A decaying heritage?
GHALIB’s haveli, Zafar Mahal, near the Qutub Minar, and the famous Red Fort — the centuries-old monuments in Delhi have today become shadows of their original glory, thanks to encroachment and vandalism.

B.N. Goswamy
An overwhelming sadness


Ray’s film cancelled
“KANCHENJUGA”, a movie by top Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray that was to have a special screening at the recent Cannes Film Festival, was cancelled, organisers said.

English pop his forte
By Jyoti Mahajan

HAVING bagged a hat-trick of awards — the Channel (V) awards for the Best Indian Newcomer, Best Indian Group and Best Indian Song (Dooba dooba dooba...) for its maiden album “Boondein” — the Silk Route has its eyes set on the prestigious Grammy awards, the ultimate aim of every pop group striving for international recognition.

It has been a dream debut entry into the pop scene for the group as several numbers, including the title song Boondein..., Dooba dooba rehta hoon... and Door kahin koi haseen..., topped the popularity charts of various television channels for weeks. More importantly, the group won accolades for deviating from the beaten track and coming out with something different. Indeed, the innovative use of instruments, off-beat rhythm, sober lyrics and, above all, melodious tunes have all combined to make the compositions refreshingly original. Though their folksy tunes may put one out in the woods, their lyrics head straight for the heartstrings.

Well, the popular group Silk Route enthralled a jampacked audience their maiden performance at the Ridge, Shimla, recently with melodious songs on the concluding day of the annual fair organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and the HP Tourism Department.

Attired in a Himachali cap, black T-shirt and black pants, Mohit Chauhan, the lead singer of the group, gave an ample proof of his versatility by singing Hindi, English and Pahari numbers with tremendous ease and simultaneously playing the mouth organ and the guitar. It was the medley of Pahari naatis which oozed a rustic flavour and made the crowd dance to the folk rhythm. But it was Mohit’s English numbers Higher and higher... and Wind... (the songs which may go into their next album due for release in September), got the maximum applause.

Kem Trivedi on the key board and the recorder (16th century European flute), too, gave an excellent account of his creative skills, which is an outcome of his two-year-long study on Inlanks Scholarship at Purcell School of Music in London.

Later, during a tete-e-tete with the writer after the performance, Mohit said it was a wonderful feeling performing in his home state and expressed a desire of per performing here again. Originally hailing from Nahan in Himachal, Mohit, the second son of a former government officer, Mr B.K. Rana, has had no formal training in music. He learnt the nuances of music when he started composing music just for fun during his childhood days at Kulu, Solan, Nahan and Dharamsala.

An ardent trekker, Mohit wandered in the high mountain ranges, through which passes the silk route (the old trade route linking Tibet and Central Asia), during his school and college days. It is hardly surprising that his music is inspired by the mountains and the rich culture of the hill people.

“The beauty and silence of the hills and sounds of the gurgling streams and the whistling winds left a deep impression on my mind during my formative years and it is finding expression in our compositions now”, he explained and cited the example of Banjara, an instrumental composition, inspired by the music of nomadic graziers (migratory shepherds) who have been treading on the silk route since ages.

“We don’t churn out the routine pop stuff which draws people into dancing. Ours is a different kind of music which stirs emotions, slowly sinks into the heart and and stays there forever”, said Mohit. “I have a great liking for the Chamba folk music which depicts the beauty of women and the mountains with a touch of Indian classical music”, he added.

Mohit revealed that although he loved music and singing since his childhood, yet he never aspired to become a singer. It was in the 1980s while studying for his Masters in Geology at Kangra, that Mohit joined The Hijackers, a Dharamsala based pop group, as lead singer, and the live performances instilled confidence in him. The Hijackers was basically a Western group and Mohit crooned out popular hits of Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart, Paula Anka and others, performing for foreign tourists at MacLeodganj. Mohit became nostalgic about his Dharamsala days and expressed his desire of performing there again. He said he had got a call from his friend and lead guitarist of The Hijackers, Kuljeet, to perform at the Dharamsala summer festival. Mohit was doing research on Himachal’s folk repertoire when he met Atul Mittal, an upcoming musician from Mandi.

It was six years ago that Mohit ventured to Delhi for making a career in the advertising world and landed up making music and TV films, jingles and documentaries and doing live shows in the Capital. “I have composed music for UNICEF, and Khoobsoorat telecast from Zee TV a few years ago. I have sung jingles for the “Duracel” advertisement featuring a few camels”, he said. He revealed he met Kem Trivedi in Delhi and they started composing songs in the evenings. According to Mohit, good lyrics are an integral part of any song. “They lyrics reflect our attitude in life as I am basically a romantic type of a person”.

