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Return of the NRIs
Standing up to China |
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Death of a ghazal icon
Brittle state of politics
Maid for each other
Maestro who took ghazal to the masses
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Return of the NRIs
The
news, as highlighted by The Tribune, that NRIs have started returning to India in droves is a good augury, in the sense that their country can put their expertise to good use at this critical juncture when it is accelerating to the escape velocity which can free it from the Third World shackles. As it is said, you can take an Indian out of India, but you cannot take India out of him. The desi heart always beats for the motherland and pulls him to his original home. Thousands have started heeding this powerful call and come back to the nation from where they started their global march. Several factors have contributed to this interesting phenomenon. The predominant one of these is the prosperity brought in by the opening up of the Indian economy. The NRIs – many of whom had left because of the lack of opportunities here – now feel that they can make a career here while at the same time being back to their roots. Plus, the recent recession in some Western countries has played a role. Even otherwise, some feel disillusioned that the affluence that comes their way in a foreign land is tempered by the unmistakable disdain for them because of the colour of their skin. This unease has increased particularly after 9/11, considering that some in the West tar all Asians with the same terrorist brush. While the trek back has started because of emotional reasons, it is for the governments here to ensure that the NRIs’ home-sweet-home dreams don’t turn nightmarish on reaching here. Things have improved but not quite enough to make them feel at home. There are many instances where those who came back hoping that their motherland would welcome them with open arms were let down by the stepmotherly treatment. Let the message go out that we need them more than their dollars. If only the administration starts treating all citizens – particularly those who have seen better living conditions and functional and responsive civil administrations abroad – with due respect and sensitivity, many of those who turn into NRIs for want of choice would not leave their hearth and home in the first place.
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Standing up to China
Not
bothering about China’s unjustifiable claims over the South China Sea waters, Vietnam has asked India to go ahead with the arrangement between the two countries for hydrocarbons exploration in two Vietnamese blocks in the area. A few days back China had told India to avoid executing any project in the disputed waters, keeping in view Beijing’s sensibilities. India and Vietnam have, however, refused to buy the Chinese argument, citing the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Yet it is not easy for India’s ONGC Videsh and the Vietnam National Oil and Gas Group to continue their cooperation in implementing the oil and gas exploration project. The US, too, has entered the scene, describing the disputed waters as being a matter of its national interest. Interestingly, the US and the Philippines have sided with Vietnam, creating more difficulties for China. The situation may take a turn for the worse in the days to come, as the disputed sea waters, having some strategically located islands, are believed to have precious natural resources. India must use the opportunity to expose Chinese expansionist designs with the help of other Asian nations. The Chinese claims over the entire South China Sea — Vietnam calls it the East Sea and the Philippines the West Philippines Sea — have never been accepted by the entire international community. Some time ago China tried to gain UN recognition of its rights over the disputed sea waters by presenting a map to the UN Secretary-General. But it had to cut a sorry figure as four of the 10 ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) members, including Vietnam, falsified the Chinese claims. The issue also came up for discussion at the Asian Security Summit in Singapore in June when China failed to get adequate support. Most countries in East Asia have been feeling uneasy because of the Chinese bullying behaviour for some time. This is the time for aggressive Indian diplomacy to make China realise that it cannot subjugate the smaller nations in the region despite the massive economic and military might it has acquired. Today’s multipolar world calls for a cooperative approach, respecting the sentiments of one and all.
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Death of a ghazal icon
Rarely
does it happen that an artist captures the cultural complexity of an entire nation to leave behind a legacy that is both profound and popular. The reason is that popularity is generally assigned to frivolity. Jagjit Singh could strike a balance between the two by his unique genius of simplifying the deeply philosophical thought and emotion and to render it in people’s musical parlance. When he sang “Apni marzi se kahan apne safar ke hum hain,” it found a resounding echo in millions of minds. Not only Indians but a majority of South Asians, fed on the Sufi thought, found a kind of kinship with his rendering of “Duniya jise kehte hain jaadu ka khilauna hai — mil jaye to mitti hai, kho jaaye to sona hai”. His power to invoke nostalgia — in flesh and blood — for an entire generation, who felt lost with the invasion of technology, felt ecstatic when his baritone voice resonated echoes of their lost world in “Voh kaghaz ki kishti, voh baarish ka paani.” Another reason that made Jagjit Singh an icon for millions was his unpretentious secularism. He joined the lineage of stalwarts like Naushad, Kaifi Azmi, Jannisar Akhtar, Mohammad Rafi and Gulzar, who popularised the composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (culture) by bringing Urdu within the common man’s reach, freeing it from its religious connotations and sophistication of the elite. If he helped Urdu reach the common man, he raised the bar for Punjabi music by composing profound verses of Punjabi poets to simple tunes, often using just four or five notes. His rendering of Shiv Kumar Batalwai’s poem titled “Birha da Sultan” created a landmark in Punjabi music. Is ghazal doomed to disappear with Jagjit Singh’s demise? Perhaps not. He inspired a whole lot of ghazal singers, who have added different flavours to the genre. He was also instrumental in introducing and promoting many new voices.
