Mumbaikar, Punekar or Nagpurkar?

Ever since Maharashtra became United Maharashtra, we have started feeling even more divided than before. Nowadays it doesn't suffice just to say that you are Marathi. You need to specify whether you are a Punekar, a Mumbaikar or a Nagpurkar. So the Maharashtrian of today is faced with an identity crisis of sorts. Being just a Maharashtrian in Maharashtra is like being without an identity. There are only 3 identities that matter - Punekar, Mumbaikar and Nagpurkar. Actually there are hundreds of towns in Maharashtra, but these are the only three that deserve the suffix "kar" after them.

So do you want to be a Mumbaikar? If you do, then it is very important that you should be born in Mumbai. Letting the one who gives birth to you also give you a roof over your head is the easiest way to solve the thorny issue of a residence in Mumbai. Otherwise you need to be prepared for another crisis. Just imagine, these days you need to pay in thousands even if you want to sleep on the pavement at night. So unless you are actually born in Mumbai, you can conveniently forget the thought of becoming a Mumbaikar. Be happy as and where you are. You don't always get what you want in life, do you? Think of this as one of those things.

But, if an aunt living in some chawl or apartment in Mumbai is willing to adopt you, then things might look up. That's the easiest way to achieve re-birth. Or you could always become a "ghar jamai". In Mumbai, the definition of a "ghar jamai" is someone whom you have to give your daughter as well as your house.

However if you do manage to take care of the housing issue, then there are few joys in the world as unmitigated as being a Mumbaikar, believe me.

"Mumbai is too crowded" is a complaint which you are more likely to hear from outsiders than from true blue Mumbaikars. If someone cribs about Mumbai's air, heat, crowds, mosquitoes, let him do it because it is not mandatory for you to be proud of everything about Mumbai. In fact pride is not a pre-condition to being a Mumbaikar at all. That's a pre-condition for becoming a Punekar. You've got to have oodles, if not tons, of pride in Pune to be a Punekar.

In fact if someone calls Mumbai rotten, you should agree with them whole-heartedly. There is no better way to dodge guests and potential immigrants who might drive real estate prices even higher. In Mumbai, dodging out-of-town guests is an exercise you have to carry out like guerilla warfare. Luckily, Mumbai is continuously plagued with epidemics. To top it all there are political epidemics like bandhs. Those poor misunderstood political parties. Every year each of them has to successfully carry out their bandhs, or no one will take them seriously. What can they do about it, poor things?

So if some relatives of yours plan to visit you in Mumbai, don't forbid them from coming. Write to them, "Yes yes, please grace us with your presence. But please remember to be vaccinated against cholera, typhoid, malaria, chikungunya, leptospirosis. There were 214 deaths last month, but nothing great about that. By the way, hepatitis is making rounds again. So please do come. Heartiest blessings to the new born" put this line also in the post card. This will take care of most of your relatives. But then there are some stout-hearted relatives who will still want to visit. For such people, assure them you will be there at the railway station, and then don't turn up. Or even better, call up the Taxi Driver's Association, ask them when their next strike is scheduled, and tell your relatives to come on that day. If the relative is coming to Mumbai for the first time, then there's more scope for guerilla tactics. If you live in Girgaon, tell your relatives, "It will be better if you get down at Thane". The only pain of living in Mumbai is avoiding these unwanted relatives from taking up valuable space in your tiny homes. Apart from that, there is no city like Mumbai, believe me.
If you want to live in Mumbai, you need to learn Mumbai's Marathi. Every sentence should have at least 3-4 English words. In fact while speaking, you should know that Mumbai has only two tenses - present and future. Mumbai doesn’t have a past tense. Mumbai, poor thing, doesn't have much of a past. She cares only about today and tomorrow. The Mumbaikar cares less about how fast Shivaji's horse galloped, and more about when the next fast local train is scheduled. It is only after you come to Mumbai that you realize that the minute hand in your watch is also of great significance. In any other city, you can go through life just paying attention to the hour hand but not so in Mumbai. In Mumbai your watch is tied not just to your wrist, but to your fate.

Mumbai might not have a rich history like Pune. But the only time a Mumbaikar feels passionate about the past is when he is talking about that special topic. You guessed it. Cricket. Cricket is the only sport that Mumbai recognizes. In other places, cricket is played on grounds and in fields. But in Mumbai, even corridors play host to legendary test matches. And please do not dwell under the misconception that to know about cricket you need to have handled a bat and a ball in your life. Remember, cricket is more about talking and less about playing. However you need to be well-versed with the history of cricket. You need not know any other history. In fact a true blue Mumbaikar is very likely to pose the question "You know that Battle of Panipat....where exactly in Pune did that happen?" to a Punekar, causing him to have apoplectic fits on the spot. But ask a Mumbaikar anything about the sport of Cricket, and you'll never find him wanting.