Presently, the group is busy with its second album slated for release in September. It will be a mix of Hindi and English numbers and be much more intense than “Boondein.” The group intended to go international by coming out with an English pop album next year. Although Mohit can sing English, Hindi, Pahari and Punjabi songs with equal ease, English pop is his forte.

Mohit said he would love to sing for films and had already been approached by A.R. Rehman. He said he would be selective and would compromise only to the extent that it added to the music. It would have to be a combination of commercial aspect and quality, he added.

A decaying heritage?

GHALIB’s haveli, Zafar Mahal, near the Qutub Minar, and the famous Red Fort — the centuries-old monuments in Delhi have today become shadows of their original glory, thanks to encroachment and vandalism.

The national Capital, which has over 1,350 monuments, has done precious little to preserve its rich heritage with conservation being given very low priority, say experts.

“Encroachments and illegal activities are the common problems seen around these monuments,” says Usha Kumar, President of the Society for Protection of Heritage and Culture (SPHAC).

The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act which bars any kind of activity up to 100 metres (or 200 metres in certain areas) near or adjoining the protected monuments has been flouted with impunity, she says.

However, rejecting any charges of neglect, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) Superintendent P.B. Sengal maintains that “it is only after 1992 that any form of encroachment or other activity within 100 or 200 metres of the protected monuments has been banned. Slums have also come up where no demarcation was there. We are trying to remove these”.

Today despite a High Court order to protect it, renowned Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s house is in a dilapidated condition, tucked away in a corner in Delhi’s Ballimaran, near Chandni Chowk. His father-in-law’s house where he composed many of his poems has faced a similar fate.

Ghalib’s haveli is almost converted to a commercial set-up with a public telephone booth standing prominently at its entrance.

An ASI Director has recently said he would be happy if any public authority takes up Ghalib’s haveli and protects it under the Central Protection Act.

“Can you imagine the state of affairs where concerned authorities wash their hands off?” lashes out Madhu Vajpayee of the Conservation Society of Delhi, referring to such suggestions.

A protected monument like Kotla Mubarak Shah Sayeed’s tomb in the Capital is also totally inaccessible due to indiscriminate encroachments along the area.

Yet, another protected monument here, Zafar Mahal, near the Qutub Minar in Mehrauli, in which Emperor Bahadur Shah once lived, “has become a house for anti-social elements,” alleges Kumar.

“Despite the Delhi High Court order directing the ASI to have a look at it, stone slabs are disappearing. A dental clinic and even a factory have been set up in Rang Mahal inside this centrally protected monument,” she alleges.

Shamshi Talab, the 700-year-old monument built by Shamsuddin Iltumish and the annual site of “Phool Walon ki Sair”, is now posing a dangerous health hazard for residents because of indiscriminate dumping of waste clogging the drainage lines.

Historians maintain that the mirab (minaret) on the west wall of the monument still contains many unusual features. But it’s becoming part of Delhi’s decaying cultural heritage.

“But it is also not possible for only the ASI to preserve all the 5,000 monuments in the country. Consequently, some are lying in waste.

“Unless there is local regulation such as in the case of Mumbai and Hyderabad, where the local municipal authorities have set up heritage regulation, not much can be done in this regard,” says Ashis Bannerjee, member Secretary of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH).

“We have lost far more in Hyderabad and Lucknow whereas in Delhi we have been able to preserve in reasonable shape major monuments. But places like the Red Fort are indeed affected by encroachments for which we are working on a conservation plan”, he said.

After the Capital was shifted to Delhi in 1911, there has been inadequate attention to heritage again priority was given to other things after Partition, Bannerjee says.

“The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has formed a heritage foundation which is trying to locate monuments. INTACH is also profiling some 20 monuments, all of which will be part of the master plan once they are published”, says K.T. Ravindran of the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) here.

“But a lot more has to be done. It is a much-complicated issue as far as management of monuments is concerned. The ASI has to develop their management. They have enough funds. How to use that money depends on how they prioritise things”, says noted conservationist Nalini Thakur of the SPA.

“We have not had a clear direction from the government as to how and what not to do around these buildings. Having a uniform regulation with the Municipal Corporation and the DDA would help”, says Bannerjee.

Vandalism, they suggest, can be stopped with a little sentiment attached to one’s surroundings in the name of history! — PTI

B.N. Goswamy
An overwhelming sadness

“Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw and lest these things depart from your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children and your children’s children.”

Deuteronomy, 4:9

These words of quiet passion from one of the most celebrated books in the Old Testament, are embedded in bold metallic letters on the concrete wall, high above a flame that burns noiselessly in the Hall of Remembrance. The space all around is bare and hexagonal. Light filters in from the high domed ceiling. Concrete benches line the walls at the sides. Behind them, against the walls, are countless little candles, some of them burning, others ready to be lit. One sees people move above silently in the space, some of them approaching the flame to look at it with reverence, others kneeling on the floor, some sitting in corners, shedding quiet tears.

