Download Yaar

[Henry Gallagher]

Yaaris a very popular and common term in India, both in English and Hindi. It has been particularly associated with certain tropes in Bollywood since the 1970s. In Bollywood, many songs refer to the desire for a yaar or to be in yaari with someone. These songs often have strong sexual overtones, which has led to the interpretation of yaar in some contexts as being more romantic than platonic.

This is the Bollywood movies inspired item number "Fuddu Yaar" (Dumb Friend). I'll try and get in touch with @annazak12 (her management) and see if she would be interested in the project. We'll go from there. Also, Rap (which is what..

I am going to Bombay to become a movie star. Like millions of others who arrive each day in this island-city by car, plane, bus, or boat, I too have my Bombay dream. I am comely, buxom even (thanks to Wonderbra), and I can giggle and jiggle with the best of them. Age is an issueI am forty-twobut there's nothing a nip and tuck won't fix. So I am going to Bombay to become a movie star. Why not?

Every country in the world, if it is lucky, has a city that allows people to create such gauzy fantasies unfettered by the grim shackles of reality. It would be wrong to say that these cities offer their citizens "the space to dream," for most such placesRio, Tokyo, Cairo, and New Yorkare insanely crowded. Still, they thrive and inspire, catalyze personal transformations and fuel creativity, not through wide-open spaces but through vibrant congestion.

Bombay (or Mumbai; locals use them interchangeably) reaches out into the Arabian Sea like an extended palm; and like veins traveling up the arm, its roads and subway lines run on a north-south axisakin to Manhattan's, actually. The city is narrow, also like Manhattandivided by Mahim Creek into North and South Bombay (NoBo and SoBo). The neighborhoods are as evocative to Indians as those of that other island it vaguely resembles are to Americans, with edgy Colaba its TriBeCa; Nariman Point its Wall Street; the Gateway of India its welcoming arch and lookout point; all the way up to Bandra, as wholesome and hip as the Upper West Side; and the suburbs beyondGhatkopar, Malad, and Thane.

Bombay is India's dream weaver, its cockaigne for consumers, its paean to possibilities. Here are the origins of five percent of the country's GDP, forty percent of its income tax revenue, seventy percent of its capital transactions, one-third of its industrial output. It is the place where pretty young things get off the train with one suitcase and the phone number of a producer relative; where indigent street children dance salsa in the hope of getting onto a reality TV show; where the dhobi who washes clothes for a living gazes at his client's Mercedes with aspiration, not envy. Bombay is the rising spires of Nariman Point, to which bankers like my husband commute each workday to move millions, but it is also the stench and sewers of Dharavi, Asia's second-largest slum, where Muslim tanners toil alongside Hindu potters. Bombay is where Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man, is building a twenty-seven-floor home for a reported two billion dollars, with a staff of six hundred to serve his six family members. It is also the crowded by-lanes of Null and Chor bazaars, where artisans from Lucknow live and work in dark, dank rooms, embroidering stunning yellow butterflies that take flight on silk fabrics destined for Europe. Bombay is the city where the inchoate yearnings of a largely repressed nation burst forth into rapturous rainbow reality. For the destitute lad trapped in India's hinterlands, Bombay could well be El Dorado. More than any other global citysave perhaps So PauloBombay is a study in contrasts, contrasts which keep getting starker.

"Bombay's contrasts drive you crazy, but they are what make it the bustling metropolis that it is," says Nikunj Jhaveri, forty-five, a lifelong Bombayite. "Bombay is like a rose. Roses come with thorns."

A courteous bon vivant with an Italian belly laugh, Jhaveri is part of the swish SoBo set: incestuous, interwoven, and snobbish, more Upper East Side than India. If they don't date each other or serve on the same boards, then their kids attend Cathedral School together (author and pundit Fareed Zakaria is an alum). "Townies," they are called by the "Burbies" of NoBo.

Jhaveri was my husband's classmate at IIT Bombay, India's top engineering school. Although he comes from a prominent business familyhis brother deals diamonds out of New YorkJhaveri gave it all up to work for nonprofits and run an IT consultancy that takes him to Geneva and across the globe. But, he says, he is happiest in Bombay. When I ask if he would like to move to New York like his brother, he stares at me as if I am mad and asks, "Why?"

This is a pattern. Bombayites view their city with a pride and passion that can seem sickeningly insular to Indians from elsewhere. Pretty much everyone I meet says that he can't imagine living anywhere elseafter, of course, heartily kvetching about Bombay. I mean, are they listening to themselves? I find this particularly galling because I now live in Bangalore, a city which knows that it is not the epicenter of anything. How about some humility here, I feel like telling the smug Bombayites. Humility, the great Indian virtue.

