Kavreli Samdhi🚗🎵🕺

Ke chha khabar? How are you?

Today, let us meet the Samdhis. That too from the district of Kavre.

They prefer a clean fade, black-and-white outfits and are well-built. Shades are prominently present as embellishment to their confident demeanor. A smile or a smirk. And an attitude. That’s what makes a Kavreli Samdhi.

The Samdhis travel mostly on privately owned SUVs and their videos are shot at scenic hillside/hilltop destinations around Kathmandu valley, probably in the eastward district of Kavre too.

All of this, of course, is a stereotype. But it seems like the Samdhis are playing on the social typification. Virality brings money. And perhaps, more than money, it brings entertainment to oneself as well as the audience too.

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Where does Kavreli Samdhi come from?

The phrase was first derived after Samdhis (they were not named as such then) started posting their videos on TikTok with a particular background music. Funnily, the lyrics does not really have the exact phrase ‘Kavreli Samdhi’ but instead mentions ‘Kavre Ko Samdhi’. However, they do mention ‘Nuwakoti Samdhi’ right before the shout out to Kavre’s Samdhi. Hence, it seems like the audience, over time through memes and re-captioning of existing videos, removed the preposition ‘ko’ (or postposition, in the case of Nepali, because it comes after the noun instead of before like in English) and changed the noun Kavre into an adjective Kavreli, just like Nuwakot’s adjective form is Nuwakoti.

After one round of virality gained through the use of ‘Kavre Ko Samdhi Ke Cha Khabar’ background music, the audience found another song that re-popularized the Samdhis - the remix of Paan Mitho Chuna Ko.

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Replace Music, Get Viral?

I tried to measure the BPM (beats per minute) of the songs, hypothesizing that both of them must have a similar BPM. This would allow the same visual content to be easily synchronized with a change in music. But surprisingly, the Kavre Ko Samdhi song had a BPM of 130 whereas Paan Mitho Chuna Ko has a BPM of 120. Meaning, Paan Mitho Chuna has a slower beat than Kavre Ko Samdhi.

Two things are possible in creating content in this situation:

1. BPM can be altered to match the BPM of another song, and the altered version of the song can there be recirculated for content creation. Modern video editing apps make it easy.

2. New content can be created with a new song with new BPM and this would allow fresher visuals to be recirculated. Samdhis can have the opportunity to play on their stereotypes or even reinvent it.

I did not really dig deeper into what actually happened over time because there are thousands and thousands of content, and the possibility is that both might have happened, in varying ratio of course.

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What really is Samdhi?

Samdhi is a Nepali word for a son or daughter’s father-in-law. To exemplify, my paternal grandfather is referred as ‘samdhi’ by both my maternal grandparents, and my maternal grandfather is also referred as ‘samdhi’ by both my paternal grandparents.

Here, A would be called ‘samdhi’ by C and D, and D would be called ‘samdhi’ by A and B. The female version of ‘samdhi’ is ‘samdhini’.

The question then arises - why do we call these people ‘samdhi’? And why have men (and some women too) started calling each other ‘samdhi’?

In Nepali, there is a culture of using friendly salutations for friends as a joke. Some of the common ones are ‘raja - king’, ‘sahuji - businessowner’, ‘sir - playing on hierarchical salutation’, etc. Therefore, ‘samdhi’ is just a part of banter and has nothing to do with any familial relationship.

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The Future of Kavreli Samdhi?

Trends come and go, but words remain. My assumption is that the use of word ‘samdhi’ will remain, albeit it’ll have two separate meaning. One as a kinship term, as was used historically, and two as a term of friendly endearment, as is being used by the younger generation. Perhaps, the first meaning will disappear over time within the next 3 or 4 generations? Who knows!

But all we can do now is to appreciate the creativity of everyone involved — the actual Samdhis, the repurposers and recreators of content, the audience for their linguistic play with friends — and ask the most important question - Kavreli Samdhi, ke cha khabar? Kavreli Samdhi, how are you?