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The maestro in his home

Humra Quraishi met Pandit Ravi Shankar at his Delhi home before he moved to the US. This is her story.

I can never forget my first meeting with sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar. It was around the time of his 70th birthday, and as I sat sipping my tea at his Lodhi Estate home, I got so terribly nervous that the entire cup crashed to the carpet of his living room. With that disaster, my nervousness peaked to such an extent that I could barely ask more than the basic, customary questions.

But  Panditji had simply smiled and tried his best to make me feel at ease.

It was only after a longish gap that I’d mustered enough confidence to try and meet him again. This was in early 1993. He’d looked frailer and quite sad. He’d told me that he’d been left totally devastated by the recent death of his only son Shubo. That was the time he and his second wife Sukanya were planning to shift base from New Delhi to San Diego, California.

When I asked him why he was moving to the US, the couple gave me a set of reasons. “The mess in the country is painful for me. Even a place like Delhi is becoming unfit for living. With everything else, the pollution here is killing,” he said. Sukanya stood close by and added, “The politicians and pollution have finished the city. We have already bought a Spanish villa in California and now I’m doing it up my way.”

To that he’d added, “For me, the house is a very important place. Since I was 10, I have been travelling, living in hostels, so I value my home. That feeling of warmth, coupled with a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Nothing gaudy or vulgar. Somehow, I totally dislike the Delhi concept of showing off. A dignified, balanced and comfortable way of life is what I like.”

He went on to tell me details of the very first house he had built for himself in Benaras. “I don’t know why I decided to build that house in Benaras. Probably because I was born and brought up in that city…and though I’d built it in the early ‘70s, within years I decided to abandon it. All sorts of crude elements had sprung up around me, those decaying values stifled me, so I decided to shift out of Benaras. I’m not a fighter. I’m a musician and I can’t stand vulgar people, besure log.”

Their Lodhi Estate home was really simple. There wasn’t a trace of any ornate furniture, no porcelain ware, no elaborate bedroom bandobast. In fact, the only room which looked well done up was the music room; with sitars, surbahaars , tanpuras neatly placed in stands and the walls of this particular room adorned with prized photographs capturing Panditji with John Lennon, Uday  Shankar, Baba Allauddin, Pablo Casals, Mariam Anderson, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

The maestro’s bedroom had only a double bed and a fax machine in it. As we neared the puja  room, he told me, “This isn’t just a puja room but my private corner. This is where I meditate, do riyaz, pray. For me, religion is a very personal thing. I am certainly not ritualistic. In fact, like me, most musicians are broad-minded.

When I was 18, I went to live with my ustad, Baba Allauddin, and though he was a devout Muslim, his home in Madhya Pradesh’s Maiher was full of photographs of Kali, Krishna, Christ, Mary…music makes you more tolerant. I only wish our present-day politicians were more musically-inclined; then there’d be more harmony and not the present-day cacophony!”

I asked him, “If religion is so personal to you, why is there such a bold ‘Om’ inscribed on the very entrance gates to your home?”

He didn’t just explain this with words, but he also wrote in my notebook. I quote him, “Om or Aum is the primordial sacred sound that has been uttered, chanted and sung by yogis, musicians and the common man for thousands of years. In music, Omkar plays a very important and a very great part. Mian Tansen and his family gave great importance in their singing to the aalap, which starts with the words ‘Hari Om’. This gradually changes to nom, tom etc…To me, as a musician, this sound signifies a deep spiritual vibration, mentally as well as physically.”

 (Picture courtesy guardian.co.uk)

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Enough said

Help victims, not the accused

Humra Quraishi writes on the malaise of rape and how a lack of policing is helping rapists get away it.

Another gang rape has taken place in New Delhi. No, it’s not really surprising, for eve-teasing is so rampant there that no woman is actually safe on the roads or lanes of this city. After dusk, it’s risky for a woman to commute, unless of course, she is a top politician or a senior civil servant or Somebody Important, in which case she has adequate security as she goes about her daily tasks.

And before I write any further, let me mention that even young men and teenage boys are not safe in Delhi either. With this, another point that cannot be ignored is that people’s faith in cop and the policing system is nil. The average citizen is apprehensive about entering a police station to lodge a complaint, because that one act results in a hundred different offshoots, with him or her facing some unsavoury consequences. There are several horror stories to be told about the city’s lockups, the police thanas, the interrogation and detention centres. The worst crimes take place right there, under the watchful eyes of cops.

In fact, there are no records and statistics to show how many cop-rapists and molesters have been hanged thus far. They get away because of all the possible loopholes in this system.

So where do you and I go for help if we are molested or raped or eve-teased? It sure does require nerves of steel to report these crimes, and that’s why most of these crimes go unreported. Reporting them is, perhaps, the last resort for most people.

I am of the definite view that hanging is not the solution. Are we so short-sighted to think that hanging a couple of men will solve all crises, be it related to terrorism or rape? Death isn’t a remedy for such ills. Those off-with-your-head orders were fine when given by rulers of bygone days, because the rule of the law was paramount then. Here, when every fifth or sixth man is trying his level best to grab an opportunity to touch or intrude on a woman’s personal space, how many men can be hanged? We will upset the gender ratio if we hang every eve-teaser and rapist.

Another important point, which most of us ignore, is what we are seeing on the big and small screens today –  obnoxious item numbers, with even more obnoxious lyrics, and our top heroines dance in them without the slightest trace of embarrassment. There are disgusting image portrayals, but there doesn’t seem to be any effort being made to stop this kind of objectification.

Today the situation is so pathetic that we have moved backwards, beyond the medieval ages. If you are planning to move out of your Delhi home after dusk, you to yourself well and try and return before it gets late. Men friends or a male companion cannot be of much help if such a situation happens to you, because rapists attack in groups, and are often deranged with drink that only a policeman can probably stop them.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Picture courtesy ibnlive.com)

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Who will set these wrongs right?

RB Sreekumar, Godhra whistleblower, writes to the PM asking for probe into IAS and IPS officers’ actions during the carnage.
by Humra Quraishi

Come January, the names for the Padma Awards would be announced. I’m not too sure how the eventual winners are selected, but one underlying factor seems to be that high-flying, glamorous people always find a place on the lists.

What about the men and women who have tried to flow against the tide? Why don’t such individuals ever find a mention? Why don’t we honour men who have had the guts to take on the political mafia, and done it persistently, such as the first whistleblower cop of Gujarat, former DGP RB Sreekumar, who tried exposing his own chief minister Narendra Modi .

The 1971 batch IPS officer wrote an expose on December 6, in which he jotted down 50 misdeeds of the Modi Government. When I met him years ago, he’d categorically stated that if one sees skull caps or long flowing beards and burqas in a Modi-sponsored meet, then one mustn’t automatically assume that the wearers of these garments are Muslims. “RSS cadres are donning all this, putting up the façade of the typical ‘Muslim look’, to fool the masses that Muslims are tilting towards Modi and his men,” he’d said.

This is a very recent letter that Sreekumar has sent to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh:

‘Sub:- Request for study by LBS National Academy of Administration and SVP National Police Academy on the deviant acts of IAS and IPS officers during 2002 Gujarat riots.

Respected Sir,

Kindly find enclosed a copy of my representation to H E The Governor of Gujarat State, praying for initiation of punitive departmental action against State Govt. officials, who acted as collaborators to the planners and perpetrators of anti-minority carnage in 2002.

1. The riots enacted in nearly 1/3rd of geography of Gujarat, had left about 1,500 citizens killed, thousands injured, besides total destruction of many symbols of Islamic culture of medieval times.

2. IAS and IPS officers administering areas of high intensity violence had allegedly became patrons, promoters and facilitators to the planners, organisers, ground level mobilisers and foot soldiers of mass crimes against the Muslim citizens. These functionaries had, during riots, unabashedly and covertly dismantled the legal, administrative and regulatory architecture designed by the Criminal Procedure Code, Police Acts, Gujarat Police Manual and the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), streamlined through numerous Govt. Orders. Many officers have indulged in competitive sycophancy to carry out the illegal hidden agenda of the ruling party for achieving Hindu communal consolidation to get electoral dividends.

The State Govt. had rewarded most of them with out-of-turn promotions, post retirement assignments etc.

3. The culpable role of the enablers to brigands, who indulged in extensive manslaughter, taken by officials, has thrown up serious questions about the efficiency, quality and impact of training imparted to them by the LBS National Academy of Administration and SVP National Police Academy. Most of IPS and IAS officers are exposed to several skill acquisition programmes in affluent foreign countries also.

