Across the Divide

MARCH 2003 - There has been some criticism of Adnan Sami Khan here regarding his work that appears regularly on the Indian channels, his support of the Indian cricket team and his alleged acquiring of Indian nationality. Of the three charges, I certainly have no credible information on the last item. He may have acquired it and then again he may not have. As for the rest, while I will never understand how he manages to convince people into giving him the lead roles in the music videos that he churns out, I can fully understand his living and working in a country where there are genuine opportunities for anyone in the performing arts line.

Of course, anything Indian is bad here, notwithstanding the fact that there is nothing in the area of culture that we don’t gobble up minutes after it is served from across the border. We all avidly watch their movies, buy their videos, VCDs, DVDs, CDs, cassettes, posters, magazines and follow the lives of their stars with the same passion we exhibit for showbiz people anywhere in the world. Years ago, when Doordarshan began beaming into Lahore, the streets would empty out the evening an Indian blockbuster film was on. People actually flew into Lahore or drove in from other cities, the evening Mughle Azam aired. It was an event generating in Lahore the same kind of passion that the new Basant festival now produces annually. Much earlier, Indian films had been phased out from the circuit. A nascent film industry here took the plea of protection and thereby gave itself an unlimited license to produce trash for the next fifty years. Everyone knew and understood that were Indian films exhibited, no one would ever want to go and see Pakistani films. There was Dilip Kumar and there was Lala Sudhir. Could this ever be a comparison? Those who called for a free atmosphere for the arts to compete and thereby flourish were quickly silenced since speaking for an open policy was tantamount to being pro-India. In hindsight, had the display of Indian films continued, would we have had a better film industry of our own today rather than the grotesque Gujjar productions that run riot day in and day out. The protection that the industry received gave it a complacency that eroded anything of value that it might have had. The fallout should be obvious to anyone now that the years have rolled by. Was there never enough talent here to actually scale the same heights as started to happen across the border? We’ll never know.

In our line of work, clients often quote and ask for the same quality production values that they see in television commercials across the border. They regularly applaud the great and innovative ideas that come dancing out in one creative concept after another, gasp in amazement at the special effects, sigh over the unbelievably stunning look men and women that carry off the scenes, marvel at the music, the sets, the makeup, the class production, the slick editing and the high class acting. What they have great difficulty in understanding is the prodigious amount of talent that makes the Indian film industry the world’s largest film producing nation, well above Hollywood. What they cannot often understand is that behind every slick commercial are artists, makeup and casting specialists, lighting professionals, gifted actors, set designers, cameramen, script writers, musicians, song writers – the list is endless. Each one of these have the great film industry to learn and polish their crafts in – there is an almost endless pool of talent to choose from which is why there is never any shortage of finding new faces, new professionals and new directors to produce quality materials that deliver the goods at the end of the day. Just as hard – and usually harder, is to convince people here that each one of the great ideas that are so attractive cost an arm and a leg. Some TV commercials in India cost just about what we spend on a feature film. Money is not everything and money can’t guarantee quality, but it sure helps. You can’t have a Rolls for the price of a Suzuki and if you offer peanuts, laughing monkeys should not be a surprise. However, if you want first class stuff you should be prepared to pay top dollars. That’s the way it is. As Danny Devito put it, ‘Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.’

Some of this may explain the dearth of real talent that appears on our landscape. After 50 years and more, in the entertainment business, we are singularly talent-less. The hardworking charities that survive on public funding have an uphill battle every day scouring for the big acts that can pull in big donations. There simply aren’t any. There are a few performers and by now, everyone has heard them a million times over. There are no crowd pullers and while a bhangra act may draw out thousands, they are there because someone else is paying the bills and entries are free. In the end, everyone falls back on the same well-thumbed brief list of ten people who monotonously appear and do the same thing they did last week, last month, last year and all the times before that. Such is the predictability that after two times, you can, for instance, time Abida Parveen about which song she will open with, when will she stop mid-song and deliver a speech or an aside and what precisely she will do as she unfolds her repertoire. It is all too predictable. Abida Parveen has a wonderful voice but the sameness of the act, kills the moment – and she is far better than most. The idea of the big act, the mega event is dead long before you can even start thinking about it. We just don’t have the necessary wherewithal. We may have the talent, hidden away somewhere, but as long as it is not explored, exposed, developed and nurtured, it will never flourish. There must be billions of gallons of oil under our land, but it is going to stay there till we can bring it out. Arguably, years of government indifference to the performing arts, the prejudice and confusion that still mars our thinking about what is ‘halal’ in the arts and what is not, lack of infrastructure, an atmosphere of repression and intolerance, paucity of funds and a wobbling economy, all have played a part in the desolation that marks the horizon, that forces those who can manage it, to sell their talent elsewhere. On top of it all, our imagination is dead.

I am not a fan of Adnan Sami Khan – his songs sound the same, his crooning after luscious women who pine and wither for him, yet stay out of range is the same act that he has been churning out. He’s become even fatter than he was here and when he moves, he quivers like a house of jelly but all the blubber aside, he is a hit across the border. They love his stuff, they don’t care he is built like a Mack truck and they give him top dollars. Over here, Pakistan’s only real industry, the one run by the pirates, is selling his CDs, VCDs, DVDs and cassettes which we all buy since we too are pirates. Some of us call him a deserter, but we still buy his stuff. He may have had other reasons to cross the divide, but he is not the first one, or the last, to find his market in a country other than his own. Will this change anything here? Of course not.