Saturday, July 18, 1998
Tapori comes of age, becomes Hero No. 1
You caught a glimpse of him in Deewar, you saw him in Rangeela, there were shades of him in Yes Boss and now here he is again in Ghulam. Swaggering without a penny in his pocket: always a line for the pretty girl: illiterate but shanya; insecure but ebullient. If anything typifies what is unique about Mumbai, to me it is the tapori.
You have money, you have class
Early to bed, early to rise, burn the midnight oil and then advertise. No formula for success has worked better for whizkids topping the two board examinations in the state - the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) examinations. The upshot: it also crams the rolls of private coaching classes, which use this exclusive group of students as easy bait to stuff their bloated bank accounts.
Spirit of 68 meets 98's realism
The drifting daughters of the rock'n'roll classes are born to be what Kathryn Flett calls "out-of-it" girls. There is a way of dressing that is seized upon, slaveringly, Pavlov doggie-style, by certain middle-class grown-up girl-children who were born out of a 1960s ethos, if not of the decade itself.
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