"Shakalaka Baby" Chinese version by Kelly Poon and AR Rahman connection

Now this is great...to be more specific, a great Victory for all the proud members of "arrahmanfans" yahoogroups...We all know how most of our music directors, with very few exceptions, shamelessly indulge in the act of plagiarism and pretend as if they have no clue about it. But very rarely we come across a news where our music is either used or copied outside of India. Most of the times they credit the music to whomever it belongs. But imagine what would happen if they failed to. One such incident happened just a week ago.

A Chinese song named "Shakalaka Baby" sung by Singaporean singer Kelly Poon appeared on the Youtube last week. Name sounds familiar right. Well you'll be surprised to know that even the song sounded very familiar. Infact it was the same song we heard in Mudhalvan / Nayak and also in the smash-hit musical "Bombay Dreams" by AR Rahman. Here's the youtube video-

Everyone wondered who was this Kelly Poon and whats she got to do with Bombay Dreams. How could she sing the same song in Chinese ? The video did not credit AR Rahman as the original composer. So did she get rights from ARR ?? Does ARR know about this ? The song was also playing on the Singapore Chinese radio station yes99.3fm and her fans were raving abt the it.

As a loyal fan of AR Rahman, I did my part in going to youtube and other forums where discussion about this song was going on, and put comments that this was ARR's song and should be credited to him. Many members of arrahmanfans group did the same. And finally yesterday I came to know that a member of the same group, Vijay forwarded all the emails to ARR and ARR's legal advisors and finally Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Really Useful Group" took it up to Universal Music who are releasing the Kelly Poon album. Universal's contention is that they will include credits to ARR in the album, which only releases on Sep 28. They claim that the video and song on air in Singapore is only a promotional release. However, after this notice was sent, the artist has now credited A R Rahman by means of a small wording at the bottom of her MTV Asia music video, which means they sure did hear us.

Should we be ecstatic and overjoyed ? Well NO !!! considering the fact that hundreds of songs get copied from every part of the world and become a craze here, we can forgive them for a one time mistake.
But should we be happy ? Ofcourse YES !! because we, Rahmaniacs, always proud of whatever ARR does, have for atleast one time made him feel proud of us, by creating awareness about a probable plagiarism act and stopping it.

Keep going Rahman, there are many more countries which you still have left to cast your spell.