Manu Joseph: Nari Hira was a success only Bombay could have given India

livemint.com:

When I do the math now, I realize that many people whom I considered old when I was 21 were actually only in their 40s and 50s. Nari Hira, for instance, who I thought was the most flamboyant old man in India was in his mid-50s when I first met him in 1995. I had just arrived from Madras and Bombay was a foreign land that was years ahead of the India I knew.

It had people who could only be found in Bombay, like Nari Hira (1938—2024). On many mornings, Hira would arrive outside a former seedy hotel that he had converted into the head office of his magazine business, Magna Publishing Company, which included the film gossip and features magazine Stardust. It was one of the largest selling magazines in India.

There were times, surely, when it outsold all other magazines. Hira usually arrived in an old luxury car, possibly a BMW. He was a slim man on whom expensive suits hung well.

Given his complexion and manner, I was surprised to learn that his real name was Narendra Hiranandani. To me, he looked like ‘Nari Hira.’ When he arrived, he always walked fast across the foyer towards a lift, as fast as his poorly paid employees walked at the end of the day to catch a local train. A distinct character of Bombay was people in a rush.

All sorts of people walked very fast to achieve various ends, giving the city the reputation that its people were very busy—which was bogus. Hira attributed his ability to antagonize film stars to the fact that he was “from South Bombay," where old money lived, people who did not rate anything that was Indian very highly, including the Hindi film industry, which was based in the suburbs. They were the sort of people who were global and ‘global’ was a local place somewhere in the West.