4. So far, no in-depth study, analysis and examination of the causative factors responsible for a series of deviant acts by IAS and IPS officers of Gujarat State, during riots and subsequently, have been done with the objective of recasting of their training agenda for re-motivating officers to be in tune with their oath to the letter, spirit and ethos of the Constitution of India, as envisaged in the Preamble and Article 51(A) of the Constitution. Currently many officers brazenly do pursue the unholy goal of self centered careerism at the cost of the Rule of Law.

5. In this context, I humbly request you to task LBS National Academy of Administration and SVP National Police Academy for urgently conducting an in-house exercise of comprehensive study about failure of a section of bureaucracy and police in Gujarat since the riots in 2002. The Apex Court had opined that, in 2002, the officers acted like “Modern Neros”, (Zahira Sheikh v/s The State of Gujarat) which had not only actualised widespread violence but also resulted in subversion of the Criminal Justice System (CJS) to deny and delay justice delivery to riot victim survivors.’

(Picture courtesy thehindu.com)

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Enough said

Confer with those who need help

Humra Quraishi writes about her disgust over international conferences that seek to include only the well-informed, upper classes of society.

I recently received an invite to the World Breastfeeding Conference 2012, and I confess, I was somewhat taken aback to see it. Hosted in New Delhi, it is said to have attracted 900 delegates from 86 nations.

No, I didn’t attend it. I didn’t feel the need to, not because I am no longer in the child-bearing or breastfeeding stage myself, but simply because I have long felt that such meets are hosted only for the ‘upper’ sections of society, or the ‘top drawer’, if you will, which is anyway well aware of the benefits of breast feeding.

Why couldn’t the organisers of this meet – The global Breastfeeding Initiative for Child Survival (gBICS), together with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Women and Child Development (GOI ) – hold this meet at some of the rural pockets and locales of the country? Why hold this in New Delhi and why in one of the posh locales of New Delhi? Why not in one of those outlying colonies or bastis and mohallas and jhuggi clusters, whose women may actually need the knowledge these conferences have to impart?

And what hits the most is the fact that Minister of Women and Child development, Krishna Tirath, does not seem to react when children and young teenagers are detained and arrested and harassed by the various security agencies in the police machinery. Why is there little to no intervention from the Government, and in particular, from this Ministry, when such incidents take place?

Stretching my disgust a little further, let me also add that Krishna Tirath should try walking on any of those stretches of New Delhi or commute by any of the public transport means available to the rest of us, and then see for herself what happens. As I have been writing all along all these years, it’s actually tough for a woman to walk on the streets of the capital city without being eve-teased. I am now middle-aged, but even I have to think twice before stepping out of my house in a sleeveless shirt, unless I throw on a long flowing dupatta to cover my arms and chest.

And in the midst of these basic realities, if we hold these fashionable conferences (or let’s just call them publicity-seeking meets), then there’s something, or maybe everything here, that just doesn’t jell together. These discrepancies between two Indias stand out so blatantly.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist and author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant. 

 

 

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Enough said

A fine gentleman

Humra Quraishi writes on the demise of IK Gujral, and what she first thinks of when she hears his name.

I heard the news of former Prime Minister IK Gujral’s demise, and the very first image that floated in my mind was of him and his poet wife Sheila strolling in the Lodi Gardens. They wouldn’t walk formally, like most married couples do, but like two close friends, hand in hand.

It was such a lovely sight to see the two together. This is not a tale of ancient times, but something that happened just about 12 years ago. I used to live in New Delhi then, and I’d go running towards those gardens to try and control my high blood sugar levels. And  whenever I would see this couple, I would stop and stare at them, sometimes for minutes. My own marriage was nearing a stage of collapse, and later it did collapse totally, so whenever I’d see couples in love walking in that romantic way, I‘d stare at them enviously.

But let me not get carried away with my romantic reminisces, and focus on IK Gujral in a wider, bigger way, as his younger brother, artist Satish Gujral has done in his  autobiography, A Brush With Life. There’s an entire chapter in this volume on Inder  Gujral titled ‘Friend and Brother’, and carried several political details and many important socio-political backgrounders. But if you were to know the actual traits of his personality, you must read the entire book, for it certainly brings out Inder Gujral as somebody who was always a class apart from the rest.

To quote Satish, “With my father’s indifference towards the household, the authority to  make decisions had passed on to my eldest brother, Inder. Though he was still in his teens, he was recognised as the heir apparent. He was not the first born child of our  parents, but the first to survive; my father doted on him. Inder had inherited many of his traits.

