Mamdani walks offstage to Bollywood song after victory speech

NEW YORK – Zohran Mamdani ended his victory speech as

New York City’s mayor-elect

late on Nov 4 by placing his hand over his chest. Then a song came on – “Dhoom Machale”, an iconic Bollywood track – and people noticed.

The song choice was a capstone of sorts to a campaign that had played with Bollywood-inspired scenes and iconography. It was also a reference to his roots. Mr Mamdani’s parents were born in India before they moved to Uganda, where they had him.

“Dhoom Machale” is the theme song to the 2004 Indian action thriller “Dhoom”. The main characters sing and dance to the song, building excitement for high-energy action sequences involving superbikes. Two decades after the movie came out, the song remains a fixture in India and is a popular ringtone.

The Hindi lyrics repeated in the song – “dhoom machale dhoom” – translate loosely to “have a blast” or “make some noise”.

Mr Mamdani is not a household name in India, and his campaign was not widely covered there, though the country’s main newspapers ran stories on Nov 5 introducing him as New York’s first mayor-elect of Indian descent. The day after his victory, on the street outside the apartment in New Delhi where his parents live for part of the year, no one had heard of him.

Still, Indian pop culture, and Bollywood movies and songs in particular, appeared to have an influence on him.

His mother Mira Nair is an award-winning film director who made Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay! and other feature-length movies that often incorporate some Bollywood elements, though she works outside the mainstream Indian film industry. Mr Mamdani’s father Mahmood Mamdani is a professor at Columbia University and a prolific writer on colonialism and African history.

Mr Aman Midda, a language tutor who was taking a break on a bench in the New Delhi park where Mr Mamdani’s parents sometimes take walks, said he hadn’t heard of the mayor-elect. Shown some of the campaign’s TikTok videos, however, he appeared impressed. “He’s very good in Hindi, and in Arabic,” he said.

Social media users recognised the song at the end of his speech on Nov 4 and shared clips of his exit from the stage in Brooklyn, with one person celebrating how a “Bollywood buff” would soon be the mayor of New York.

The designer behind Mr Mamdani’s campaign visuals, Mr Aneesh Bhoopathy, said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that Mr Mamdani had mentioned Bollywood posters, among other things, as an inspiration for his main logo.

Some of his campaign ads appeared to borrow from Indian cinema, too. The color, music and action in one video from December – in which Mr Mamdani wears a long white kurta – resemble those of a Bollywood movie trailer. He also clipped a scene from an Indian film in another video from June, which addresses his supporters in Hindi.

“Today I have buildings, property, a bungalow, a bank balance, and a car. What do you have?” a character from the 1975 action drama “Deewaar” says in the clip. The ad cuts to Mr Mamdani replying with his arms outstretched: “You.”

Mr Mamdani, 34, has worked on film music, though not necessarily as part of the Bollywood industry. He oversaw the creation of the soundtrack for Queen of Katwe, a 2016 Disney sports drama directed by his mother, who joined him, his wife and his father onstage after his victory speech.

In the speech, Mr Mamdani quoted Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India’s first prime minister.

“A South Asian Muslim era in City Hall is truly here,” Ms Yashica Dutt, an Indian writer in New York, said on social media. She called the exit song “iconic”. NYTIMES