This is one of my favourite CDs of all time. It invokes so many memories of my teenage years when this CD was always playing in our house. It's been played so many times that I know the sequence of the songs by heart. I guess this my first introduction of ghazals and as such, is a perfect compilation, not too long, not too short. You have so many gems here that take you to subliminal heights.
My mother explained that being an Ahmadi, "Ae Mere Humanasheen" by Munni Begum, resonated with the community, the sense of betrayal, for all that they suffered as Pakistanis, stripped of their rights as practicing Muslims. I can never listen to this without thinking of what this ghazal means to my mother.
Nayyara Noor's "Khabhi Hum Bhi Khoosurat The" is easiest to fall in love for a teenager and, I still remember the view of Athens from our balcony in Politia when I listen to this. I probably never understood what the ghazal meant but loved pronouncing the difficult Urdu words. I can still see those hills in my mind, feel that teen longing invoked by this music.
Farida Khanum's "Maine Pairon Mein" is also easy to love and sing along to.
For our times now, Mehdi Hassan's "Mohabbat Karne Wale" has been revoked at least twice : by Ali Sethi and Arooj Aftab. I didn't really like Arooj Aftab's rendition and maybe I have to listen to it a few times.
I have been fascinated by Ali Sethi's conversations around ghazals, his classical training and how to think about ghazals, about Hindustani classical music for this generation. I loved this conversation between Ali Sethi and Anupama Chopra. If you need a guide to find a love for ghazals again, please listen to this piece. I also loved The New Yorker piece The Pop Song That’s Uniting India and Pakistan but not for its naive and ignorant point of view but for what I learned about Ali's ustaad:
He is the last living vocal practitioner of the ancient forty-nine-note microtonal Surti scale and a descendant of Mian Samad bin Ibrahim, a student of the thirteenth-century musician credited with inventing Qawwali in South Asia. “He’s a man of the medieval moment,” Sethi said, and he found in Saami a kindred spirit. “He makes his own medicines. He goes to the mountains every year in search of roots and elements. He’s a linguist who speaks Arabic, Farsi, Sanskrit, Braj Bhasha, but no English.” Saami taught Sethi the melody patterns of raga, and how Vedic chants and Turkic and Persian melodies were fused by guilds in medieval India. “And he showed me that, before the encounter with the West, South Asia had its own microtones and its own notations and its own multicultural sense of what a musical scale is.
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