I’ve been to the Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium just once this T20 World Cup – the day of the double header of the Australia–Pakistan and India–West Indies matches. It was a long time to spend at the stadium, with bursts of cricket action interspersed with loudly announced commercials and even louder music.
And over all those hours, this thought kept striking me: this is all Bangla music, isn’t it? And people seem to be responding to it so well! So what was all that brouhaha about our music not being good enough to draw enough people for the T20 opening ceremony – oops forgive me, the Bangladesh Cricket Board celebration concert?
We just celebrated our 43rd Independence Day, and set a world record having more than 250,000 people simultaneously sing our national anthem. Before we go off into a tangent discussing the wisdom of spending what seems an exorbitant amount of state funds on this venture, my point here is that all those people turned up.
Now the conventional wisdom is that we have too many people who essentially have nothing better to do and will turn up for any event at the drop of a hat, especially if there is no expenditure involved, and most of us will admit there is some truth to this. But can we also hypothesise that out of these teeming thousands, some may have turned up out of a genuine sense of patriotism and a love of the national anthem? Perhaps, dare I say, a majority of them?
So if we shout our lungs out to our pop songs at cricket matches and turn up in droves to sing the national anthem, why is it that we think our music is not good enough for the opening ceremony of the most prestigious event our still-young nation has ever held?
Now I know this particular dead horse has been flogged ad nauseum over the past few weeks in print and in electronic and social media, but these recent events have led me to believe there’s life in the beast yet, so please indulge me a few more minutes by allowing a few more lusty swings, gentle reader. I promise not to try your patience too long.
From what I have seen, the groundswell of indignation and belligerence seems to fall into two distinct categories. The first group’s reaction smacked more than a little of bigotry and xenophobia: how dare we bring in foreigners (read Indians) to perform in a national celebration event! Why are state funds being splurged to aid the process of Hindi cultural aggression? So on and so forth until it’s more ugly than funny.
The second group concentrated its efforts on shaming the first, but not, to my mind, for the right reasons. O hypocrisy, they chimed. Why do you dance to Hindi music in your Gaye Holuds? Which channels do you tune in to in your vegetative state at the end of the day? Like leaders, you get the entertainers you deserve, you fickle, shallow lot; count your blessings that the great god of Bollywood music deigned to grace you with his awesomeness, in spite of you obviously being unworthy.
A local musician asked in his Facebook post, seething in righteous vexation, when the last time was that any of us had spent 60 taka to buy a Deshi musician’s CD. All valid questions and pertinent observations, to be sure, but as is our predilection when passions are inflamed and the rhetoric flies thick and fast, perhaps a trifle overblown.
Now in amongst all this carnage, other, somewhat quieter, voices were also heard. They argued that since it was a World Cup opening ceremony, or a celebration concert hosted by BCB, or whatever the heck it was, it was a perfect opportunity to showcase our culture. Or, if we wanted to be suitably politically correct about it, it should have featured performances from all corners of the Cricketing world.
Notable among these dissenters was Nazim Farhan Chowdhury, the advertising and media personality, with his view that Bangladesh has classical singers, playwrights, instrumentalists, dramatists, writers, humourists, designers and filmmakers to spare, not to mention modern dance icons like Akram Khan and fusion bands like Lokhkhi Tyara; more than enough ingredients, in other words, with which to whip up a savoury cultural broth for the world’s consumption, or at least those bits of it enamoured with this slapdash form of the inscrutable game.
It is this school of thought that I most see eye-to-eye with, but allow me to throw this radical idea into the mix: maybe our singers and musicians alone can pull off a show of this magnitude. And perhaps our people would turn up in the kind of numbers that would make the event a resounding success.
And my submission is that we would not even need expatriate Bangladeshi performers like Akram Khan or Lokhkhi Tyara to do this; nor would we need the film and media personalities Mr Chowdhury suggests to put on an elaborate show of the kind he has in mind. Our homegrown musicians would be able to put on a performance that would appeal across demographic and geographic boundaries; that would be eminently economically viable, and leave us feeling a lot better about it afterwards.
Consider this: we have singers the calibre of Subir Nandi, Kiran Chandra Roy, Farida Parveen, Chandana Mojumdar, Rezwana Chowdhury Banya, Rathindranath Roy – just to name a few. None of them performed at the opening ceremony. These are world-class performers who have mesmerised audiences everywhere.
What if they were to take the stage along with the likes of Runa Laila, Sabina Yasmeen, Momtaz, and Kumar Bishwajit – artists who did perform that day – and actually sing, as opposed to lip-syncing? What if they took the trouble to rehearse and collaborate? Would paying audiences choose to see that?
