tldr: Pettai Rap is a cult phenomenon. We (@teninthemorning, me and @beamboybeamboy) made a basket of consumer goods using the items from the song. Calculated prices for 1994, 2016 and 2020. Calculated inflation. WIP. Feedback welcome. All errors mine, BeamBoy and TenintheMorning are impeccable wrt stuff.)

<a href="http://<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTyTTrFFz1Vv63Z8sWjxf54f_u8MKQpNcXM0v5HCoskiXLLaQ4azkncS-19_XXyMbVd2fswHjDM52Po/pubhtml?widget=true&headers=false">Excel here but looking at the numbers I don’t have confidence in what I’ve calculated. WIP.

If we compare	Start Year	End Year	Inflation
	1994	2016	1096.21%
	1994	2020	1910.91%
	2016	2020	68.11%

Context:

If you were alive and well in the dusty sweltering 90s in Madras (that is Chennai, that is Chennaimetras), then you would have been a part of the zeitgeist of the social and musical phenomenon called Pettai Rap.

No? Misfortune! But it can be easily remedied. Listen to it here. NOW.

Pettai Rap is a song from the popular Tamil movie Kadhalan. The movie has not aged well in my opinion, but the music is lovely. In particular, Pettai Rap stuck with me, its one of the first pieces of rap music I heard – and is an enumeration of the travails and costs of living a not so privileged live in TamilNadu.

tldr – Pettai Rap is about how much a certain set of things cost and how there’s never really enough money to pay for everything the heart and mind want and need.

In 2016, @beamboybeamboy and @teninthemorning and I were hanging out and we got to talking about Pettai Rap, and we all loved the song, and so we decided to create a basket of goods using the items listed in the song. It took us 3 years (and so much life has happened between then and now, but I had some spare time tonight and decided to finish v1).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For those not aware: A basket of goods is a set of commonly purchased items that is used to keep track of prices and inflation. The basket of goods is typically decided by the government – here’s a quick piece in Livemint on consumer price index, basket of goods and tracking inflation.

We made a list of the items in Pettai Rap. Guesstimated some prices for 1994, 2016 and 2020. I made some final calculations using this video. See our excel sheet here. Some notes below.