Metallica, the Meltdown in Delhi

Photo Courtesy: Zabeeh Afaque/ Hindustan Times

Writer's Note: This piece comes more than two weeks too late following the cancellation of Metallica concert in Gurgaon, Haryana (India). 

There is an uncanny resemblance between the flow of music and material goods from the hierarchy of the First World to the Third. Sarojini Nagar Market & the Western Music scene in India are two cases in point. Both sell market rejects.

Bear with me oh self proclaimed metal head (with the claim of knowing all discographies; also easily available in Wikipedia), for I have nothing against metal and certainly am a bigger junkie for shopping outside of showrooms. But it does eat away at my soul when mostly the ‘Has Beens’ of the music industry come and ‘grace’ us with their presence. When Prodigy successfully performed in Gurgaon earlier this year, I was just puzzled why a Coldplay, System of a Down or an Adele won’t play in town. Furthermore, I was bewildered by the number of “dedicated” Prodigy fans that cropped up as if they all decided to come out of the closet after all these years once the show was announced.

They say it takes 10 years for masses in India to catch up with international music acts and in another ten, once the act wears off from the contemporary scene of the Billboards and the Grammys, its time to relive their past glory in the land of ashrams, spirituality and suckers who call music by Aqua evergreen.

Now I won’t go into some fourfold analysis into why and how the concert was a success in Bangalore, known to host more and better rock acts than the NCR region ever has. For a deeper analysis on the factors that failed in Delhi, you may like to refer to Abhiroop Datta’s, a disgruntled yet hopeful fan, detailed account of the event, pre and post.

Sanya Rai Gupta, who attended the shows in both cities, said, “I felt that the Bangalore gig was way more organized, in terms of the waiting time, the crowds and the timing. Metallica played for about two hours, and there was a short gap between when they started playing and the opening bands stopped...but the crowds were pretty enthusiastic and patient.” Yet, no one can assume with confidence if the audience in Bangalore would have reacted the same, if the management had subjected them to the same debacle that Delhiites faced.  

There have been multiple observations and commentaries on the mobs and the vandalism, some sympathizing with their frustration, others delineating via dialects how they were, in fact, not from around town. Amongst all the arguments in the debate whether it was the management versus the crowd to be blamed or the Delhi against Bangalore rock culture, the words of Blogger Rahul Sarin most strongly agreed with me, when he said:

You on the other hand, dear band members, were sitting in your hotel room, comfortably. You did not have the courtesy to apologize to your fans. Your crew treated the audience like dogs by hurling abuses at them and insulting them. Had this been USA, UK or any other nation for that matter, you’d have not dare messed with the audience by way of insults. 

Given my apparent prejudice towards Delhiites, the failure of a Metallica concert turning into mob madness would have normally amused the sadist in me. However, in the spirit of justice and value for entertainment, I personally (despite my physical absence from the scene) felt ragged by the unapologetic attitude of the management, the band and the crew. Media reports claimed that the band refused to play out of concern for the safety and security of the audience. Accepted but in a better PR exercise, they should have issued a more consolatory press statement and reached out to their fans via Twitter. Lady Gaga, another visiting artist in India for the Formula 1, does not have the largest Twitter followers for no reason!

Photo Courtesy: Zabeeh Afaque/ Hindustan Times

We no longer inhabit a world where artists, celebrities or even the Government can maintain a snooty distance from the public and remain inaccessible to their fans. Thanks to Social Media, Jasmine revolution for democracy in the Middle East and rising fuel prices, voices don’t just come out in small circles but explode in the World Wide Web.

The NCR region has held many events on a much larger scale than any other metro in the country combined. The Metallica mishap came in an unfortunate series of events that is more of an isolated incident than routine and the culprits have been brought to task. True that such follies being committed in a Pandit Ravi Shankar concert or a ‘Daler Mehendi Live’ is less imaginable and a band like Metallica is but once in a lifetime opportunity. For all such reasons, the sentiments of the crowd are more understandable than the excuses made by the management.    

*All images are under the copyright ownership of Zabeeh Afaque. 

His honour to kill and her fate to die?

We call our nation Bharat Mata, Dharti Maa. We worship many Goddesses. However, we revere them on conditions of ‘purity’ and ‘chastity’. 