The way a Punekar can wax eloquence about his pantheon of "Bajirao, Nanasaheb, Narayanrao...", a Mumbaikar will launch into the exploits of "P Balu, CK Nayudu, Vijay Merchant...." right upto Gavaskar, Vengsarkar and Tendulkar.

The true blue Mumbaikar always had a special connection with the Brits. You see, Mumbai was never ruled by Mughals or Marathas. In fact Mumbai did not exist until the Brits built it. The Brits came and built Mumbai from scratch. So the first and last Kings of Mumbai were the Brits. Outsiders like Tilak and Gandhi needlessly came and stirred up trouble between the Mumbaikar and the Brit Saahib. Even today, the true Mumbaikar wells up with emotion when he looks at the old buildings in Fort and misses the Brits. So even though Pune retained its grace even after the extinction of the Peshwa dynasty and the horse carts, the Mumbaikar still misses the Brits and the good old trams. “Saala, they should have at least retained the Tram # 6.” The pain of the good old Mumbaikar while making this statement cannot be understood by anyone else.

Ok, so now... do you want to become a Punekar? Go ahead. We have no objections. But our advice is... Think again. Do you really want to? OK, if you insist then your preparation needs to be thorough. And once you are fully prepared, then being a Punekar is as enjoyable an experience as any.

Firstly, do not nurse the notion that you are inferior to anyone in any aspect of life. You are not. You are a superior being. Secondly, learn to express dissent on every issue possible. I mean seriously, stop thinking about minor things like who you are, how educated or rather uneducated you are, and what your achievements are..... Don’t think about any of these things and just express a contradictory opinion. Whatever the topic under discussion, your opinion needs to be strongly voiced, and it has to be contrarian. Even if the topic under discussion is "How to get the United States of America back out of the economic depression?", You should be able to freely express your contrarian opinion forgetting that are just an employee of the Rat Extermination Department in Pune Municipal Corporation. Don't let such inadequacies stop you from holding forth.

At least once every few hours you need to cluck your tongue making that disagreeing noise (chuk chuk chuk), shake your head and say "Pune just isn't the way it used to be." There are no age-related requirements for saying this. In Pune doddering geriatrics and school-going striplings are entitled to say "Pune just isn't the way it used to be" with matching conviction. So you will get to hear this statement with comforting regularity in offices, colleges, Pensioner Maruti’s hillock, Mandai (vegetable market) and even at most Kinder Gartens.

Marathi, or in general any language, exists in several forms in Pune. Public Speaking Puneri, Shopkeeper's Puneri, Domestic Puneri.... are all various dialects with little in common with each other. Here is a demonstration of the difference between the dialect used in private conversation and the dialect used for public speaking, with an example.

Imagine that a Prof. Bhamburdekar is talking about a Prof. Yelkuntkar with his wife –
"What nonsense! Yelkuntkar is being felicitated? Utter nonsense. Actually he should be thrashed with his own shoes. What is he being felicitated for? Translating the Rigved? More like transmutating the Rigved. But still he gets government grants, thousands of rupees."
NOTE- One of the typical ways for a Punekar to vent his anger about someone else is to rant about the money he is making.
"Yes, you fool! Live it up! Embezzle that money! Live the big life! Eat banana pudding and peas curry everyday!" continues Prof. Bhamburdekar.
The most superlative form of living the big life for a Punekar stops at these humble heights - eating banana pudding and peas curry everyday.

Now let me show you the transformation of this sample of private Puneri language into public Puneri language. Imagine, the same Prof. Bhamburdekar at the felicitation, giving a speech about Prof. Yelkuntkar.
"Felicitating Guruvarya Prof Yelkuntkar is like felicitating he Sun God of Scholarliness. Friends, today's date will be carved with gold in the annals of Pune's cultural history. This great teacher of mine.... I mean I have always considered him my teacher.... I am not sure if he considers me his student..."
At this point the audience laughs a little. According to Puneri Public Speaking rules, if you don't make the audience laugh after every third sentence, then it is termed as a FOUL. All aspiring Punekars should always keep this in mind.
"Now of course, in a way I am his student. Because when he was a teacher in the municipality schools, I was his student in Class 1"
See how cleverly he slipped in the information that Prof. Yelkuntkar was once just a school teacher in a rundown municipality school.
"His father was an employee of the nutritional department in the palace of the Sardar Panchapatlikar"
Another masterstroke.... the good professor's father was just a cook!
"Having spent his childhood in extreme poverty, Professor must be feeling great contentment living in his spacious bungalow in Aranyeshwar Colony"
i.e notice how he's embezzled all this money under the garb of education.
"Prof Yelkuntkar and our Honorable Education Minister have been friends right from their school days"
i.e now you know why he gets all those government grants he doesn't deserve.

