mid-day anniversary: 37 words Mumbai gave to India and the world

The Internet is undoubtedly the greatest communicative tool ever invented It is of course an extension of the human discovery of writing and then printing It has as evidenced by the omnipresence of Google of Wikipedia of Facebook and a hundred other lsquoapplicationsrsquo revolutionised communication globally It has also given rise to the greatest outpouring of triviality and foolishness that the world has ever knownSmall talk is not new It has sustained dinner parties and gatherings from the beginning of human time In the beginning was the Word as the Bible puts it but it doesnrsquot say if it was meaningful purposeful and truthful or had passed through a process of relevance and verification commonly known as editing Newspapers in general have points of view and however much they protest their neutrality and objectivity are biased towards those editorial and sometimes proprietorial mdash step forward R Murdoch viewsThe Internet is exciting and unreliable Bloggers and conspiracy theorists preachers of hate seekers for love fraudsters and people with more vanity than sense idlers and charlatans fill cyberspace with their unfiltered contentions ploys and babble Like newspapers and periodicals they build up a lsquofollowingrsquo whose extent depends sometimes on the viciousness of the blog and sometimes regardless of the worth of the words on the celebrity status of the bloggerWords are born live and dieTo mark 37 years of middayrsquos record of words from Mumbai here are 37 words that I associate with The Big Mango as Americans would call this city if it belonged to them And arenrsquot we glad it doesnrsquotBOMBAY The name itself has disputed origins It was first used as a harbour for Portuguese trading ships and they called the islands that sheltered them from the Arabian Seas vicissitudes and tides and the harbouring inlet lsquoBom Bayarsquo In Portuguese this would not mean a good bay but rather a good lsquobeachrsquo So is the Shiv Senarsquos insistence that the word Bombay is a perversion of Mumbai so called because of the temple of Mumba Devi which existed here long before Portugal was a nation The islandislands have given their name to various foodsBOMBAY DUCK isnt a duck its an eel bit its so called because the Brits who built the railways in the 1840s and 50s had consignments of the stinking fish packed in railway compartments to be transported inland And since the British disdained to call the consignments stinking fish they called them Bombay Dak the Bombay MailBOMBAY ALOO Open any popular book of Indian recipes and there it is the concoction that was probably one of the first street foods Of course it should be called Bombay Batata which is the Portuguese word adopted into Marathi for potatoesPAOON or a loaf of bread the dough for which was kneaded on an industrial scale by stamping on it with we hope clean feet Hence paoon foot roti The Portuguese adopted the word after it was invented on Indias West Coast though some would hotly dispute that chronologyPAO BHAJI is another Bombay street food the equivalent of the Italian Panini which I always thought was the name of the renowned Sanskrit grammarian and now popular all over India and internationally in Indian restaurantsBUNGALOW was invented in Mumbai to mean a Bengalstyle house as the British on acquiring Bombay as part of Charles IIs dowry transferred this architectural style from their earlier settlement in Bengal In what were then the farreaches of the island away from the Fort area there were respectively seven bungalows and four bungalows and the neighbourhoods around them still retain those namesMUTTON is the word my mother and grandmother and all of Bombay used and uses for goats meat The word in English literally means old sheep nothing to do with goats which is another species altogether British memsahibs probably began calling goats meat mutton when serving it to their sahibs who may have been reluctant to eat goat chops of which there are none in England but would readily dig into mutton ones The West Indian colonies were more honest In Trinidad and Jamaica they eat curry goat with relishCOOLIE is the universal and rude word for an Indian labourer who lifts loads In Bombay and later Mumbai it became the specific and partially sanitised word for the redshirted baggage attendants at the great railway terminus now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus but formerly Victoria Terminus and colloquially BoriBunder the place where sacks bori of cargo were unloadedBUD BUD is the Marathi colloquialism for talking rubbish a sort of blah blah or yacketyyak When I first taught in a London school the racist kids would say budbud as a parody of Indian accents Interestingly the cook of my household in Pune when I was but a boy would parody English which he didnt speak with the sounds feeshfosh peesh posh and on occasion Waat ees dees Komdee Ka pieceBOLLYWOOD is a word for the popular films of the Mumbai industry Its genesis is clear but if usage were consistent and logical as no languages usage is the industry and its products would be labelled Mollywood Though it would be outrageous to call collectively the films of Satyajit Ray Mrinal Sen Rituparno Ghosh and others lsquoKollywoodrsquoBHASSEIN was according to my school history books the northern part of Bombay where the islands joined the mainland Throughout my adolescence I looked in vain for the fragment of the city that retained the name and only realised later that Bhassein was the anglicised perversion of Vashi where the creek separating the lsquoislandrsquo from the mainland is still called by that nameBOMBAY DREAMS was Andrew Lloyd Webberrsquos failure of a London musical that lost money in the UK and closed early in the USA as there were not enough Indian tourists