This feminine idolization or idealization doesn’t quite settle. Economically we’re booming but culturally still misfits; not as per the norms of the ‘Great White Man’ but even by our own ‘Asiatic’ standards of adaptation in a global village and by universal standards of human rights.

The recent rise in reports of young men and women being murdered in the name of honour has been crucial in throwing light on a long continuing trend that the local law, for reasons of both corruption and tradition, have kept under wraps; and the urban educated had until recently become oblivious to.The exposure of honour crimes has been a serious reality check - barely 5 kilometers from the fringes of our flourishing cities thrives an alien culture.

Honour - A word that spells collectivism not only in definition but to a greater degree also patriarchal in an Indian context. Instances of women dying in the name of honour have been witnessed through history in a multitude of forms. The earliest that one recalls is the now abolished Sati, legitimately practiced pre-independence, when women threw themselves or were thrown in the funeral pyre of their husbands.

One shudders to recall the chaos of the India-Pakistan partition during which women’s bodies became the site of offense and defamation. Most female victims in the massacre died by their own hands. Urvashi Butalia, in her book ‘The Other Side of Silence’ which recounts survivor experiences of partition from a feminist perspective, talks about the status of women who willingly killed themselves to save their own or their family’s honour, and women who were abducted by mobs from either side of the border. Survivors, mostly male, emphasized the ‘heroic’ and ‘valorous’ aspects of these tragic deaths as she observes, “…while abducted women entered the realm of silence, women who were killed by families, or who took their own lives, entered the realm of martyrdom”.

A remarkable movie that dealt with the subject matter of women's sexuality subject to honour and violation during the India-Pakistan partition

What gets purported in the repeated incidence of such acts and society’s legitimate acceptance towards them is the psyche of the woman being the bearer of family honour, dictated by masculine prudence. It is not to say only women come under the knife or bullet for supposedly dishonoring their families. News reports show both lovers being slaughtered for committing the forbidden. On April 4, 2009 Reuters had reported the honor killing of four gay men in the Sadr city slum of Baghdad. Men, too, are paying an equal, if not heavier, price for patriarchy.

Courtesy front pages and breaking news, honour killing has become the intellectual subject of a human rights debate. At this moment, however, more judgments are being passed where answers aren’t available, which is, again, a sad consequence of reportage. Speed trials and judgments deliver justice in time but do not prevent recurrence of the crime. More questions need to be raised, sensitively and sensibly. Only by addressing the issue from within will we be able to gauge more reasonably this culture of violence against women, something that the criminal justice system does insufficiently.

In the contemporary scenario of honour killings, two fresh angles are being recorded. One - women are neither silent nor passive spectators in such incidences. The abhorrent case of Delhi based journalist Nirupama Pathak’s own mother doing the dirty job questions the theory of maternal instincts against all odds. In an interview to Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), Rana Husseini, author of "Murder in the Name of Honor", on the role of women in honour killings said that they are usually divided into a) those who don’t have a say in the issue; if they stand up and speak, they might get killed themselves. That’s how they wind up as accomplices, b) others who really believe that the woman should be punished and that it will be a lesson to others in the family.

                                                    The second focuses on the system of castes and communities like the Khap Panchayat who glorify such crimes as their moral duty in preserving the sanctity of their community. There are debatable theories of ‘sick societies’ and in situations like these, it’s a real struggle to draw a line between mental health and cultural sanction. Is it more disturbing to think that it was a collective stand or that it didn’t prick their conscience? Further, the question here is if conscience is embedded in morality, which is certainly more culturally defined, or independent from it.

Writing for The Times of India, Madhu Kishwar sought to protect the rights of any community like the Khap Panchayat to, “insist on the right to decide for itself what aspects of tradition they wish to cherish and what they wish to discard or reform, provided its leaders can enforce community norms through democratic consensus”. 

Rightfully, such a negotiation must be worked out wherein a sensitive approach is taken, one which does not lambaste community norms and cultural sentiments nor puts caste adjudicators on such a high horse where they decide who lives or dies in shame or honor.

