"Papa, can you please play Manike Mage Hithe?"

 "Papa, can you please play Manike Mage Hithe?"

..asked my kid. We were in the car, on our way to pick my wife from the airport. Now my kid usually loves English songs, occasionally Hindi. So this was a first. A Sinhala song. We do not speak or understand the language, so I was surprised she liked it.

Am sure most of you may have heard this viral song or heard about it atleast. The song has been viewed over a 100 million times on YouTube as of September 2021.

A couple of months back, a friend messaged me saying "Just listen to this song, it's mesmerizing. I can't stop listening to it." I reluctantantly clicked on the link and heard it. "Nothing great about this" I told myself and moved on.

Few weeks later, after repeatedly stumbling upon the song on social media, I slowly took a liking to it. Eventually I found myself listening to it on loop on my daily jogs. I was hooked on to it. And now it seems my kid is hooked on to it too.

1. As they say, music is indeed the universal language that cuts through multiple barriers like language, beliefs and age among other things.

2. In general, if something sounds good, you need not understand everything about it in entirety in order to accept/like it.

3. Our opinions/likes/preferences change so often and so easily. Something we pass off as ordinary might suddenly seem great and on the other hand something we put a lot of value to might seem quite ordinary at a later point in time.

4. The creators of this song as well as creators of all things that ever went viral would never ever have anticipated/expected the resounding success that they would have experienced. You keep doing your thing. What has to fail will fail and what has to fly will fly.

Btw, if you haven't heard this song yet, then maybe you can give it a shot now. I think it grows on you after a few repetitions.

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