Poorly received pronunciation

Mumbai residents chop syllables to sound posh. Folks in the satellite town of Navi Mumbai say ‘tosh!’

Navi Mumbai is ‘New’ Mumbai, a newly developed IT hub. Bandra is a posh western Mumbai suburb; Andheri is a yuppie neighbourhood near Bandra; Worli is posher-than-Bandra precinct in south-central Mumbai. Other localities mentioned are in Navi Mumbai.

“I shall put all the ailments in place for yah wedding,” said the exquisite package of professional keenness and combustible beauty. Everything about her was reassuringly sharp. Creases on her faux-Armani suit, the highlights flickering on her precision haircut, and her colossal calculator that had more keys than a jail warden's belt. Yet my friend, who was on the threshold of terminating his bachelorhood, stiffened into shock. After all, you don’t surrender your life’s savings to a wedding planner so that she can add a touch of lumbago, gout, or even halitosis to the happy event. A tactful request for elaboration, however, clarified matters. The precious dynamite, it turned out, was affecting the posh Bandra accent and had meant to say ‘elements.’ Cannot blame her, her office isn’t too far from the Hill Road.

A worrying number of Mumbaikars flatten syllables to amplify their social superiority. Sadly, the message is often a wreck of syntax and intention. The misguided population that mauls language is distributed across the city. Yet Mumbai’s part-time sociologists (with alternate professions ranging from vada-pav peddling to screenplay writing) characterise the clipped gibberish as Bandra brogue. That is a justifiable reflex, given that the density of those who dice vowels is perhaps the highest in the city’s western suburb.

Some Navi Mumbaikars fear that it is only a matter of time before this brand of pretentiousness infects the satellite town.

“I was seeing this dishy guy from Worli,” says Bindu Joaquin, an engineering student from Nerul. “But he spoke as though he had a permanent sore under his tongue. Mo-thaw (for mother), saw-ray (for sorry)…he was insufferably stiff,” she says. It incensed her that the man’s fastidious extravagance in enunciation exposed his poor pronunciation. “He would sound like an illiterate tractor when it came to saying things like ‘pint’ or ‘honest’. I had enough, in about two weeks,” she says.

Joaquin’s new boyfriend is a Malayali from Vashi. She is, inexplicably, wary of providing an assessment of his pronunciation ability. “He is unlike the typical snooty Mumbai bloke. Besides, he has a nice dress sense and a heart of gold,” she says. Joaquin can take an odd ‘sweet-hard’ from a man who holds doors open for her. Anikhet Gargava, a Sanpada resident who works for a prominent bank in Nariman Point, believes he has an intelligible explanation for Mumbai’s conceited façade. “It’s all because of Mumbai’s tony pubs. Stewards there are better groomed, better built and better dressed than the average patron from, say, Andheri,” Gargava says. He reasons that the image-conscious Mumbaikars have acquired the mongrel-Oxbridge accent only to impress the supercilious waiters. “Here in Navi Mumbai, my faithful Raju bhau at the local bar does not care how I speak. He barely has the time to slam a large Old Monk^ on the table before moving on to the next bevda#,” he says. The exchange likely to be heart-warmingly homey and without airs: “Rum paijey, fast!”/“Ho!”/”Cheers, bhau!”/”Ho!” *

#Drunkard (in Marathi)
^Inexpensive rum preferred by college students and bourgeoisie baiters
*Ho = Yes; Paijey = want; Bhau = brother (in Marathi)