Singing Sad Songs

I hate sounding like a snob. But this will have to be one of those times. Do you know what a ghazal is? Are you thinking Pankaj Udhas? You are? Uh, oh. 

So let's get down to the basics. The ghazal is a form of poetry, like the 
sonnet. It consists of couplets/shers in which the second line has a refrain that repeats throughout the poem. Ghazals can be, and have been, romantic, satirical, realist, revolutionary. Wine, women, love and loss are not the necessary components to defining a ghazal. Nor is maudlin singing. Sometimes it seems hard to believe.

Like at the Moti Mahal Restaurant in Daryaganj, which, along with butter chicken, is supposed to have invented another great culinary tradition—listening to live qawwalis and ghazals along with your meal. I was there late Sunday night, sitting in the nearly empty courtyard, listening to indifferent ghazals fighting a losing battle with the indifference of the customers as they concentrated on chicken and conversation.

Why wouldn't they? I could judge the quality of the words if I could have heard them clearly, but there's something about the mikes and sound system that manages to muffle the vocal range, kill the bass and flatten all sound with egalitarian zeal.

Plus lousy harmonium, overloud tabla, and a very irritating synth pad. Or maybe the singers were just plain bored. They kept stopping in the middle of songs, taking long breaks to chat on their cellphones. No one seemed to mind one way or the other. And the family in front of me kept asking for film songs, and then happily ignoring them. 

Many film songs are also, technically, ghazals. But they’re often soulless, indifferent, clichéd, irrelevant. Music to eat butter chicken by. How can one sing about heartbreak so heartlessly? Bring on the boy bands.

Kamar and Raju have been playing at the restaurant for 10 years now, seven days a week, 8pm to midnight. Says Kamar, "Now we'll be here till we go up", pointing heavenwards. 

It's a depressing thought.

Not as depressing as the ghazals in Hotel Gold Regency, Paharganj though. 

Once upon a time, Gold Regency had a cabaret and a dance floor. But all that has stopped now. (See p.80 for Delhi’s last surviving cabaret venue.)

Now the Indian male clientele is herded off into a different long room from where the backpackers hang out. 

Here they smoke, drink cheap alcohol, and don't listen to the ghazals being sung by a woman and her accompanists, all squeezed onto a small platform at the end of the room. She sings with vim and vibrato, of love, loss and desire, but the soul gets lost somewhere in the loud male buzz of the room, the sea of smoke, and the feeling that everyone here would really rather watch the cabaret...

Why do I complain so much? 

Because I once heard a ghazal in a restaurant. In Bangalore. A good friend, mildly inebriated, singing remembered Begum Akhtar across the table. His voice nowhere near hers, but carrying a memory of that voice, that turn of phrase, that language, that desire. Mere hamnafas, mere hamnawa, mujhe dost ban ke daga na de... 

I had to fight back my tears. Do that for me, and I'll listen to ghazals in your restaurant. Otherwise just bring on the butter chicken.