"Bombay has a zing to it. You clear your mind here. Maybe it is because of the sea," says svelte Sangita Jindal, whose last name carries as much weight in India as Carnegie or Mellon would in the States; enough to get Al Gore to fly over for the launch of the children's books she published on behalf of the JSW (Jindal Steel Works) Foundation.

"Why can't Bombay have a summer festival like the one in Central Park?" demands Sanjna Kapoor, who runs Prithvi Theatre, founded by her English mother, Jennifer Kendal, and Bollywood actor father, Shashi Kapoor. "Bombay needs thirty Prithvis."

"Bombay is both the New York and L.A. of India," says industrialist Nadir Godrej as we share fresh lime soda at the posh Willingdon Sports Club (membership wait list: thirty-four years and counting). "It was oriented toward the West long before the rest of India was."

"The amazing thing about Bombay is how you can cram so many people into such a small space and not have them continually kill one another," says Nagesh Kukunoor, who quit an engineering career in Atlanta to make films in Bombay. "I mean, there is no shooting, slapping, or road rage."

With eighteen million peoplegive or take a millionBombay is the most densely populated city on earth. And Kukunoor is largely right. For proof, I ride the Virar local one day. India has one of the biggest and busiest rail networks in the world, and it all began right here in Bombay in 1853. Today, the city's train system is as complex as New York's except that each day it transports about a million more peopledreams and sweat intact. The trains aren't for the faint of heart, but the ladies' compartment is tolerable.

As the local leaves Virar, in the northern suburbs, early one morning, women congregate in small groups, dissing their mothers-in-law, singing bhajans, hemming saris, playing cards, and buying everything from bindis to beedis (a thin cigarette) from itinerant vendors. That evening, I watch a woman climb in at Byculla station laden with bags of fragrant farm-fresh vegetables that her cohorts fall on with cries of delight. Together, the women begin chopping beans, shelling peas, cleaning fish, and bagging everything so that by the time the train reaches Virar at 8:30 P.M., each woman has prepped her dinner and indulged in group therapy, leaving the compartment a mess of scales and shells.

But it is the dabbawalas, or lunch-box carriers, who are Bombay's most famous train riders. Feted by Prince Charles and Richard Branson, studied by the Harvard Business School, and given a Six Sigma rating (one error in six million transactions) by Forbes Global, these five thousand men trawl the trains in trademark white kurtas and Nehru caps, schlepping some 200,000 lunch boxes to offices.

The concept is simple. Every morning, millions of commuters leave suburban homes at dawn to be in their offices downtown by 8 A.M. The dabbawalas show up two hours later, pick up boxes of home-cooked food, and deliver them to the offices. They code the boxes so that the vegetarian Jain diamond merchant gets his non-garlic dal, the fish-loving Konkani trader his chili prawns, and the dieting Gujarati executive his steamed vegetables. Later, empty lunch boxes are collected from the offices and delivered back home. No modern technology, no computer spreadsheetsjust memorized codes and the muscles to fleet-foot coffin-sized trays containing multiple lunch boxes through the crowded chaos of Bombay's streets. A sample code would be D9MC3, where D is Dadar station, the point of origin; 9 is Nariman Point, Bombay's financial district; MC is Mafatlal Center; and 3 is the third floor. Beyond that, these paladins of piggybacking keep track of their lot of lunch boxes, perhaps through the scent of distinctly flavored masalas and curries.

It isn't just food delivery that makes Bombay the epitome of economic ingenuity. After all, you can have toothpaste delivered in New York City. The difference is this: If you compliment a New York cabbie for his knowledge of the city's streets, he'll probably shrug it off. Cab drivers in Singapore or London might murmur politely that they've grown up in the city. A Bombay cabbie, however, will take your measure and ask as you get out, "Do you need a tour guide? I get off my shift at 4 P.M. and can show you the city. Only one thousand rupees for four hours."

I think of this as I enter Chowpatty Beach. There is something wonderfully egalitarian about the scene here. Bombay's millionaires may have their exclusive high-rises along Marine Drive, but the sea is open to everyone. All of India is in evidence: burka-clad women helping kids build sand castles, Goan Christian couples strolling at the water's edge, and large Hindu families sitting on the sand, sari-clad grandmothers munching peanuts alongside teenagers in halter tops.

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