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A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. —Francis Bacon
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Brittle state of politics India’s politicians are marking time because, despite the wishes of the ruling and main opposition parties, an early general election could be sprung upon the country. Obviously, an early election is not in the Congress party’s interest because, given its disarray, it can only lose seats. In the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, intra-party quarrels are even more intense because Mr L.K. Advani is doing his own thing in the shape of one more yatra while the other aspirants for leadership sharpen their knives and the seeming inevitability of Mr Narendra Modi’s grasp for power brings despair to the party realists. Mr Anna Hazare, whose immensely popular anti-corruption fast on Ramlila Maidan was a benchmark event, is seeking to retain his relevance to the country’s politics by directly taking on the Congress in the Hissar by-election. He was already tainted by saffron support for his crusade, and his decision publicly to signal an anti-Congress political platform will only serve to dent his popularity and credibility. The Congress is grappling with two kinds of problems. The Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi tandem has ceased to work in terms of giving the country good governance. Second, the apparent objective of the exercise, launching Mr Rahul Gandhi as the inevitable Prime Minister should the Congress win again, is not working according to plan. The heir-apparent still lacks self-confidence and has yet to reveal a sure-footed grasp of the alchemy of Indian politics. But the BJP is facing the greatest dilemmas. Given its frustrations in losing two general elections after its sole six-year stint in power at the Centre, it seemed to have a realistic chance in leading a non-Congress coalition to power in the next general election. But even in the face of uncertainties on the timing of the election, the party is losing its plot. For one thing, the dominance of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh over the party’s affairs after Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s retirement has accentuated the voters’ dilemma. Many of those wishing to give the BJP another chance will balk at bringing the RSS to power at the Centre. The other problem, of course, is the intense competition in the BJP ranks for the leadership role. While the party president, Mr Nitin Gadkari, has announced that a collective leadership would contest the election, nobody is convinced that the BJP would have a chance without projecting a future Prime Minister. And here the ploy gets complicated because Mr Modi has, in a sense, already anointed himself as the country’s future leader by his elaborately staged token fast, with other party leaders being mere props in what amounted to a coronation ceremony. The choice of selecting the next future leader of the BJP is entirely the RSS’s and in the still largely opaque world of RSS functioning, the factors that will influence the RSS leadership remain obscure, except in carrying out the organisation’s agenda. Nor is it entirely clear when the RSS will make up its mind. The BJP is, therefore, functioning in a void not knowing when a leader will be sprung upon it. The Congress party’s travails point to a bigger dilemma. In view of Mr Rahul Gandhi’s inability to measure up to the leadership seemingly awaiting him, the tradition of a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family automatically becoming the leader is being called into question. Yet the Congress ceased being a cadre-based party, if ever it was one, long ago, relying in the main on the charisma of a leader of the Nehru-Gandhi family to bring it votes and power. In return, he (or she) could pretty much do what he pleased. Will the compact be broken this time around? The rub is that princelings are found in abundance in the ranks of the Congress and the contagion has spread to most other parties. Mr Rahul Gandhi is unlikely to be allowed to break the chain and will be under greater pressure to measure up. He will obviously have more time to show results if the general election is held on schedule in 2014. Elections to state assembles, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, in the intervening period will be pointers to the shape of things to come. But given the decline of the mother Congress party in recent decades, regional parties are exercising greater influence on the national scale. Ms Mayawati is one indication of the power of regional satraps; the other is Ms Jayalalithaa, who has stamped her authority on Tamil Nadu in a characteristic fashion. Mr Nitish Kumar in Bihar represents another pole, having carved out a position as a role model. These trends are to be welcomed for the greater democratising tendencies they represent. But the brittle state of Indian politics holds a warning. The Indian parliamentary system has often been a noisy one, but recent trends in its functioning are reprehensible. As the main opposition party at the Centre, the BJP must take the lion’s share of the blame because its consistent disruption of Parliament to serve its immediate or short-term interests is a dangerous tendency. The Congress is also to blame in disrupting state assembly proceedings where it is in opposition, but the BJP’s fault is greater because its aim is the country’s Parliament. It goes beyond the churning of politics in a boisterous democracy. For the present, the Left parties are ploughing their lonely furrows. In fact, as far as the communist parties are concerned, greater introspection is required because it is time they grew up and abandoned their original mantras of singing hosannas to Stalin. Apart from some obscure communist parties, Indian communist parties are unique in retaining their worship of archaic leaders and dogmas while the communists’ world has fallen apart in the rest of the world. But the burden of shepherding Indian politics to a healthy future rests in the main on the Congress and the BJP. Both these parties seem more concerned about their immediate future than the greater good of the country. The question is: Will they measure up to their
responsibilities?
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Maid for each other
Man
has always been enchanted by the beauty of ‘Eve’, often bordering on the delusional. The mermaids, the fairies and the apsaras are creations of moon-gazers’ fantasies. They found lavish expression in verse and prose alike. “A pretty girl is like a melody, that haunts you night and day.” (Irving Berlin) “She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies. And all that best of dark and bright, meet in her aspect and her eyes.” (Lord Byron). “The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed the lover embraces only his own disillusions.” (Naomi Wolf) There was no limit to the flow of eloquence from these wise men but there was a flip side to it also. Chekhov wrote: “When a woman isn’t beautiful, people always say ‘You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair’.” Not many will agree with this as writings are full of allegories comparing hair of a woman to dark clouds; eyes to ‘limpid pools’ and ‘Paimanas’ ; laughter to the sound of a flowing brook or sound of trinkets and so on and so forth, but there was no doubt that she ruled a man’s heart. As Dostovesky said, “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” It was natural for a man to believe that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever and to begin his quest to achieve that “forever happiness”. Whether he succeeded or not is for all to see but past shows that restless kings travelled continents to possess the beauty of their fancy. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy exemplify this. Poets with their poetry; Shayars with their Shayari; and prose writers with their eloquence; gallant men jousted each other on steeds and the not-so-gallant ones serenaded their fair maidens to win them and on rejection lamented: “La Belle Dame sans Mercy.” With the ‘French Fry’ revolution the mooney thoughts disappeared, while loony antics still prevail. Seemingly the mermaids and fair maidens have given way to maids. ‘Beauty is all very well at first sight but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house for three days?” (G.B.Shaw). The basis for such a disdain is unknown but statistics about eves who are in the house for more than three days even other than the ladies of the house prove Mr Shaw wrong. Son of a person holding a gubernatorial assignment was in the news for his dalliance with a maid; a ‘shiney’ career of an actor was grounded due to a maid. Ask any true blooded landlord of Punjab the importance of a maid in his life and the statistical figures will go into a tizzy. A potential presidential candidate of a European country lost out on his claim to the coveted post due to a maid. So instead of Mer-maids, now it is ‘Mar’-Maids. You die (mar) metaphorically, if you fall for her, and literally if you see the ensuing consequences that these gentleman faced when they discovered it was not a case of ‘Maid for each other’.
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Maestro who took ghazal to the masses
In
the crowded musical landscape that we Indians inherit, there are some landmarks which do not fade with time. Music lovers can recall when and how they were pulled to a compelling voice, they came to know as Jagjit Singh—the voice with a personality that remained indelible in their collective musical memories. Chitra Singh’s daughter, Monica once reminisced listening to Punjabi number maye-ni-maye at a neighbour’s house by Singh, when she was still a child, “ I was so moved by that song, I just sat down and wept ... it was the purity and intensity of his voice that touched me,” she recalled. She was not alone in spotting that singular moment down the memory lane.
Reviving ghazal
Singh came on the Indian music scene at a time when ghazal was fading from the ecology of Indian music. Stalwarts like Noor Jehan, Mallika Pukhraj and Begum Akhtar, whose voices resounded the grandeur of Urdu shayri in chaste diction and purity of classical music were perched on a crumbling edifice of time, bidding a slow adieu. With his baritone, hypnotic voice, Singh infused a fresh draught of oxygen to this dying genre, with his courageous and unique fusion— of the profoundest shayri of the masters of Urdu shayri like Ghalib, Meer, and Zouq in the contemporary text of music, using western instruments like the guitar, accordion, saxophone and violin. He also sang ghazals as duets with his singer wife Chitra Singh and made room for the other genres of music, which were dying due to the all pervasive reach of the music of Hindi films.
His courage paid sweet dividends. Poet Sudarshan Faakir, whose ghazals of varied hues were rendered by Singh once observed that ghazal lovers will be forever indebted to him for “ developing a new industry, the ghazal industry,” with its ancillary artistes, sound engineers, studios and poets. Urdu poets owe him a special place in their hearts, for he made it a practice to pay lyricists a part of his earnings. Composing new notes
There are many such unusual ‘notes’ in his musical journey that he traversed with élan, taking ‘risks’ as a norm. After the unprecedented success of the first solo album titled ‘Unforgettables’(1975) composed and sung by a couple for the first time in India and which changed the way ghazals were rendered, he interpreted Punjabi poet Shiv Kumar Batalwi’s poetry in Birha Da Sultan. The mellifluous rendering of Batalvi’s sad verses haunted listeners for decades. Jagjit and Chitra then composed and sang the first-ever double album, ‘Come Alive’, followed by ‘Live at Wembley’ and ‘Live at Royal Albert Hall’, altering the destiny of ghazal. They became one of the most sought after singers in the international concert circuit, their shows were sold out in advance. This was unprecedented for a non-filmy singer of the Indian origin. Surprisingly, this lover of sophisticated Urdu poetry came from a simple Punjabi family from Sriganganagar, Rajasthan, and was named Jagmohan at birth. His devout Sikh father rechristened him Jagjit on the advice of his Namdhari guru, who spotted his talent. Accordingly, his father got him to train under a blind teacher, Pandit Chhaganlal Sharma, and later, under Ustad Jamal Khan of the Senia gharaana (a school of traditional Hindustani music). He used to sing shabads (devotional Sikh hymns) in Gurdwaras and processions on birthdays of the Sikh gurus from a very young age. Though, initially he aspired to become a playback singer for the Hindi films, the failure of Bollywood to offer him work turned out to be a boon for ghazals. Later he composed and sang some of the most memorable numbers for celluloid in Arth, Saath Saath and Prem Geet. His compositions for the TV serial Ghalib became a milestone for musicals, for all times to come.
Music was his solace
At the peak of his commercial success, he lost his 18-year-old only son in a car accident, which turned him to devotional music. He infused devotional music too with fresh flavour by adding traditional kirtans, shabads and prayers ( Cry for Cry, Maa, Krishna etc) to it. His wife Chitra Singh did not sing after their son's demise, barring for the album 'Someone Somewhere' which was produced to commemorate his memory.
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I had heard Jagjit Singh in the 80s, singing baat niklegi to phir…with guitar, which was a path-breaking stylistic device, to give ghazal a new body. When I was making
Arth, I felt only he could capture my emotional sub-text , only he could translate it into music for me. That’s when I asked him to compose music and sing for
Arth. We made a deadly combination- me, Jagjit and kaifi ( Azmi). Early morning we would assemble at Kaifi’s place, and Jagjit would come in his old Fiat car with his guitar. He would just inhale Kaifi’s words and convert them into outstanding melodies. Whatever came first to his mind was always good— music came to him like leaves come to a tree, like stars come to the sky— effortlessly- from nowhere. He would compose music within minutes but took long to record, perfecting each minor detail. Arth wouldn’t have been Arth without
Jagjit. For the premier of Arth at Metro, audience clapped and chorused ‘once more’ after ‘jhuki jhuki si nazar’ came on screen. This was unparalleled, as though a singer was asked for an encore after the concert. ( Singh rendered evergreen numbers ‘tum itna jo muskura rahe ho’ and ‘jhuki jhuki si nazar’ for
Arth, a semi autobiographical film by Mahesh Bhatt, released in 1982).