Ustad Zakir Hussain

 

A few days ago, I woke up to the news of the passing of Ustad Zakir Hussain. Much encomiums can be read all over the place and I will not add to them. I just want to reminisce about my two encounters with him. The second one shows the kind of impact he had.

The first time I listened to ZH live was in January 1981, in an old college in Mumbai, I do not remember which. I am certain about the year because there was a concert of Pt. Ravi Shankar after the concert in which ZH played. Before Ravi Shankar’s concert started the emcee announced that he had been awarded the Padma Vibhushan. That news was received by the large audience with a very lengthy round of applause.

Coming to ZH, he was accompanying Dr N Rajam and her daughter Sangeetha Shankar in a violin concert. During that concert, there was a long sawal-jawab between Sangeetha and ZH. It turned out extremely well. The audience, mostly college students, cheered, clapped, whistled, and hooted as if that dramatic exchange was a romantic conversation between two of their peers that they had overheard and were teasing them about it. And all on stage enjoyed it though Sangeetha herself appeared extremely abashed

The second time I heard him live was in the year 1987 when I was doing my MTech at IIT Kharagapur. It was January and the famous Spring Fest of IIT Kgp was on. Since my friends knew my interest in classical music, as the day of a much awaited concert approached, many asked me something like, “Surely, you are going to the Zakir Hussain concert.” I felt a little bad because it was a Santoor concert of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, accompanied on the Tabla by ZH. I also overheard people talking about the Zakir Hussain concert in the cafeteria and so on. That shows how famous he was among the youth.

On the day of the concert a few student organisers of the Spring Fest came to me with a peculiar request. They wanted me to attend the concert in “fancy dress” - dressed in tight fitting pyjamas and a long kurta and a shawl draped over it. They also wanted me to sit at the very front. They wanted me to play the role of one of the cognoscenti. I could oblige but for the fact that I did not have a suitable pyjama. They went out and fetched one - from another student - washed and freshly ironed. There were a couple of other students who knew classical music - another Veene player and a Sarod player. They were reluctant to wear the fancy dress and hence it was only me.

I wore the clothes and thanks to them, I had the opportunity to go to the wings of the stage and talk to and spend some time with the artistes as they waited for the event that was going on to end so that they could start their concert.

I am not very knowledgeable about the percussive arts. However, I am a great admirer of Pandit Yogesh Shamsi. The great respect and awe with which he talks about Zakir Hussain (and of course, his father Ustad Allah Rakha) I can get an idea how good they were.

 

Cold Play Leaves Me Cold

It was the mid-seventies. I was an engineering student in Mysore. I was an avid concert goer and listened to a lot of music on the radio and also read a lot about music – Karnatak, Hindustani, Western classical and Jazz. So, it is no surprise that when I read about a sitar concert by Pandit Ravi Shankar in Bangalore. The lowest priced ticket was Ten rupees. I could perhaps travel to Bangalore and be back with an expenditure of twenty rupees. So, it sounded doable.

With great hope, I asked my father if I could attend the concert. He said with great calm and decisiveness, he said, “One should not spend that kind of money on entertainment.” Period.

I was terribly disappointed. But the decision was final – in one sentence.

So, you can understand my disbelief when I read this in the morning today: There will be three concerts by the rock band Cold Play in Mumbai in January 2025. The ticket sales started yesterday online by Book My Show. The tickets were sold out in two minutes in spite of the server crashing. Within minutes, and according to some reports – even before the sales opened – resellers were offering tickets at a whopping 900, 000 rupees. Yes, you read right.

Reports say that computer savvy geeks have created bots to buy the tickets within seconds of the sales opening. What I can’t understand is why anyone wants to attend the concert in the first place. Former fans of the band tell me that the band leaves them cold and it no longer “rocks” and they sound repetitive.  

Shakes head . . .

 

Traffic and Gunfire

 

I was at a dinner, a curtain raiser to a conference, with my fellow intellectual property professionals from all over the world. It was a “networking opportunity” as they say in corporatese. I started chatting with a husband and wife pair from the US. Both of them were IP professionals. After the introductions, and collecting our drinks, the talk turned to the chaotic traffic in India, Bangalore in particular. This was their first time in India and they recounted their experiences of the unruly traffic. They said they could not understand why people honked so much. I joined them in sharing horror stories about traffic in India.

While we were at this, a handsome African American gentleman, from Detroit, working for clients from the automotive industry, joined us. He quickly joined the traffic-horror-story bandwagon. Familiarity, perhaps, does breed contempt. Though they were very polite at first, their condescension started coming to the surface. I was really surprised when the newcomer complained, “I am amazed that I have to go through metal detectors whenever I enter hotels in India. My bags are x-rayed! What are they thinking? Do they think I would be carrying a bomb?”

However bad Indian driving may be, however ready I may be to be critical of it, this was really crossing a line. I quietly told him: “It is not to check if you are carrying any explosives, but to ensure that no one is. It is actually to protect you. This is a high profile hotel (Marriott) and may reasonably be expected to be a terrorist target. So, there is nothing surprising about all these precautions, don’t you think?” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, it is still strange to me!”

I told him: “Well, I am surprised that you are surprised. I can’t even imagine that in the US there are schools with metal detectors because the kids may be carrying firearms. When I was in school, I had not even seen a firearm,  except in parades.” This hit home more than I had anticipated. The Chicagoan said, sheepishly, that it was true and he had studied at such a school! I was surprised that he admitted that.

I wanted these people to know that however superior they may feel to the rest of the world, they do not live in a perfect country, either. I continued and said, “Well, you find it difficult to understand Indian traffic. I don’t understand the American gun culture at all - if culture is the right word to describe it. Thousands of innocent people are killed and you don’t do anything about it! School shootings, public shootings, and what not. Everyone claims that they have a gun to protect themselves and as a deterrent. If that were the case, America would be the safest place in the world. But it is the most unsafe in this respect. So, I understand that you do not understand many things Indian. No one understands many things American.

Now the couple admit that they own a gun too and looked as if they wanted to change the subject. I swallowed the last of the beer in my glass and said, “Ready for dinner?” They were. Now I donned the role of a culinary guide on Indian food. “No. No one eats such food at home every day. No, all this is north Indian food and South Indian food is very different  . . .”

Thinking about the shootings, what is less comprehensible is the inane (or do I mean insane?) words of politicians. “The victims are in our thoughts. We pray for them.” Fat lot of good it does to the victims, and more cruelly, to the bereaved families. What could actually be done – greater controls on gun purchases, let alone eliminating them, is never on the agenda!

 

 

 

PS. I used to blog fairly regularly a long time ago. That was when reading was a major part of my day job. Then, writing became the major part and I had stopped blogging. I had been planning to write this up often – as often as the regular, almost ritualistic, bloodletting-through-gunfire, that America indulges in. The latest one did trigger me into action.