Of songs, of pretence, of snobbery

IT feels good to listen to so many young people discussing culture and singing songs on television these days. Yes, there are too the ubiquitous competitions, in direct emulation (or imitation?) of everything that happens on all those Indian television channels. It is not always a comfortable feeling knowing that what you are seeing on your channels is what you have seen before on all those foreign channels.

If you have been fortunate enough to watch Strictly Come Dancing on BBC, you simply do not enjoy the Indian version of it on the Hindi channels. The original is always the best. There is hardly any question about it. Even so, how many of us get to see the original? Indeed, how many among us know that there was American Idol long before we were overwhelmed by Indian Idol? These are questions you cannot always answer. More importantly, these are the reasons why a handful of us ought not to grudge the multitudes the happiness they derive from watching the copycat productions of cultural images at the local level here.

Let there be, therefore, a largeness of the soul in us. And yet, when you sit down at the end of the day before your television set in an attempt to draw something of entertainment from it, you run the risk of getting into a feeling of sheer tedium or outrage. It is up to you to decide which attitude you would like to adopt. But consider this: the young woman who comperes a program, in affected Bengali, and attired in what appears to be a cowboy suit, does not know that it is her very appearance that pushes viewers into surfing a few other channels rather than keeping themselves glued to her one. And she is not the only one to blame.

There are others, people more sedate (or supposedly so) than her. They come across, initially, as young Bengalis who certainly could emerge someday as the epitome of national culture. You observe them; and there is something of pride which you feel inside you. But then everything appears to collapse. And it does because of the deliberate, absolutely uncalled for manner in which they begin resorting to the use of English terms when there is certainly no need for it. There are, ladies and gentlemen, perfectly good and purposeful terms in the Bengali language for these people to explain their points of view. Why must they resort to snobbery then?

Yes, it is snobbery when you speak Bengali with a foreign accent. It is snobbery when you want your audience to know that you do have a stock of English words you can throw around in abandon. And chances are most of these people in love with selective English will be at sea when it comes to formulating a whole sentence in English. Ah, but how many are there among us who know the difference between ego and intelligence?

Take the instance of the young woman (and she has a reputation as a well-known music maker in town) who called up the participants on a television music show (there were three of them) the other night to tell them how well they were doing. That was all right. But what certainly was not all right was her long statement of praise, in the course of which she did not forget to focus on her own performance (and she used that term "performance" rather its Bengali substitute) at some recent programs. That was self-serving.

It was also grossly insulting to the audience, who simply wanted the conversation to end so that the songs could continue. The lady would not stop, though, and went on addressing two of the participants (both women) by their nicknames. That produced a coy response from one of them: "Hey, you are revealing my nickname to everyone. I will do the same about about you." Professionalism went missing. It always does when snobs take over.

And that, my friends, is one more instance of snobbery for you. Being snobbish is being elitist. It consists in letting people know how highly you think of yourself, how desperate you are about singing your own praises. Snobbery comes through the facility with which you drop names. You know everyone who is anyone in the country. Think of that particular Bengali immigrant in Britain. You name anyone of consequence from Sylhet and he will do the rest. Every one of them is related to him by some means or the other. Not bad, is it?

But let us go back to this matter of music. There are far too many among us who decide, on impulse and in public, to try their hands (and their voices) at singing Urdu ghazals and Hindi songs. Now, enthusiasm is one thing and public demonstration of it is quite another. Why sing Jagjit Singh's "wo kaghaz ki kashti wo barish ka paani" if your kaghaz mutates into kagaj? Why make it a point, as you sing, to let the audience know repeatedly who you sired you years ago? Why sing "dum-a-dum mast Qalandar" before people and hear their deafening roar of approval without letting them know that long before you it was artistes like Noor Jehan who sang that song? You sing old, charming numbers from Ferdousi Rahman and Abdul Jabbar and are content to have your fans live in the illusion that the songs are yours. That is not nice. It is theft. It is highway robbery. It is pretence mingling with pretension. It destroys poetry.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk