It’s time for schooling in concert decorum

Sumit Paul

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. — GK Chesterton

YEARS ago, in Lahore, I asked legendary ghazal maestro Mehdi Hassan, ‘Aap ko kaun si baat sab se naagavaar guzarti hai?’ (What gets your goat?). Smiling, he said, ‘Jab kisi hotel ya restaurant mein koi mutrib meri ghazalein gaa raha ho aur bajaay usey sun-ne ke, log luqme todne mein mashghool hon’ (When a singer is singing my ghazals at a hotel or restaurant and instead of listening to him, people are relishing their meals).
I could empathise with Mehdi sahab’s angst at a swanky restaurant in Pune that had elite diners. The al-fresco arrangement had an artiste singing ghazals of Mehdi, Ghulam Ali and Jagjit Singh. Hardly anyone was attentive to the poor singer. Some would patronisingly say wah, wah or kya khoob and that’s it.
This reminded me of an incident narrated by great Urdu poet Ahmad Faraz. He had gone to a fine restaurant in London, mostly patronised by Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. He sat in a secluded corner, far from the stage where an up-and-coming singer was singing a ghazal, penned by Faraz and famously sung by Ghulam Abbas. Nobody was listening to him. It was an insult to the artistes. Faraz left and never patronised the restaurant again.
‘Eating and listening to Western classics don’t go hand in hand. You either eat or listen to Beethoven’s celestial symphonies. One can’t eat the cake and have it too,’ wrote Kishore Chatterjee, a connoisseur of Western classical music. The same can be said about all genres of performing arts. You can’t carry eatables to operas in Europe. Theatres in Vienna prohibit eating during a show. True appreciation of art and artistes depends upon the connoisseurs’ complete attention. You can’t admire Mozart while having popcorn nonchalantly.
Multiplexes serve costly meals during the screening of movies. You can eat and watch in a lying state. Do you go there to watch a movie, sleep or gorge on a sumptuous spread? If you eat groundnuts while watching Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara or Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, you are not being respectful to the directors and the actors.
It’s like caviar to the general, as Shakespeare said. Eccentric genius Firaq Gorakhpuri rightly ordered the audience to sit through his poetry-reading session without eating or going out to relieve themselves.
Vilayat Khan, Ravi Shankar, Hariprasad Chaurasia and other maestros would request the audience to not clap during the concert. They found it a plebeian and boisterous gesture, distracting them from their soulful renditions. It’s time all are schooled in concert decorum.