The end of the day

Inevitably, for artistes the end of the day comes at one point or the other. For many in our society, it is a cruel one. Roohi Bano is one example. An actor who enthralled millions of fans through the 1970s and into the 80s lives in a state of psychological illness, in a dilapidated house which she has attempted to burn down, unable to care for herself or afford the help that she requires.
Her fate has largely been ignored, a situation worsened after the mysterious murder of her son many years ago. The state, the main patron for performers and artistes in nations that care more about such things, has of course ignored her. But so has society – and much of the entertainment industry itself.
She seems to have been shunned too by her clan of half siblings, the most prominent among them Ustad Zakir Hussain, the US-based table player who has an enormous following and teaches music at top institutions in the US. His father, Ustad Allah Rakha, was also Roohi’s father – but though this story has appeared in the Indian press, there seems to have been no attempt by the family to extend a hand towards a sibling now in urgent need of help.
It is true individuals in Lahore have made attempts to help Roohi. There have also been efforts from outside the country. Such philanthropy is not uncommon and is what keeps much of our society running. People extend help in quiet ways, where and when they can.
But we should be seeing more of this and more efforts to come to the aid of an actor who also seems to have become the target of television show hosts who call her on shows as a way to draw audiences by presenting her as one would a freak show. The horror of this seems not to have moved too many. We are then an essentially cruel society, unwilling to help when it is badly required.
Other persons from the world of the performing arts have met much the same fate. Money for the late Mehdi Hassan, the ghazal maestro who had a huge fan following across the Subcontinent, was raised by the late Jagjit Singh from India to help him through his last years of sickness rather than at home. His failing health seemed to have bothered very few.
We see the same lack of appreciation in the case of Ustad Fateh Ali Khan who is also in failing health and in need of financial assistance. Yes, there are some who offer this. But with classical music having quite deliberately been killed within a country which does not care about its heritage and has been unable to come up with sponsors for the arts, many are not even familiar with the name of perhaps the greatest classical singer our country has known.
There are many other examples. The question we ask is: where will this take us? What road are we headed along? We need to think very carefully about this. Why are we so indifferent to the plight of those who form an important part of all that lies within our culture and all that introduces elements of joy in our lives? So many of these persons have been discarded – once they are no longer capable of living independently or once their art is no longer needed.
The cruelty comes in other realms too. There are many stories of artists who died in abject poverty, in some cases almost literally of hunger. They found no one during their lifetimes to help them manage or promote the art work that today hangs in some of the world’s most famous galleries. This is too a tragedy and there are many performers from the world of film who have met the same fate as well as directors of music and those from the field of sports who have at times had to sell medals in order to survive.
Wrestlers rank among these. An Olympic medallist today runs a tiny food cart along one of Lahore’s busiest roads, attempting to survive and telling tales of the days when the sport was respected as an important tradition with patrons who nurtured talent within what is one of the oldest sports in the world.
Athletes, hockey players and others have faced a similar lack of willingness to offer them respect for what they have achieved wearing the colours of their country.
The building of respect is a process that needs to begin early in life. We have managed to construct a society that is essentially self-centred and distorted in many ways. Talent is rarely nurtured. Instead, there is an effort to pull down those who possess it. Why this is so is not easy to understand – and to make matters worse, a strange sense of warped pride means that we refuse to accept help even when it is offered. An example of this comes in a recent offer to the Pakistan Hockey Federation from Hockey India to help the latter fund a national training camp it had been forced to close down because of a lack of money to pay players and coaches their daily allowances.
The generous offer from across the border was refused on the grounds of patriotism and a statement saying that assistance from an ‘enemy country’ would not be accepted. When we cannot do something for ourselves, surely there is no harm in allowing others to help. This is simply foolishness of the worst kind.
The question is why we have come to a point where we have no money for music, for the performing arts, for art or for sport. Why are we not able to understand that these realms take up an important niche in society and that expertise within them belongs to only a rare few? The issue is one which needs to be taken up at the governmental level. Many nations have been able to find corporate sponsors in all these fields. Certainly, we have companies that would be willing to emulate the examples found elsewhere if they were persuaded to do so.
The problem is the lack of willingness and commitment to work towards this. There is no readiness to create change and to construct for ourselves a better place in the world as a nation capable of continuing to produce excellence in different spheres.
Musicians such as the late Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali have brought global audiences to their concerts in the past. There are others with the potential to do the same in our country. But by failing to offer them encouragement, we are failing ourselves and holding back what could belong to us collectively as nation. We need to generate greater sensitivity towards the culture that we have inherited and the abilities that our people possess in many different areas.
Society as a whole is responsible for this. The selfishness within us has grown over the years and has now reached a point where it has begun to strangle us and hold us back further and further. We must break away from this net and find the freedom to perform and to offer the encouragement that people need to excel in areas which are not always respected in an increasingly narrow and closed society where myths of various kinds have taken over, combined with blind commercialism rather than any other qualities.
The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.
Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com