East West Global

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A new addition to the list of East/West duets?

In the beginning there were the Ravi Shankars and the George Harrisons, .... singing of global peace.

Then there was the Pussy domination of "Jai Ho"(e), the signature tune of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, a song and dance number in which A.R. Rahman appeared subordinated by the PussyCat Dolls. 

The song had a purely aesthetic value and was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

The latest in the line of East West duet is Peter Gabriel and Atif Aslam's song from Mira Nair's 2012 movie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (based on the novel by Moshin Hamid).

The song is a beauty; the words sing of the individual's place in a world gone complex. It's a good place as long as the individual resists its commandeering by the forces that be.

As translated, the song is:

Speak, for your lips are yet free;
Speak, for your tongue is still your own;
Your lissom body yours alone;
Speak, your life is still your own.
Look into the blacksmith’s forge:
The flame blazes, the iron’s red;
Locks unfasten open-mouthed,
Every chain’s link springing wide.
Speak, a little time suffices
Before the tongue, the body die.
Speak, the truth is still alive;
Speak: say what you have to say.

Wither women?

Mahraganat (I may have misspelled it) is a popular form of street music in post-Arab Spring Cairo.

Poor young men from Cairo's poorest areas compose songs that sound like they're straight out of a Bollywood movie, but have real, meaningful lyrics about life and politics.

Politics, according to one of the popular singers is not just about big events like the Presidency (didn't E.M. Forster say the same?), but about the lives of ordinary folks. Politics, the singer says, is enacted every day in the slums where people struggle to keep their body and soul together.

This is all very excellent, but I noticed that this new form of youth-expression in Egypt is plagued by the old virus of segregation. There are no women in the wild gathering of young males, and the commentator says, somewhat discreetly, the women are celebrating "elsewhere."

The poor boy-singer who speaks bravely of life itself as politics, is blithely blind to the fact that separation of men and women too is part of that politics.     

"What's wrong in being fat?"

"Why is fat so onerous?" asks Jim Morrison, the Doors frontman (I almost said front door man!) in an interview above.

Morrison also says some eye-opening truths about food, consumption and the college cafeteria.

Death of a sitarist

Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist, died at the age of 92 in San Diego, California.

Just as it's difficult to talk about Gandhi, so it is with Ravi Shankar; both are too much of legends.

So I won't waste space describing what a genius Shankar was.

But I do wish there were an Andy Warhol-like figure immortalizing somebody like Shankar in a portrait as snazzy as that of Marilyn Monroe.

Alas, in India, legends are remembered differently--through dour hagiography.

Anyhow, so Shankar, I used to read growing up, had a certain irresistible charm. He successfully used that charm, not only to bowl over major Western musicians, but also the most talented and intelligent of women.

It is apt that he is survived by two gifted women--his two daughters, singer Norah Jones and virtuoso Anoushka Shankar Wright.

Oh and proud to say this: He was a Bengali.

Salute to the spirit, life and music of Robindro Shonkor Choudhury.  

Writing

Many writers fall prey to the quintessential American notion that bigger is better. They overload their sentences, adding more adjectives, more descriptions, more component phrases, tangents and appositives to form sprawling, syntactical centipedes (like this one) whose many segments and exhausting procession repeat themselves and say the same thing in different ways, with different words, and exhibit an entire ideology: that prose’s sensory and poetic impacts exist in direct proportion to the concentration of words. I know: I succumbed.

Aaron Gilbreath on how to compose prose like Mile Davis composes music.