Cold evenings made emptier still

Islamabad diary

How does one inform the great Pakistani masses, the awam of political discourse, that as they play their juvenile games, obsessed with problems of the faith and the prospects of the hereafter, the rest of the world, heedless of their cries, goes in a different direction?
To cite just the latest scientific breakthrough: British scientists have found a way to store massive, unbelievable amounts of data in miniscule strands of DNA, the code of life...data amounting to, say, 70,000 Hollywood movies stored in DNA no bigger than a speck of dust. Mind-boggling, isn’t it? I mention this not because it is the only thing happening on the frontiers of science but because it is in the papers today.
Meanwhile look at us, masters as always of the ridiculous, killing in the name of the faith and performing other silly sacrifices at the same altar. Like the government of the Islamic Republic, clueless about everything else, striking another blow for the faith by continuing with the ban on YouTube. If there is a prize for asinine behaviour it goes to this.
The web is not about pornography or blasphemy. These are peripheral things, strings attached to it. The web is a storehouse of knowledge beyond the clouds, indeed up in the heavens, and each person gets from it what he/she desires.
Was it easy travelling to the great library of Alexandria? Is it easy looking up things in the British Museum? Well, it is easy unravelling the keys of the library in cyberspace. Just a click away is no longer a figure of speech; it is actual fact. But for reasons baffling to any remotely sane mind, a vital part of this library we have thought fit to slam shut the doors on, for obscure reasons of faith. Why, for a change, don’t we do something for obscure reasons of sanity?
Evenings out of kilter, that is what has happened. As evening fell and if there was a glass at hand, what a delight to perform a few clicks and there find S B John singing his timeless, “Tu jo nahi hai tu kuch bhi nahi hai”; or Saigal, or Noor Jahan. Rafi and Lata too. And the great ustads, a whole line of them, recordings that you thought never could have existed.
I got a call sometime back: “I am S B John.” Thinking it was some prankster I said if you are S B John I am Barhe Ghulam Ali Khan. But it turned out it was really the great man, so gracious and kind. We have to meet up in Karachi, a trip I have yet to make.
How I miss other things, Orson Welles for instance, reminiscing about the time he was playing Othello in the West End and Winston Churchill was in the front row. As the performance began Welles heard a low rumble which just wouldn’t go away. To Welles’s consternation it was Churchill repeating the lines without remorse. Later, Churchill came backstage and repeated Othello’s part word for word, laying special emphasis on the bits Welles had left out.
Anyone interested in acting or being on the stage should listen to Welles...the voice, the delivery, the twinkle in the eyes, the humour. Churchill had just presided over the greatest victory in modern times – Welles’s words – and, savour the luck of the draw, just been beaten in the elections. And there with his wife Clementine he was on holiday in Venice, cutting a lonely figure, without pomp or ceremony. Welles was there too with an Armenian financier from whom he was trying to hustle some money for a film he was making. At lunch as he and the Armenian passed by Churchill’s table, Churchill looking at Welles bowed slightly. The Armenian was blown out of his mind...enough to make him cough up the money.
The next morning as they were paddling in the water, Welles swam up to Churchill and said that his small gesture had meant so much for him. That day at lunch, as Welles and the Armenian entered the dining hall, Churchill got up from his chair and bowed deeply. What effect this had on the Armenian Welles does not say.
Richard Burton said something similar about Churchill in what used to be the talk show, Parkinson (all this a click away, when sense prevails and YouTube is back). He was playing Hamlet and one evening the manager said, be good because the Old Man was coming, everyone in England aware who the Old Man was. Burton became nervous. He says that he may not have been the best Hamlet but he was certainly the wettest, his hair standing on end and himself drenched in sweat.
When the performance began a low sound came from the front bench, Churchill repeating Hamlet’s lines. Burton tried shaking him off, going fast, going slow, but nothing worked. After the first act Churchill got up and the players to their relief thought they had lost him. There was a knock at Burton’s door and Churchill’s head came into view. “My Lord Hamlet,” said he, “may I use your bathroom?”
Burton came to know later that the Old Man knew 10 or 12 of the Bard’s plays by heart, first word to last. So the oratory and the cadences did not come from nowhere.
And there is so much of Peter Ustinov available, unforgettable TV appearances, so funny that even the dead would awake from their dreams. When it came to impersonation no one could beat him.
Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No 1...everyone knows about it. I seldom listen to the whole but the opening bars, the piano notes and then the swell of the orchestra, makes one’s goose pimples stand. There’s a recording of Van Cliburn at the Moscow Conservatoire...he had just won the Tchaikovsky Prize...and many more of Martha Argerich, the Argentinian player, especially in the first bloom of her years. All there. Military marches too, my favourite the Preobrazhensky March from Peter the Great’s time, now the slow march of the British Royal Marines.
When we were growing up the only music we had was on the radio or the occasional Grundig tape recorder which not everyone could afford. When I got hold of Beethoven’s Fifth on cassette I would play it over and over again because it was the only thing I had, plus a 70 rpm record of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. That’s all.
Look at the wealth of choices available now, thanks to the Internet and devices like the iPod. Who has assembled all these archives? (uploaded is the right term.) The more one sees the more one’s astonishment. Furtwangler conducting Wagner, the Meistersingers, or Beethoven, the Ninth, the war on and the Nazi elite listening in rapt attention...gives one an eerie feeling. Ballet recordings, some of them stupendous: the early Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Svetlana Zakharova, divine legs and incredible turns (pirouettes).
The point I am making is that you don’t have to go on an African safari to get all this. It’s there and so much more, treasure heaps awaiting discovery.
I myself am an amateur with no specialist knowledge of music, east or west. But to understand the power of music one does not have to be a specialist. One just needs the right ear. I have played the intermezzo from Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria rusticana to youngsters totally unfamiliar with the stuff and asked them what they felt. Invariably, they nodded their heads and said “great”. So with Mozart...always the thumbs up verdict. Yehudi Menuhin on the violin playing Schubert’s Ave Maria: one doesn’t have to be a musical genius to be moved by it.
Western classical music belongs to no one race. It is the common property of mankind. It did not help the Germans – who have produced such immortal music – to steer clear of the siren calls of Nazism. But more attention to music, more attention to the arts in general, may just help us to cleanse some of the nonsense now so ineradicable a part of the national psyche.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com