Words matter. These are the best Bombay Quotes from famous people such as Karan Johar, Mani Ratnam, Sobhita Dhulipala, Rasika Dugal, Satish Kaushik, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m deeply stressed as a filmmaker, and I know I’m not alone. The censorship crisis, the moral policing, the politics of it has most of us on edge. I’m scared to use certain words: like, if I use ‘Bombay,’ will there be a problem?
Roja,’ ‘Bombay’ and ‘Dil Se’ weren’t planned as political films. It was a phase India was going through and these things affected me and found their way into my work.
Anurag was always too passionate about ‘Raman Raghav 2.0’ to care about anything else. There never was a ‘Bombay Velvet’ hangover.
In Bombay, people usually tend to cast you in roles that you’ve played before. Even though they may consider you to be a talented actor, they just think it’s ‘safer’ to have you play the same kind of roles over and over again.
Salaam Bombay’ and ‘Monsoon Wedding’ are the two Mira Nair films I go back to.
Bombay was an expensive place and I didn’t want to spend my nights without food in my stomach. For 400 a month, I would make bills from morning till evening and then would head to Prithvi Theatre.
More dreams are realised and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India.
I was writing stand up comedy for TV for around 5 years and just wanted to attempt it myself. Vir Das started an amateur comedians’ night in Bombay in 2009 and I went for the very first one. It was a competition and I won the first prize.
When I came to Bombay, as it was called in my time, it was filled with people from everywhere, Kashmir to Kerala.
I was determined to return to Bombay on two legs and not on crutches and dance again.
I was chosen over British and French choreographers to work on ‘Bombay Dreams.’
It was in 1976, I think. I was in South Africa on military engagement when someone left a magazine on my bed with the picture of a beautiful woman on the cover. I read that her name was Parveen Babi and I thought, I must go to Bombay and meet her.
In writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
My mother is a lawyer by profession. Now she has shifted with me in Bombay. I lost my father a long back.
As far as the industries go, in the North, they think I’m a South Indian actress; down South, I’ve always been thought of as a Bombay girl. I guess it’s sort of an identity crisis, even though I’d like to belong to all the industries.
I saw Mani sir’s ‘Bombay,’ and I wanted to be a Mani sir heroine.
I initially moved to Bombay to work in the corporate space. After settling my family here in due course of time, I turned to acting which initially started off as a hobby that I wanted to pursue on the side and then became my profession to sustain my passion around five years back.
In the ’50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay – it didn’t feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.
I’m a pucca Indian. Bombay is my home.
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can’t take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
The fun of sitting around Pangong Lake with 40 guys around a fireplace, having a glass of wine… staying in one camp together… that’s an experience. Waking up at 5 in the morning, watching the sun come up. You don’t do these things in Bombay.
I’ve never lived anywhere else in my life, I have a massive love-hate relationship with this city. I grew up in the western suburbs in the ’80s and for everything we had to go to south Bombay – so you lived the whole city, in a sense.
My first show was in Patkar Hall next to Bombay Hospital. It was a total flop. I was so nervous standing in front of all those people that I completely froze. I forgot all my lines and the audience booed me off the stage. I realised that day that you have to earn the audience’s appreciation. They aren’t fools.
Back in the ’90s, we saw prominent non-film artists like the Bombay Vikings do a splendid job on old classics and people danced to those new tunes without ever feeling that the song had been spoiled. We slowly saw this trend creeping into mainstream cinema.
Bombay is the ideal microcosm of India, of that whole sense of inequality where you could have the biggest skyscrapers next to the poorest slums.
When I don’t have the time to be in the Himalayas, I am in Bombay, Los Angles or N.Y. or Paris or wherever.
‘Salaam Bombay’ didn’t put a halo on the poor. Instead, it said that they will teach us how to live.
The theme of ‘Bombay’ will make you fall in love with it again and again.
When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn’t speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they’re not very forgiving. ‘If you don’t speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?’
There is a psychology of Bombay.
Everybody I meet is a star. In Bombay it is crazy and even TV has become so big that there are just too many stars and there is too much greed for that little space on the newspaper.
‘Bombay Velvet’ is my first film in a trilogy about Bombay, before it became a metropolis.
Bombay feels like a second home now. I have adapted to the lifestyle of the city.
Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.
I think Calcutta is that kind of a market that if you are a Delhi or a Bombay designer, they feel they are being shortchanged and given stock that isn’t fresh.
In Bombay, we have a fine concert hall. I think it is high time we built venues in Delhi and Calcutta, not only for western music, but also Indian music. It doesn’t matter which party is in power; don’t you think the capital of India should have a concert hall?
I’ve been to Delhi, Madras, Bangalore and a lot of other cities, but I have never seen a crime set-up like that in Bombay.
I’ve always wanted to do an Indian film, but I didn’t want to come to India and pretend that I could play an average Bombay girl.
Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens.
My family and relatives alone could fill Shanmukhananda Hall in Bombay.
Muslims remain the most convenient target for prejudice in a city like Delhi, which is far more ghettoized than Bombay or Bangalore, for example.
The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it’s the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
Well the Bombay film wasn’t always like how it is now. It did have a local industry. There were realistic films made on local scenes. But it gradually changed over the years.