to fill the theatres Bombay Nightmares may have haunted the losersSANDRA FROM BANDRA was the slightly ironic teasing name given to any young lady of the Catholic faith There were other rude terms for the Christian girls of Bombay Goan East Indian or even of AngloIndian descent lsquoChutney Maryrsquo was one of them and paradoxically it was adopted as the name of a now famous and prosperous Indian restaurant in LondonTOWERS OF SILENCE is the English name for the structures on which we Parsis expose the bodies of the dead to be disposed of in an ecologically friendly manner by being eaten by scavenging birds The English phrase was undoubtedly coined in Bombay the Persian term dokhma being used before Parsi migration to Britruled BombayVILE PARLE in north Bombay is named they say after the two temples of Vileshwar and Parleshwar but it also housed the factory of Parle confectionery making sweets and biscuits started by the Chauhan family in 1929 So was Parle named after the district or was the term lsquoVillersquo the Frenchified usage meaning Parle TownshipIn my boyhood the lsquostreetrsquo word or phrase with which to tease bald people was taklya which of course was literal The metaphoric usage was calling a bald person or shouting after one in the street CARROM BOARD mdash the shiny surface of the striker gameDISHOOM is the onomatopoeic sound for Bollywood violence shootings and beatingsup the ldquobang bangrdquo or ldquosock powrdquo of Indian cinema The word has now been adopted as the name of a chain of very popular restaurants in London which intentionally feature Mumbai cafe themes and menus their furniture being modelled on the Irani restaurants of Colaba and BycullaTENSION NAHIN LENEKA is another Angloadopted perversion attributed to Bollywood scripts and Bambaiya a verbal invention itself slang Its meaning is abundantly clear though the strategy of avoiding stress is not explainedITEM NUMBER is another Bombay Bollywood invention for the songoutofcontext added to a film for purely commercial reasons I have now even heard cosmopolitan filmmakers in the West use the Mumbaioriginated termSHRI 420 is the name of a famous Raj Kapoor film and refers to the characterisation of a rogue the numerals referring to Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code covering offences relating to cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property and leads to punishments of fines It is universally used in India but was elevated in status by Kapoorrsquos film and turned into the romantic myth of the lovable rascalBREACH CANDY has nothing to do with a sweet with attractive gaps It was where the Arabian Sea breached the land towards the south of Bombay Island and the candy is probably an anglicised perversion of the word lsquokhadirsquo meaning a watery gapTIME PASS is what the peanut sellers on Mumbais suburban trains shout to sell their papercones of unshelled roasted produce Its probably the first time a food has been called by an activity that characterises its preparation for consumptionPREPONE UPGRADATION and even MATRIMONIAL are words invented or pioneered by English language newspapers and publications I would guess first from Bombay You wont find them in the Guardian or in the New York Times though all three words are functional and useful So also with the Indiannewspaper expression of MISCREANTS ABSCONDING for criminals who have escaped the policeTAPORI Leaving the erudite offices of Mumbais publications and wandering into the street one encounters as I have all through my short and happy life the argot of the Tapori Its a word that some translate as vagabond but is closer in meaning to what in the US is known as streetThe words generated by the Mumbai street mdash from BOSSY to address any familiar or even unfamiliar male to the slightly sly and insinuating very Parsi but now universal SAALA mdash have as we say in the Internet age lsquogone viralrsquo at least in parts of India Delhi University would substitute lsquogurursquo for lsquobossyrsquo and the street form would inevitably be lsquoyaarrsquo The other phrases of Taporitalk that come to mind are the very Mumbai KHALI PILLY which sometimes comes welded to BOM MARTHAI mdash which put together is the accusation that you are full of sound and fury signifying nothing as Shakespeare would sayThe TAPORI enquiry may begin with the word lsquoKAIKOrsquo which fascinatingly was adopted by Rudyard Kipling in a poem called Route Marchin in which the chorus goesldquoWhile the Big Drum says With lsquois lsquorowdydowdydowrsquomdash Kaiko kiskeywaasthey donrsquot you humsey aagey jaordquoAnd betting on New York Cotton figures was invented on Bombay street corners and the game was known as SATHTHA PUNCHA It came to an end when the Russians launched Sputnik and the rumour spread that the satellite was transmitting the real numbers in an instant to the street bookiesKUT LEY is the Mumbai word for lsquoget lostrsquo It can be translated if expressed mildly as meaning lsquoexperience a departurersquo or in its more aggressive form ldquogo some distance and fornicaterdquoNot to be confused with CUTTING which is a graphic word for filling the purchased cup with only half a cup of tea mdash what we used to call ldquoSingle Chardquo in the cafes of PuneAnd those that can be put together in a Bollywoodish plot involving corruption larceny conflict and of course song and dance are HAFTA the word for a bribe possibly as payment for concealing the cause and suppressing the prosecution of participants in a fracas or incident known as a LAPHDA Or if its deliberately complicated or made to disappear in a rounded fate it would be called GOL MAL Here endeth the etymological ly questionable lessonIndianborn British writer playwright and screenwriter Farrukh Dhondys latest book is Words My private Babel Harper Collins