Himesh and the yellow auto

Add a little fancy English to the description, and it will be in an arts biennale before you can say, bhaiya Malad jaoge?

The other day, I watched a video where a young woman had installed a sound console in an auto rickshaw and was driving around DJing in it (no prizes for guessing it was a jugni song). These stock items of hipster slumming are the opposite of exuberance. You pretend you have created something new just because a person of your class or gender is doing it for the first time—while other people have been doing it casually all along. Add a little fancy English to the description, and it will be in an arts biennale before you can say, bhaiya Malad jaoge?

Every 1990s autorickshaw was already its own disco station. Stacked speakers with flashing lights turned interiors a radioactive green or incandescent candy pink. We hunted for these autos to take us through the slick night streets and crowded day traffic as they drove by with a quick audio flash of the dhinka chika typifying their chosen playlist—songs remixed with jhankar beats. It was an era that began with Raja Hindustani—Pardesi pardesi jana nahin--and Prabhudeva hits—Take it easy Urvashi--and peaked with Himesh Reshammiya. His Himmness was made for auto-rickshaws and that 15-minute party we inhabited in the midst of our urban busy-ness. We stepped out of those autos grinning.

Mobile phones have put auto rickshaw speakers on silent. We no longer partake of the the auto-driver’s taste. But what is cosmopolitanism if not the capacity to enjoy difference, to be modified by it, without appropriating it? Globalised now, we each put on our headphones, shut each other out and proceed together and alone, so near yet so far, and arrive at our destinations looking lost.

But autos hold on to flamboyance as if to say “I’m Still Here”. They do it visually through stylish upholstery inside their sober exteriors. Yesterday, I got into an auto and a sunny side up burst of yellow flooded my vision. “Wah kya rang hai dada” I said. “Yes everyone says that” grinned the driver. “That’s why when it goes old, I reupholster it in the same colour.” Some are extra flamboyant. They may have shelves, astroturf and potted plants. Or the whole vehicle may be a causal art installation dedicated to Salman Khan. Or there may be more insouciant ishtyle with slogans—Yaa Habibi Chalo Kabhi Bhi (photographed recently by my friend Kripa), Love is Easy but I am Busy. And ya habibi, yaad rahe an autorickshaw saved Saif Ali Khan. 

So I like it that only this month there is a new Himesh song in the dhinchak firmament and guess what? He faces off with Prabhudeva. We are instructed ki “jiske chehre pe mayusi dikhi uski phir laash dekhegi”. Yaniki, khabardar baby, don’t calm down, enjoy fun for fun’s sake. I even caught a jhalak dikhlaja of Johnny Lever dancing in a distasha and an indignant Navneet Nishan. There is no rationing of exuberance in this song. It is awash with belly dancers who seem to have come via the Moulin Rouge, trademark lyrics of not much meaning produced from the Himesh Urdufication Random Generator (madhubala, zohra jabeen, hour pari, nilkamal, dil ka taj mahal arright), dancing villains, and oodles of sincere bhankas and faltugiri. At the end, I felt as if had I come out of an autorickshaw grinning. 

Bas, aur kya chahiye?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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