Actor Manju Warrier has been keeping busy during the lockdown, with her social media posts showing that she has been learning to play the veena. And it looks like she is doing well in that respect, because in her most recent Instagram post, she is seen playing a popular song on the veena – ‘Bella Ciao’ from the popular show Money Heist on Netflix.
The video, posted on Monday night, shows Manju deftly playing the hook of Bella Ciao.
Earlier on May 8, she had posted a video of her playing another, more complex tune on the veena. She had captioned the video, “As long as you are learning, you are not failing!” In this video she is in the company of another woman who is watching her play. The actor already has some playback singing to her name, and now, playing the veena is clearly adding another feather in her cap.
Bella Ciao, which literally translates to goodbye/hello, beautiful, is an old Italian folk song of resistance which came up during the 19th century. The song has gotten popular after Money Heist, a Spanish show originally called ‘Le casa de papel’ (the house of paper) which has four seasons out so far. Created by Álex Pina, the series is about a group of robbers trying to pull off a heist at the Royal Mint of Spain and the Bank of Spain.
The song Bella Ciao is played in Money Heist as a background score and is also sung by the characters as they execute the robbery. The resistance song being sung by the robbers has been interpreted as a signifier of their own act of resistance against the government – in the robbers’ eyes, they were pushed into poverty by the system, and the heist is a way of challenging it.