So you see, unless you are Dale Carnegie, you will have to prepare a lot before your public speaking skills can match up to Puneri standards.
Now when it comes to Puneri language to be used in day to day life, the standards are pretty stringent too. Let me illustrate with another example. All over the world, the convention is that when you answer the phone it should be with a polite "Hello?" Not so in Pune.
In Pune when you answer the phone, your voice must take on that natural irritable brusqueness that descends when someone wakes you up from a Sunday afternoon nap, and you must yell "WHO’S THIS??" It helps to pretend that it costs you money not just to make a call, but also to receive a call.
Now if the caller responds with "Err...could you please get Mr. Gokhale to the phone?", then his non-Punekar status will be blindingly obvious even to a Puneri kid. A true Punekar will yell back testily "CALL GOKHALE TO THE PHONE".

"DAMN IT, THERE ARE 10 GOKHALES HERE. WHICH ONE DO YOU WANT?"

"GET THE GOKHALE THAT L.I.C PAYS TO SLEEP ON HIS JOB"
“HEY GANNU, someone is trying to find you like Crazy” muttering “Damn it, this Gannu gets a 1000 calls per day, god only knows who all, he has given this number.”

To be a true Punekar, you have to have a burning pride for something. Not just normal pride. Normal pride can be felt by anyone. It has to be fierce burning pride. It is not necessary to feel this pride only about major things like the life of Shivaji or Tilak. It could be something as flippant as the rank of your lane's Ganpati statue during the Ganpati immersion procession or even peanuts from the rural regions of Pune district. But no matter how flippant the issue is, the pride must be fierce and burning.

This burning pride is very helpful when you have to make dissenting arguments. So then, on the day of Tilak's Death Anniversary, you could tap into burning pride for Gopal Ganesh Agarkar. On the day of a cricket test match, you could tap into burning pride for kabaddi.

Expressing your dissent merely in private conversations is not enough to get you the Punekar tag. You need to frequently write in your dissenting opinion to the 'Letters to the editor' column. It does not even have to make sense.
Dissent is primary. Logic is secondary.

Now another art you need to perfect, and that too in a specialized Puneri way, is driving a bicycle. Just sitting on a bicycle and going all around town on it does not qualify you as a cyclist in Pune. The verb "driving" when it comes to cycles in Pune, is used in the same sense as "driving an axe into a block of wood" or "driving hordes towards revolution".

A bicycle in Pune is viewed, not as a means of transport, but something to sit on when you meet for chit-chat with a group of friends in the middle of the road. It really helps in training new traffic policemen. It also helps in making access to any building virtually impossible for pesky salesmen. Managing to cluster bikes together to construct such a barricade is as crucial as being able to extricate your own bike from the cluster without toppling others.

Bicycles should not be driven alone, in Pune. There should be at least 3 bikes together going parallel to each other in the middle of the road, at a leisurely speed while talking to each other. Your eyes should not be on the road, but on the walking-and-talking attractive scenery (read girls) on the road. Having unnecessary accoutrements like horns, mirrors, lights, indicators is a sign of cowardice on the streets of Pune.

In this way, as you are crossing various levels in the game "How to be a Punekar", you should in parallel keep up your efforts to become an office bearer in some social or cultural organisation or a Rotary Club. Holding a hollow post in a useless organization is central to the completeness of the Punekar's existence.

It is also necessary to attend as many lectures, talks and seminars as possible on topics as diverse and vacuous as "Shrimant Bajirao II’s beautiful Handwriting" or "Fungus on the Bajra crop". And after the lecture, it is imperative to catch hold of the speaker, and in full view of at least half a dozen people say to him with an earnest expression on your face "I would like to discuss this topic in more depth with you some time."

All this preparation should be enough to make you a normal Punekar. But if you want to operate a shop in Pune, you need more lessons. You especially need lessons on language. Only then will you be able to heap maximum insults on your customer in minimum possible words. Because in Pune, the verb "operating" a shop is used in the same sense as "operating a bull dozer" or "operating a machine gun". The most negligible entity in a shop in Pune, is the customer. This is the secret to operating a shop successfully in Pune.