I had heard of course that holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC is a museum unlike any other that one knows. For at its core is not art, nor craft, nor even any of the other things that museums are built around, but memories. The very aim of the museum, its “primary mission”, is to advance and disseminate knowledge about that unprecedented tragedy which goes under the singular name of the Holocaust, the systematic elimination of millions of Jews and others in Hitler’s Europe.

Memories of civilisation’s worst nightmare, I had heard, hover about in the museum, touching everyone with their dark wings , swishing past every single person who walks through its galleries, flickering in that torch in the Hall of Remembrance. For that torch is placed in a pit filled with “earth gathered from death camps, concentration camps, sites of mass execution and ghettos in Nazi occupied Europe”. With all this initial awareness of the Holocaust Museum, however — I am ashamed to admit — I had never seen it for myself in any of my Washington visits. This time I did make my way to it. And I came away moved . Shaken.

Like nearly everyone else in India, I knew very little about the crimes that Adolf Hitler and his cohorts had perpetrated in Europe till I went there myself for the first time. That was a long, long time back but there, in the very heart of Germany — as a part of the process of purging itself of the sense of collective guilt — was being shown a short film titled ‘Nacht und Nebel’ (Night and Fog).

It was made, as far as I recall, by Alain Resnais, that great film-maker from France. Using some footage from surreptitiously made films in the concentration camps, excerpts from the documentation kept by the Nazis themselves photography done by the Allies after Europe was liberated, the film consisted of a piecing together of what had gone on in those camps. One saw hordes of famished men walking about as if in a trance inside courtyards fenced with barbed wires; men being made to dig mass graves in which they were to be buried themselves after being shot; German SS officers quietly reading in the light of lamps the shades of which were made from human skin. There were shots of gas chambers devised as the “most efficient” way of eliminating masses of men and women and children; piles of teeth filled with gold and silver taken from the bodies of murdered Jews lay about. The film chilled one to the bone. There was a raw edge to the anger with which it was made.

The museum has all this, but also much, much more, and it goes about presenting the material — gathered with prodigious Jewish effort and patience by hundreds of researchers working for more than two scores of years — with restraint and subtlety. The main hall of the museum where everyone gathers before being allowed entry into the galleries, is reminiscent in itself of the air of concentration camps, with its bare walls, its high roof and mercilessly exposed girders — and from it one moves into exhibit after exhibit.

The wretched ambience of the camps is reconstructed here; one moves through narrow, darkened corridors in which, at each step, real artefacts and films mingle; one hears almost for the first time the stories of those who dared to join the resistance against the Nazis within the camps at the risk of certain death; one sees a battered milk-can jugs in which men and women quietly kept depositing notes of what they were seeing and going through in the dim hope that someone, some day, will read them and know; one sees on film rare survivors who lived to tell the tale of those horrors speaking bravely in dead, matter-of -fact tones at first and then breaking down.

As one moves through the galleries, an unspeakable sadness descends upon one’s own soul; those fading photographs and browning footage quietly brand the mind.

One of the most moving exhibits is that designed especially for young visitors. In it the story of a boy, Daniel, is told through artefacts and voices and the reconstruction of his life in those dark days. One hears at first the sounds of a normal, happy household, those squeals of delight and wonder, and feels the warmth of family all around; then, as one moves from room to room, and from corner to corner, one becomes aware of shadows beginning to loom over lives. The leaves of a reconstructed diary recount to one the gloomy tale as seen through the eyes of an innocent child: the sights he sees, the voices he hears, the fears that grip his soul. It is all very affecting.

Only glimpses

I was not able to see the whole museum, for the time-slot for which passes were available to some of the galleries — this gives one an idea of the crowds waiting to get in — was so late in the afternoon that it clashed with another appointment. What I have drawn attention the herefore, is only a series of glimpses. But let me at least share some of the words of the Old Testament that read on those walls.

“You are my witnesses” Isaiah, 43.10

“What have you done! Hark, thy brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!” Genesis, 4:10

“I call heaven and earth to witness this day. I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life so that you and your offspring shall live.”

Deuteronomy, 30:19

Ray’s film cancelled

“KANCHENJUGA”, a movie by top Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray that was to have a special screening at the recent Cannes Film Festival, was cancelled, organisers said.

The show was cancelled because of “obstacles” by Indian officials, Films Sans Frontiers, the company in charge of distributing the film, said in a statement.

Officials said they had instead scheduled screening of German director Werner Herzog’s “Mein Liebster Fiend” (My Best Enemy). — PTI