The M Word

One of the US-based co-founders of Samosapedia.com tells us how Mumbai, monsoon and mangoes all played muse for the birth of the crowd-sourced guide to South Asian slang.

Home page image: January O' Really.

When I was 14, the great metropolis of Mumbai, India’s city of dreams, was responsible, albeit indirectly, for getting me a withering and contemptuous stare from one Mr. Bhagwan Das, a man I recall with a shudder. To be fair, I am to blame—as a teenager, I often elicited withering gazes. At the time, I was in school in China, experimenting with Bombaiya bhasha in Mr. Das’s Hindi class. I used the expression mangta hai, straying out on a grammatical limb, believing naively that popular usage offered legitimisation. Mr. Das corrected me, and the class tittered with approval.

I have a long-standing obsession with Mumbai, and the easy slang that rolls off tongues there. My strongest memories are of the summer I spent there when I was 13, an age when nascent (and sometimes illicit) cravings are best expressed with a rambunctious “Mangta hai!” My family spent a long summer traveling between various Indian cities, but it was always Mumbai I loved best. That summer, I distilled a magical little formula for myself consisting of three “Ms”: Mumbai, monsoon, and mangoes. And what mangoes! Each mango had a different name, and exploded with a distinct kind of sweetness. I stained many a T-shirt with the gusto with which I devoured Alphonsos, Imam Pasands, and Ratnagiris, all varietals on the same fruit. To this day, I mutter “Mango mangta hai!” under my breath when I am at odds with the world. Mangoes are my madeleine—a Proustian jolt of memory which helps me slip back into that summer. My aunt believes I grew taller that summer, nourished by mangoes alone.

The rains were so prolific that I saw cars turned over in potholes the size of small ponds. No major city I’ve ever known has rains like Mumbai. I’m told that eminent Arab sheikhs take hotel rooms during the monsoon, just to gaze at torrential rain from their balconies. The rains came in abundance that summer, and with them came some road rage. The first time I witnessed a kaan patti in action was during a street brawl between an auto-rickshaw driver and someone seated in an Amby. There are choice words I gleaned, too scathing for print, but I suspect you know of them as well.

Even draconian Mr. Das would warm up to tales of culinary malfeasance. Eating vada pav with a chai chaser seems to anchor Bombayites, and was permissible with much pleading. I would also tempt fate and sneak in some bhel puri on the beach, unbeknownst to my watchful parents, who feared stomach disorders. They needn’t have worried. Mumbai loved me well then, and I escaped unscathed. I’ve since become a bit more fattu, but only as far as food is concerned, since I dare not tempt fate again.

I’m not exaggerating when I say it was that childhood summer that resulted in Samosapedia.com, our foray into the linguistics that galled poor Mr. Das. My business partners and I spend a great deal of time laughing at the evolution of language, which we see as the fulcrum of culture. The site has taken on a life of its own, with users adding expressions and words every day, and we watch it as we would watch a child grow, feeding on the sweet fruits of collective labour. We can be humorous, or we can be didactic, but we now know that some words don’t translate well. Take jugaad, for example, something on parade every day in Mumbai. How does one explain panache, optimism, and ingenuity with one word?  The answer lies in culture, not in linguistics. In my own way, I like to believe that I found jugaad in Mumbai, and carried a certain spirit of temerity back to class, and then held on to it dearly as I traveled far and wide, reluctantly growing into adulthood.

Arun Ranganathan is the co-founder of Samosapedia.com.