When he released his first music video, Mumbai-based musician Mihir Joshi understood that it would be reviewed by India’s Central Board of Film Certification for obscene or offensive lyrics. When the board objected to a single word, he quickly agreed to part with it.
However, he was flabbergasted to hear that the word was “Bombay.”
“I started laughing, and I said: ‘What are you talking about?’” Joshi, 33, said in an interview.
The music video was broadcast on the MTV Indies cable channel over the weekend with the offending place name replaced with a bleep and blurred in the accompanying subtitle.
“I have nothing against the word ‘Mumbai,’” he added, a little plaintively. “I’m not calling it ‘Constantinople’ or ‘Atlantis’ or whatever.”
He chose “Bombay” in the second line of the song, he said, because he needed a rhyme with “today.” However, by doing so, Joshi stumbled into one of India’s many unresolved tugs of war over history and identity.
Mumbai, a word drawn from the Marathi language, has been the official legal name of Joshi’s home city since 1995, when the nativist political party in power chose it to replace the Anglicized name Bombay, used since colonial times.
Not everyone adopted the new name, though. Some kept using Bombay out of long habit or institutional inertia — the city’s stock exchange and its high court still bear the name, for example. Others stuck with Bombay as a political statement, rejecting what they considered xenophobic politics behind the change.
Although this divide leads to regular dust-ups on televised talk shows, Joshi’s case was the first in recent memory in which an artist has been called out for using Bombay.
“If the name of this city has been changed, it’s only fair that we adhere to the new name,” daily The Mumbai Mirror editor Meenal Baghel said. “But should it have been bleeped as if it is a four-letter word? I think that’s ridiculous.”
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS