Apna Time Aayega

Vivian Fernandes discovered hip-hop through a school friend's T-shirt printed with the cover of 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. Rapping as Divine, he made songs about growing up in the chawls of Mumbai with a single mother, and in 2015 his single "Mere Gully Mein" with fellow Mumbai rapper Naezy went viral, shared by Bollywood celebrities. Director Zoya Akhtar took the story of the two MCs and turned it into Gully Boy, a 2019 film about an aspiring rapper from the Dharavi slums, played by Ranveer Singh, with Nas as an executive producer. Divine and Naezy worked on the film as consultants to keep its picture of hip-hop authentic, and Divine wrote additional rap lyrics for Singh's character and composed songs for the soundtrack, which music supervisor Ankur Tewari described as an attempt to bring the two worlds of hip-hop and Bollywood together. "Apna Time Aayega", whose title promises that our time will come, became the film's rallying cry. Gully Boy premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, became India's entry for the Oscars and won a record 13 Filmfare Awards. One of them caused an uproar: when the award for best lyrics went to "Apna Time Aayega" instead of the patriotic Kesari ballad "Teri Mitti", that song's lyricist Manoj Muntashir publicly vowed on Twitter never to attend an award ceremony again, and many fans and musicians took his side. That a street rap could beat a war ballad at Bollywood's own awards showed how far Mumbai's gully scene had come.