We have a glut of young musicians with very considerable following in the rock and hip-hop genres. Imagine a three-hour session where Cryptic Fate, Artcell, Aurthohin, Stoic Bliss, Chirkut, Nemesis, Lalon, Shironamheen, Warfaze and the reformed Bangla take to the stage one after the other. Would you pay to see that? I would.
And then you have the warhorses, the elder statesmen of what we so endearingly call ‘band music’: Souls, Miles, LRB, James with or without his band Nagarbaul. Folks who don’t get along particularly well, and whatever happened the day of the opening ceremony will not have helped matters, but they certainly have drawing power.
Matrons and college students alike know their entire songs by heart, although those college students may not want to admit it. What if we could get these venerable gentlemen to appear onstage together, play a few licks in each other’s tunes, maybe take turns at singing lead vocals? For those in the audience who absolutely had to have their Hindi music fix, James could even trot out his Mumbai melodies! Surely people would leave the comfort of their homes and brave the Dhaka traffic for this experience.
Now please do not get me wrong. I have enormous appreciation for the work of expatriate Bangladeshi performers, and count some of them among my friends. Nor is it my intention to disregard the contributions of the other types of creative people suggested by Mr Chowdhury.
My point simply is that we have such riches in terms of musical talent within the country that we could put together a glittering programme that would appeal across all demographics, and quite possibly across national boundaries, if we could manage to have them all in one place. In fact, it would be difficult to find the time for all of them to perform.
An important part of getting this kind of event right would be in the sequencing of performers. I would suggest the singers who do not perform with a full band – the quieter performances – should take the stage at the beginning, the younger bands in the middle, and the more ‘time-tested’ bands at the end.
Some may hold the view that the rock audience would get impatient during the more traditional performances - but people sit through, and warmly applaud, intimate, acoustic acts who perform before big rock stars at music festivals the world over. Given the quality of our solo performers and the much-loved nature of their oeuvre, I don’t see it being a problem here, either.
I can hear some people arguing that no one is going to pay seventy-five thousand taka to watch homegrown acts perform. My humble query to them would be: why did we have to price the tickets so high in the first place? Principally to pay for the expensive headlining acts, right? These performers would gladly put on a dazzling show for quite literally a fraction of the cost.
They would perform tight, professional sets that would feature their best-loved numbers, in contrast with the peculiar tone-deaf quality of AR Rahman’s set, who obviously misjudged audience tastes by featuring a whole suite of Sufi music in the middle of his performance. And they would perform live, in contrast with Akon who, as much as I loved his touching performance of “Ghetto,” was obviously lip-syncing in parts.
Besides which, I don’t know of a single person who paid seventy-five thousand taka for their ticket anyway. As is generally the case in Dhaka, those tickets were all ‘managed’ through someone influential. Twenty thousand taka tickets were going at about half that much hours before the show. And does it strike anyone else as faintly obscene that tickets for a mass-participation event were priced so high in a country such as ours?
All of which brings me to the core point of my ramblings: valuing what we have. Just what is it that makes us think a global audience would not appreciate our performers? Artists such as Farida Parveen or Bangla or Chirkut have played to adoring listeners overseas, often to people who did not understand the language. I listened to the outrageously talented Momtaz perform along with Labik Kamal Gaurob to the accompaniment of visiting Scottish musicians in a small gathering of primarily British nationals the other day, and it was quite apparent that there was not a single unmoved soul in the room.
We may not give ourselves the proper credit, but our music is soulful, resonant, opulent – quite capable of provoking stirring of the soul and tapping of the feet, in equal measures. As Atul Prasad Sen wrote all those years ago, there is magic in the Bangla song, and not just to our ears, but to everyone’s. We just have to let ourselves experience it.
After initially being left cold by it, I have grown fond of the T20 World Cup anthem composed by Fuad. It is insanely catchy and propulsively rhythmic, but that is only part of the reason for my liking it. I like the fact that the lyrics say Chaar chhokka hoi hoi, ball gorraiya gelo koi - not gorriye, but gorraiya. I like the fact that we are singing our songs our own way. We are at a cusp, ladies and gentlemen. Out of these tenuous elements, stitch by painstaking little stitch, are the tapestries of national identities woven.
The filmmaker Mostafa Sarwar Farooki – a gentlemen who has done a fair bit to introduce colloquial Bangla into the mainstream of our popular culture – remarked in a recent Facebook note he wrote that he doesn’t see Brazil filling the opening ceremony with US acts when they hold the football World Cup in their backyard.
As it turns out, US artists Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull will be performing there, but they will collaborate with Brazilian artist Claudia Leitte on the theme song at the ceremony. It will not be a situation where the US acts are the focus and the locals relegated to the sidelines. It is time we displayed the same faith in our own culture. Let’s know our songs well and start singing. The world will sing along.