skirted responsibility to look after the workers and properly clean up the soil and water around its former thermometre plant. “Kodaikanal won’t step down,” Ashraf warns Hindustan Unilever, “until you make amends now.”
The three-minute rap song, part of a campaign by NGO Jhatkaa, is about Unilever allegedly avoiding social responsibility about the effects of its former plant in Kodaikanal. Ashraf is seen leading marches of villagers and former factory workers in the area around a canal, which she alleges has not been cleaned in the 14 years since the plant shut down throughout the video.
