MUMBAI: India a multi-cultural land is always ready to embrace global art and culture in every form. We’ve gone with a global wave of fashion-cuisine, art-infrastructure, dance and music. The latest Indian fixation happens to be K-pop, a booming music genre that germinated in South Korea.
The fair, tall, lanky singers are being liked for their innovative style and music globally and India is no different. Now, Namas-K is looking forward to bringing these pretty lads to Indian.
Namas-K, is a platform created by Keiko Bang, a Japanese -American media consultant who ran a successful media company out of Singapore for 20 years. While the band's co-founder Yogesh Karikurve is a former corporate executive. He has worked with leading Indian media companies such as Reliance, Times of India and Zee.
“In North East people were listening to Korean music, later we realized it’s not just the North East, this music prevails in Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. People were doing little things when it came to Korean culture in smaller cities. So, we thought of bringing all this together on a platform,” explained Karikurve.
He further added, “First we thought of naming the platform 'Namaste Korea', but due to its length we cut it short to Namas-K, keeping the Indo-Korean feel intact.”
Karikurve has observed Chennai’s affinity for Korean dramas and other Indian states inclination towards K-pop. Korea, on the other hand, is not in sync with the same according to him as he explains, “Problem with Korean pop is in Korea people don’t know K-pop’s magnitude. In India too people haven’t realised that Korea is achieving popularity. To bring in synergy we need proper sponsors to have the audience – that happen to be young kids.”
To amplify on this Korean fixation Namas-K is bringing in IN2IT. “We are taking them to a couple of cities, if this works we will get a bigger band,” said Karikurve.
When asked what makes K-pop so special in India, the co-founder stated, “K-pop are models of virtues. Moreover, they end up donating a lot of things. They do a lot of social work. The lyrics speak of social justice, politics and more. Most of which is not spoken about in India. The strength of K-pop is built on good doing.”
Namas-K hopes to be a one-stop-shop for the Korean wave, fulfilling the demand for Korean dramas, movies, e-sports, beauty, concerts and official merchandise. Also, offering original and curated content from both Korea and India.
“We will also be getting into K-beauty, beauty cosmetics. K-pop merchandise too will be made available to create a fan base. The website will be made available by May. We are building an ecosystem with the backing of Korean and Indian companies and would like to get groups like BTS till the end of 2019,” ended Karikurve.
