“Many Happy Returns, Dear Don!” And, Vinay Nadkarni grins mischievously and accepts the greetings. But it is not his birthday.
On Saturday, the globally favourite cartoon character created by Walt Disney Studios, Donald Duck turned 78.
Mr Nadkarni (50), a shy, unassuming Mumbai banker, is the Indian voice of Donald Duck since 1992. “In fact, most people greet me every year and I have become quite used to this,” he said.
After all, his was the only voice selected from among thousands of others that had been sent for a voice test to the US in the early 1990s, after Walt Disney Studios decided to enter the Indian market dubbing all their cartoon films in Hindi.
Long before Mr Nadkarni came on the scene, the original Donald Duck was “born” on June 9, 1934, in the cartoon film, The Wise Little Hen, which was part of the Silly Symphonies series of theatrical cartoon shorts.
In the early 1990s, when Donald Fauntleroy Duck, son of Hortense McDuck and Quackmore Duck, started on a trip to woo Indian audiences, the mantle fell on Mumbai youth Mr Nadkarni to give him a Hindi voice.
“It is a very tough and painful job, speaking the lines, synchronising them with the original cartoons perfectly to make Donald Duck appear speaking fluent Hindi with a natural flow,” Mr Nadkarni said. Mr Nadkarni said that he had been “quacking” since childhood as a hobby, much to his family’s embarrassment. “Once, I was on a hiking trip in western Maharashtra and we were lost in the forests at night. We came to a village and the villagers took us to some youth camping nearby,” Mr Nadkarni recalled.
They happened to be NSS students of Bhavans College, Andheri (Mumbai) and they welcomed the lost group of Mr Nadkarni and his
three friends with open arms.
At the campfire celebrations later that night, Mr Nadkarni “quacked” and became the hero of the evening. Later, they invited Mr Nadkarni for a stage show in the college and he brought the house down with his duck voice delivering Gabbar Singh’s dialogues from Sholay.
Two of the main organisers of that event — Narendra Verma, who later went on to become a leading Mumbai politician and now a senior Nationalist Congress Party leader, and stage artiste Sanjeev Nayak — encouraged Mr Nadkarni to pursue his unique vocation.
“There was no looking back from then,” said Mr Nadkarni. So far, he has dubbed nearly 500 films featuring Donald Duck and continues to do more as and when they are released for the Indian audiences.