On Sundays, Sanjay Ramjhi, 30, prefers to have brunch and watch movies with his close friends. His interests are typical of those his age, except one: his fascination with K-pop.

It was an accidental viewing of the South Korean espionage TV drama Iris in 2009, which captured his heart with its high-production values, settings in foreign countries, and superb storytelling. “Once I watched Iris, I started watching Korean dramas more and more,” he says.

Earlier this year, he started learning the Korean language. He practices Taekwondo twice a week and watches Korean dramas at least two hours daily.

He works as a content writer for Web sites and his name is printed in the Korean language on his business card.

“I went to South Korea for sightseeing. I participated in G-Star (South Korea’s major game show) and played lots of games there,” Ramjhi says with a smile, showing pictures of the game exhibition on his Samsung Galaxy Note smart phone.

South Korea’s pop culture has seen an unprecedented boom, taking young people and housewives by storm from South-East Asia and West Asia to the US. But the influence has not grown into a cultural phenomenon here, at least now. “He is a minority here although more and more people are interested in the Korean culture,” Ramjhi’s friend, Atreya Ellupai Sridhar, says with a chuckle over brunch with Ramjhi.

Rathi Jafer, Director at The Indo-Korean Cultural & Information Centre, a non-profit organisation funded by Hyundai Motor India and TVS Motor Co and other Korean companies, says: “In India, a Korean wave is pretty much contained to the North-East. The area is geographically closer to Korea. (In that area), Hindi programmes were blocked so there was a lot of space for content from other East-Asian countries…for the rest of India, a Korean wave has not manifested in the same way as it has in other parts of the world.”

The big hurdle

Sungho Park, programme manager at Busan International Film Festival, says Bollywood and cricket culture is a big hurdle for Korean pop-culture to break into India.

“The Indian film industry’s Bollywood culture has been deeply rooted in the Indian people and has been the dominant pop-culture form,” says Park who came here to attend the Chennai International Film Festival held earlier this month. “A big popularity of K-pop will not happen in my lifetime.”

Sukhee Lee, visiting faculty at the centre, acknowledges that more and more young people and housewives here have acquired a taste of K-pop, but the K-pop market here will still be a ‘niche’ market compared to Hong Kong and Japan.

“India is the one and only country where Dae Jang Geum (a historical fiction TV series) did not become a hit, although the programme was aired at prime time. Other Asian countries and even countries in West Asia got hooked by this series,” says Lee, who has taught the Korean language at the centre and also to engineering students at SRM University in Chennai. She also says that differences in cinematic storytelling are a big hurdle for Indians, saying that Korean movies progress at a slow pace, have long pauses, and feature close-ups of characters face to show emotions.

“Gangnam Style became a hit as the dancing has a fast tempo and is comical; however, it could be one-time thing in India,” she says.

The INKO Centre’s Jafer says it is the “right time” to introduce traditional and modern Korean culture, as the popularity of Gangnam Style has helped Indians to be aware of Korean pop culture and a large number of big Korean firms — Hyundai, Samsung and Lotte — have created job opportunities here.

(The writer is on an internship with this newspaper from the University of Hong Kong)

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