What Man Santa: Holiday Cheer From Mumbai\'s Bandra

It is, Tweeted one enthusiastic fan, the “Kolaveri of Christmas.”

Like the Tamil film song “Why This Kolaveri Di” that went viral last year, the Bollywood musician Daniel B. George's quirky Christmas tune “What Man Santa” has been spreading across the Internet faster than a snowball melting in the Mumbai summer. Within three days of being posted on YouTube, the song had been viewed more than 200,000 times, earning the producers lots of laughs and inquiries from radio and television stations that want to air the tune in the run up to Christmas.

“The reaction has been phenomenal,” said Daniel B. George, the hooded character in the video who is also the composer of the ditty, in a telephone interview.

To Mumbai residents, “What Man Santa” instantly conjures up visions of Bandra, a neighborhood with a large Roman Catholic population, some of whom speak a distinctive brand of English characterized by syntactical structures and phrases that are directly translated from Marathi and Konkani. When Mr. George wrote the tune, he imagined it being sung by a young man from the Koli community, which makes its living from fishing. Musically, too, “What Man Santa” uses rhythms that recall Koli wedding songs. The punch line, which involves the Pope, was provided by Mr. George's Bible teacher.

Mr. George is a fixture on the Bollywood music scene. He has written scores for a couple of films and worked as an arranger for other composers. One evening last year, as he and his colleague Swanand Kirkire were kicking back after a hard day, Mr. George began to belt out his Santa tune, which he had written as a lark a long time ago.

“I loved it,” said Mr. Kirkire, a noted lyric writer, singer and dialogue writer for Hindi films and television serials. “There's an element of sadness to this â€" the idea that Santa refuses to come to poor Peter's home.” As he listened to the tune, Mr. Kirkire said, he began to visualize it in his head.

On Dec. 8, Mr. Kirkire made his directorial debut, using a camera he bought in Singapore last month. Friends in the film industry were amused enough by the tune to donate their time to shoot and edit the video. The team only had to pay for the costumes and makeup for the background singers, who were dressed to be instantly recognizable as another Mumbai stereotype: “Sandras from Bandra.” They are the kind of girls who work as secretaries and who sometimes sing in the choruses for Bollywood soundtracks who aren't impressed â€" or fazed â€" by anything, Mr. Kirkire said. The video took a day to shoot, two days to edit and cost 100,000 rupees, or about $1,800.

The producers said they were delighted by the attention it was getting. “It's cr azy to see it get so popular,” Mr. Kirkire said. “It was an idiot thing.”