Street Cred

From the slums of Mumbai, Vivian Fernandes has risen the ranks of rap to straddle both indie and Bollywood.

- Naini Thaker

THIS IS THE STUFF OF MOVIES.

In 2002, a teenager and his older brother moved in with their grandmother, into the slums of Mumbai’s JB Nagar. Their abusive father had left them, and their mother had moved to the Middle East in search of a livelihood. In a life devoid of television, the only form of music the boy ever heard were Konkani folk tunes, and the local bands that kicked up a frenzy during festivals. One day, he saw a passerby wearing a T-shirt with an unfamiliar face printed on it. A friend pointed out that it was American rapper and song-writer 50 Cent. The same friend then took the boy home, and burnt more than 60 hip-hop tracks onto a CD and gave it to him.

Cut to the summer of 2018. Netflix releases its first original series in India, Sacred Games. As Saif Ali Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte negotiate their way through Mumbai’s underbelly, playing in the background is the title track ‘Kaam 25’, a befitting, hard-hitting, hypnotic rap that captures the essence of the eight-episode thriller. It is perhaps equally befitting that the teenager from JB Nagar—now a 28-year-old Vivian Fernandes—is the one who composed and performed the song.

It is difficult to associate Fernandes, sitting in a black hoodie and his signature cap, with the rapper aggressively mouthing the gritty lyrics of ‘Kaam 25’. “When I made ‘Kaam 25’, I had no idea if it was going to do well. I don’t make tracks with the intention of breaking the internet. I thought it will die down after the series ends, but it’s playing everywhere even now,” he says. The track has got more than 5 million views on YouTube in the five months since its release.

But garnering millions of views for his compositions is not new for Fernandes, who goes by the stage name Divine. His 2013 home-made song video, ‘