A shop operated in this way can realistically make money only for 7-8 years until all the customers desert it. Once that happens, you can sell your shop to a Sindhi or a Marwari. The price of land must have appreciated enough to get you a hefty bank balance to last you for the remainder of your life. And you are free to conduct seminars and attend panel discussions on the topic "Why are Maharashtrians unsuccessful in business?" in the Tilak Smarak Mandir.
Summing it up, to become a Punekar, every action of yours should be aimed at ensuring a felicitation ceremony for you some years down the line.
Now, do you wish to be a Nagpurkar? This ambition of yours is very simple to be realized. The only pre-condition required is that you cannot live in Nagpur for this. All real Nagpurkar’s are always eager to show off how important they are. So, If you live in Pune or Mumbai, only then will you be able to show off in your Nagpuri style. Just keep praising Nagpur in comparision to any other city that you might be living in.
A Few examples:-
1. If, someone invites you to a lunch or dinner and serves you excellent home made ghee, you should immediately speak about “Varhaddi ghee”
2. Even if you are eating, Biriyani, you should say “Vada-Bhat tastes much better than this”
3. If the climate is very endearing cold, you should speak about “Nagpuri summer”, like “Nagpuri summer, man how beautiful it is, such tasty oranges, etc etc.” Keep doing this, till the person who is listening to you does not start sweating in that cold.
But all this should be done, only when you are living a bare minimum of 200 miles away from Nagpur. If you live in Nagpur and start showing off like this, the guy next to you will snap back, “Shut up. Why the heck are you building castles in the air?”
To become a Nagpurkar, you must always try and play the victim thinking that somebody is constantly trying to condemn or victimize you. And even, if we are offering only a cup of tea to a guest in our house, you should say “Man, you guys from Mumbai and Pune are very stingy, have your tea.”
You should develop a mindset such that outside of Nagpur, people do not appreciate food and drinks at all. But the catch is to refrain from going into the details of the items prepared, cause, a Goan guy will give you at least 20 types of preparing the “Bangda Fish” and the max that you can go is up to “Vada Bhat”, then it will become an embarrassing moment for you. In case you get caught up in such a debate, you should change the topic and bring it on your city’s specialties like Oranges and Cotton.
Because, a real Mumbaikar, trusts that Oranges are meant to be eaten with “Erandale” and cotton grows inside the mattresses and one day tears it apart and comes out of it.
If you want to show off about being a Nagpurkar in Mumbai, then ensure that the other person’s surname is Kulkarni or Dhurandar and then start in your Nagpuri special Hindi. Because, a real Mumbaikar doesn’t fear Ghosts as much as he fears Hindi.
That is because, just as the mother tongue of a Nagpuri Marathi Manus is Hindi, similarly the mother tongue of a Mumbai’s Marathi Manus is English. But this Mumbai English and the one spoken in UK has no relation whatsoever. Pune’s English came to life on the Banks of the Mula-Mutha River and was buried at Onkareshwar.
Nagpur, does not have to bother about English at all, because, according to a reputed linguist Pune’s English finds its roots in Sanskrit, Nagpur’s Hindi find its roots in Marathi and Mumbai’s Marathi finds its roots in English.
Now, the belief that to become a Nagpurkar, chewing Paan is very important is baseless. Paan gives you the best chance to show off that you are a true Nagpurkar. Imagine that you are invited by a friend living in Pune or Mumbai for lunch.
As soon as you finish your lunch, ask him out rightly, “Don’t you serve Paan after lunch?”
The poor Puneri/Mumbaikar guy feels embarrassed, and you have scored your point.
“Then, send someone to the nearest Thela and ask him to get it.” The poor host guy does not understand what a Thela is or whom to send there and again is embarrassed. You have scored your second point.
“If that’s not possible, ask someone to get some Supari at least”
Then in a jiffy the host sends someone out to the nearest shop and asks for Masala Supari. As soon as he gives it to you, the reply should be “Hutt.. This is Masala Supari, even Kids in our Nagpur don’t eat this” again the host guy is clean bold.
And after all this embarrassment, if he manages to get you a Paan then without thinking of anybody you should chomp on it and then spit straight out of the window. In case, the neighbors living below are forced to celebrate Holi, when the host goes down the next time, he will celebrate a forced Diwali. We should be undeterred. The point is to show off that we are real Nagpuri people.
A thing to note is that, even if you act too prudently from above, you should always project that you are very generous from the within.
For example;
If you are a Nagpurkar currently living in Mumbai and are going live there till and long after your retirement also, then too your should be insisting that your Mumbaikar friends like this, “Come to our Nagpur once in the orange season. We will have a lot of fun eating Oranges. Come and experience our hospitality” Now if you calculate correctly and add, the to and fro fare from Mumbai to Nagpur for a family.. Eating Oranges in Mumbai itself, would be a better and a cheaper option so no one will accept this invitation of yours so you do not have to worry.

Hmmm.. This is just a prologue of the entire book that has been written on this topic. The entire book is ready and waiting to be released, but whom to invite for the release ceremony.. a Mumbaikar, or a Punekar or a Nagpurkar is the only crisis that I am now facing.