User:Messart

AnOTHER indersalim.

Ye mana meri jan mohobat saza hai, magar is main itna maza kis liya hai is popular bollywood song/qwali from Hanstey Zakham. Today I heard its paradoy. Nothing new about it, except that the parody was sung by a typical muslim bearded man with a typical muslim head gear in a neat kurta pyjama. It was late in the evening and I was in bus back home from Mandi House. In his song he was Sudhama and he is at the door of palace in Kanaha’s Dwarka. The musical instrument in his hand was the empty plate in which we eat roti. The lines of the song as parody were much more effective than the lines in original song. Not surprising that the people gave coins generously to him. I also gave a coin to him, but suddenly I found an echo of myself in his performance. Inder as Kanha and Salim as Sudhama.

The poor Muslim was fully conscious about his earning ways. In his own unique way, he is indeed perfectly rooted in the cultural past with a present relevance in it. But am I ? When I gave him the coin I found myself a Kanha in myself who celebrated the reunion with his poor friend. But the friend Salim as Sudhama as the unknown poor muslim in the bus was somewhere outside. Somehow I became conscious of the fact that I belong to the majority community in India, once out of Kashmir, and therefore, privileged somehow in comparison to the minority muslim masses.

That way, how poor indersalim is. The sum total of indersalim is the sound of the very symbol which is conceptually rich but empirically as poor as Sudhama.

Only the repetition of the song in some sense ensures the continuity of the reunion, and therefore, celebration of being an Indersalim. Although the most visible sense is the silence right now, which fills itself with the echo of the parody, and that way it is weird, little insignificant as well, let alone the celebration of being INDERSALIM.