The highlight on the murder of the Delhi based journalist, Nirupama Pathak, who came from a family with an impressive educational profile, also forces us to identify the line that many Indians demarcate between ‘education for occupation’ and ‘tradition for living’. Are we essentially the same people from the period when Granths and Vedas were written, only with touch screen devices now to read them from? Isn’t ‘honour killing’ a practice no less cruel than Sati was?

Northern states like Delhi, Punjab and Haryana have the fastest growing economic and social enterprises; yet the sex ratio remains abhorrently skewed. On the far end, although the eastern and north eastern states of the country continue to struggle with sufficient economic provisions, let alone investments; dowry death, rapes or honour killings were somehow never a part of their contemporary history. These places are yet to progress to a level that can provide more than the traditional opportunities for women, but they are not currently debarred from the existing options in occupation or education. Rather than looking west, some of these sex skewed states could more realistically emulate their own neighbours…their own brethren.

It is imperative here to understand two ideas in the context of integration. One, for the development of any state wherein infrastructural growth must accompany (or at least be followed by) cultural revolution or else the gap widens and development becomes like a hollow, empty barrel with a superficial crust. And the other is of national integration via communication and cultural exchange.

Despite the multitude of reasons and contexts in which honor killings take place, it should be repeatedly reminded that the supreme courts are above all local laws and cultural collectives and that the only exception to murder is self defense, not ‘honour’. 

Originally posted on 5th July, 2010 in The Alternative 

"Being Indian is my comfort zone"

A couple of eventful days back, my professor in class (who also happens to be my thesis advisor), in preparing for a presentation in a forthcoming international conference, threw at us a very rhetorical question, or so I label it.

"Tell me, what does it mean to be an Indian? What are the things that represent India? What comes to your mind, an image or a thought, instantly in relation to the word?"

As rhetorical as many questions are, that come up in our lectures and discussions, we also are as proportionally an automated lot. A very few pertinent answers came, like this one that commented on an Indian's heightened respect for fulfilling obligations, but a lot more stereotypical answers came forward, which was less to my surprise and more to my disappointment.

I suppose we resent it so much when foreigners (mostly we think WHITES!) assume we still go get our milk on our pet elephants, however, we can't conjure anything more original than the typical Doordarshan images (think, paddy fields and a sun beater farmer) that we would strongly, or should we say more "traditionally", identify India with.

In my mind, my instantaneous response to the question was the façade of a mystic that India is often mistaken with (yes, I realize strong words) i.e. typical with a snake charmer while we are just as, if not more, business minded as any other cultures' day light robbers can be. As much as I still stick to the honesty and truth of this opinion, I do refrain from saying only this. Two reasons why.

a, I'm aware of my overbearing cynical tendency. b, it's never the whole truth if you haven't explored within, right?

So, I did the latter. And came to be realizing exactly what the title of this post is. How? Because when I thought of an alternative to the previous rhetoric (and I wasn't necessarily making an effort to be relatively positive), what then came to mind was a wide encompassing term, "confluence of cultures".

One of the only few well expressed opinions that came in the class was, "the sense of being an outsider in one's own country is unique to us".

The only way I could hit the right note with this rhetoric was by taking it from a personal angle because, (again, the points that follow!)

- no competing culture of the globalized world today is unadulterated.

- And India is not home to any one homogeneous culture, in addition to the much well known fact that it is inhabited by many varieties.

- one can hardly or even objectively speak of something which he is still a part of.

So adopting the rhetoric to my personal life, it, to my delightful surprise, created a hardwood bridge for my web of otherwise disconnected realities. Not being able to define where you come from or where your loyalties lie, is certainly not an envied position. Not being able to wholly identify with your family nor friends, who often belong to different backgrounds, can be quite challenging in defending your position and a lot of times, not being able to justifiably do so.

Herein I owe it to the broad generality of the term 'India' that cannot specify to mean any one thing. Even if it is alternatively called Hindustan which is to suggest it is the land of the Hindus, given the fact they are the majority, there are enough opportunities to punch holes in this definition too. And as much as I crib, and I'm not alone to, a lot about how unkindly one can be treated like a stranger or a hostile intruder, I know that psychologically as well as in physical reality, I was born an Indian and this is where my loyalties lie, with the fair amount of directed critique yet undeniable love.

Thus, being Indian is my safety net, my comfort zone.