This affinity of temperament drew them close to one another…the audacity of spirit which Inder demonstrated when he took to politics was undoubtedly inherited from our  father. Inder was only ten years old when, like our parents, he courted arrest. Although he  was kept in the police station only for a night, his actions reassured my father that his son was following in his footsteps…”

The passages where Satish writes of his near-fatal accident in Pahalgam’s Lidder river – which left him severely injured and impaired his speech and hearing – brings out the  supportive role played by his brother Inder. In later years, Satish embarked on his artistic journey. “Inder found an art school in Lahore where I could learn drawing, painting, sculpting and much else…” And later when Satish shifted to Mayo, the bond between the brothers deepened.

“The one thing I could not stomach in Mayo’s hostel was tasteless and badly served food. My father, who knew how fussy I was about food, arranged for me to eat in Inder’s  hostel, which was only half a kilometre away. Joining my brother every day for meals brought us closer to each other. Besides eating with him, I learnt a great deal from him  about literature and poetry, and above all, how personality was moulded by  commitments.

He also sensed that my resentment and frustration at being handicapped was building up to a climatic rage, which, unless channelled into creative pursuits, would be my undoing. It was Inder who infused in me a fervour for social revolution. He felt that this would ease my burden and instil in me the hope of a better world.”

Humra Quraishi is a senior journalist and author of Kashmir: The Untold Story, and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

 

 

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Enough said

‘Amrita Shergill threatened to seduce me’

Khushwant Singh tells Humra Quraishi about his first love affair and how he could never make a pass at women.

I need to get something off my chest. I am disturbed by the upheaval taking place in the sexual lives and attitudes of us Indians. Divorce rates are going through the roof, singletons’ clubs are seeing more memberships. And everybody’s writing books – just yesterday, a newly-divorced friend cooed that she’s all set to make the most of the divorce by penning a book on it!

So it was very refreshing to catch up with Khushwant Singh, and I asked him if he thought sex education ought to be introduced at the school level. His reply was rather surprising. “It may lead to an early indulgence in sex…but then, it’s shocking to know that many adults don’t know a thing about sex, not even the basics.”

He went on, “My friend Prem Kirpal didn’t even know that women menstruate! In his 30s, he was attracted to a woman friend and wanted to get close to her, but she wouldn’t let him near her. The next day he told me that he couldn’t go ahead with her as she was wounded!”

He said that there was “too much sexual frustration in the country, leading to rapes and gang rapes,” and that the concept of ‘love’ in India was limited to “a tiny minority that prefers to speak English rather than Indian languages, read only English books, watch only Western movies and even dream in English.” He then added, with his usual candour, what love and seduction have meant for him. “It baffles me, why do women confide in me the way they do? Total strangers have rung me up to discuss their personal problems. They tell me of their inhibitions, their love affairs, their extramarital relationships. When it comes to women, I am a patient as well as an interested listener.”

And he dwelt on seduction. “Women do seduce. I have been seduced by women all my life, right from the time I was attracted to Ghayoor (it’s she who’d held my hand). Most women have made the first pass at me, led me on, with the exception of two women, where I took the lead.

Even when I was attracted to a woman, I had little confidence to make the first move. I was terribly flattered when women made a pass at me…looking back, I wish I had the confidence to make the first move, for I could have got closer to several women, like Amrita Shergill. In fact, Amrita had threatened to seduce me just to teach my wife a lesson, but she couldn’t carry out this threat because she died a few months later.”

The thing about Khushwant is, he never holds back. I asked him about his first intense love affair, and he said, “I was in college. She was a Muslim from Hyderabad and had to come to Delhi to study at the Lady Irwin College for a degree in Home Science. I was around 17 years old and Ghayoorunissa was three years older than me, and she was my sister’s friend. On one of those occasions when she, my sister and I had gone for a movie, she’d slipped her hand in mine. That alone meant a lot to me…I really loved her. Now she is dead…she died several years ago, and I went to Hyderabad when I heard of her demise, visited her grave and have been in touch with her daughter ever since.”

“Why didn’t you marry her?” I ask.

“I went to England and she went to Hyderabad and got married. I continued to meet her even after her marriage, and I was so in love with her that I was drawn to the entire Muslim community. I believe that when you fall in love, your perception of his or her community changes, you begin to feel closer to that community.”

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story, and co-author of Simply Khushwant. 

(Khushwant Singh picture courtesy caravanmagazine.com)

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