....Of An Eid Unlike Any Other

   I won't beat about the bush, yesterday was Eid and it was brilliant. Not in the bountiful-meaty-goodness wali brilliant, the sitting-16-hours-in-front-of-the-PC brilliant.

  Ever since I've become enamoured of Qawwali, my hunter-gatherer instincts have resurged with an intensity not seen since the heady days of trying to download EVERY Dylan song I could find. With Qawwali, I have been trying in vain to collect recordings of some of the "ancients"; the pre-partition qawwals who were instrumental in establishing the popularity of recorded devotional music in the sub-continent.

 A bunch of very good friends dose out (very stingily) recordings of Mehboob Qawwal one or two mehfils per month; more on that in another post, but mostly I am left to scour messageboards, forums,Youtube and storage sites in search of anythin I can find. The sad bit is that there is precious little authentic research apart from the important work done by Professor Regula Qureshi. Special mention must go to her book, Sufi Music Of India And Pakistan; Sound, Context And Meaning In Qawwali; which will probably be the ONLY book I take with me to PMA.

 I've been hopping from website to website for a long long time with occasional success, but yesterday I hit the jackpot. Just like Spotify and it's promise of almost unlimited music, I stumbled onto a collection of ginormous scope, linked in a network with several other similar treasure troves. What I've found cannot be discussed at great length, but the absolute joy and awe I felt at listening to one of the earliest recording ever made in the subcontinent,and especially the absolutely delightful last 10 seconds , an 11 year old Ustad Salamat Ali Khan singing in praise of the Maharaja of Champanagar after the latter had completed a successful military campaign; a recording which redefines the phrase "child prodigy", and countless countless others is hard to put into words.

  Three magnificent recordings of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's father and uncle, half a dozen each of recordings of three of the most important qawwals from the earliest days of sound in India, a few of which feature a young and immensely talented Haji Ghulam Farid Sabri in his early days....... I have goosebumps just writing about them. If only I had gotten here a few days earlier, I would've had time to properly sift through the massive horde. But the urgency brought on by having to leave for PMA in 5 days (sigh) has brought on an odd,frenzied state where I'm exhausting myself from the hours spent in front of the PC, trying to taste if not digest, as much as I can.

 |Lets hope my taste buds can bear the strain.

  

.....Iqbal

"I sat by a stream and asked it;
'Why is it that you swallow up everything;
From the largest rocks to the tiniest needles,
But this broken branch floats on you,
When everything else drowns.'

"The stream thought a while, and spoke
'Do you think I am so heartless, so as to drown
Something that I have nourished with my own lifeblood ?'|"

Iqbal (or as they call him in Iran, Sheikh Eghbale Lahori). "Israare Khudi"

...Of Slight Surreality

 The Race Course jogging track here in Pindi is right next to the Army Graveyard, and right next to them is a huge bare piece of ground where at least 50 different groups of kids are playing cricket from sunrise to sunset. I usually jog there for half an hour every evening in a futile effort to lose some flab. The jogging track has at least twenty odd speakers hung on trees, all piping out meant-to-be-soothing Muzak that I'm blissfully unaware of thanks to my iPod.

 I don't think I need to tell anyone that The Big Lebowski is one of the best films ever made, and whoever put out the entire audio track of the movie out as a series of mp3 clips is a friggin' genius. I usually listen to the film as I jog. Today as I was coming out of the jogging track, with the last few minutes of the film playing in my ears, one of my favorite bits of dialogue came on ;



“Well I guess that’s how the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time"

 At that I took off my earbuds and saw a scene that might have come straight out of Lebowski. The jogging track speakers were blaring Muzak at full volume as a funeral was going on in the Graveyard. Just then one of the many batsmen at the cricket ground hit the ball high into the air, falling right onto the earthly remains of the deceased, lying on a charpaai in front of the congregation. 


.....Well, I guess that’s how the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time.

.....Of Nothing in Particular

 I saw Khalida Riyasat on TV today.

 She was laughing, but her eyes weren't.

 I miss Khalida Riyasat.

...Of A Week In Rehab

A week ago, when my finals were cut short mid-way and I was sent home because of the deteriorating security situation, I was none too pleased. This was in contrast to most of my classmates who thought that after a tough and slightly dispiriting start to the exams, a break was just what the doctor ordered.I however, didn't like a break in the tempo that I had grudgingly built up over the previous 20 days or so, plus I thought of a 10 day hiatus as only dragging the misery to beyond stretching point. On top of that, the elaborate plans I'd made for the post-exam holidays were in danger of getting mangled, most importantly the biannual pilgrimage to Lahore.

Therefore, I came home grumpy and planned to stay that way for the duration. There was, naturally no plan to study the first few days, and I was hard-pressed to come up with something to do over these ten days. I knew I could read two or three books over the next 5-6 days, but 20 days buried nose-deep in books had put me off the printed word for a while. Going out was out too, with every day bringing news of further bloodshed.

That's when I decided to go on a binge.

I have been downloading movies incessantly over the past six months or so, and with supply dwarfing demand, a huge backlog had built up. Plus I had several new ones on download too. The problem I have with movies is the same one Bill Bailey has with jokes, I lose commitment and tend to bail out on them. I have stacks upon stacks of DVDs, each chock-full of stuff I've downloaded but haven't had the time or the perseverence to sit through them. This was the perfect time however, to take the plunge. I substituted my 18-hour study sessions with 18-hour movie marathons, re-watching old favorites and discovering new ones. It is safe to say that I have absorbed more genius (and done more irreparable damage to my eyes) in the last 5 or 6 days than I've done ever before.

Now, as I head back to my hostels to get back to the nitty gritty, I can take stock of all the stuff I've watched and congratulate myself on so successfully flushing all the medical nonsense of the last 20 days clear out of my head, leaving me fresh and ready to finish the task ahead.

Here then, in a semi-organized form, is a list of everything I've watched in the last 6 days.If anyone wants a copy of any of these, I'd be very happy to oblige, after my exams are over, of course.

...............................................................................................................................

1. House MD, Season 6, Episodes 1-5

2.Parks & Recreation, Season 2, Episodes 1-5

3.Up

4.Coraline,Henry Selick

5.The Nightmare Before Christmas,Henry Selick

6.Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea,Hayao Miyazaki

7.Mien Liebster Friend-"My Best Friend",Werner Herzog

8.La Salaire De La Peur-"The Wages Of Fear",Henri-Georges Clouzot

9.The Battle Of Algiers,Gillo Pontecorvo

10.Do Bigha Zameen,Bimal Roy

11. The Apu Trilogy,Satyajit Ray

12. Awara,Raj Kapoor

13. The Usual Suspects,Bryan Singer

14.Glengarry Glen Ross,James Foley

15.Network, Sidney Lumet

16.Double Indemnity,Billy Wilder

17.High Noon,Fred Zinneman

18.Tenacious D in The Pick Of Destiny,Liam Lynch

19.A Fish Called Wanda,Charles Crichton and John Cleese

20.Ryan Giggs-True Red

21.Barton Fink,The Coen Brothers

22.Fargo,The Coen Brothers

23.O Brother! Where Art Thou,The Coen Brothers

24.Airplane, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker

25.Observe And Report,Jody Hill

26.Office Space,Mike Judge

27.The Apartment,Billy Wilder

28.My Man Godfrey,Gregory La Cava

29.The Third Man,Carol Reed

30.Rear Window,Alfred Hitchcock

31.King Kong(1933),Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoesdack

32.Frankenstein,James Whale

33.Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956),Don Siegel

34.Cool Hand Luke,Stuart Rosenberg


Cheers, and do spare a prayer for my exams !!