Complaint (microfiction)

01.11.2025

‘Shikayat’ (from “Gangubai Kathiawadi” soundtrack)

I was writing to A. About a song.

In this song, there is complete understanding. The understanding of a woman. The story is that there is a man who is upset with her. And she understands that he is upset with her because he loves her.

He does not look at her.

He does not think about her.

She passes by him. He does not stop her.

He complains about her.

She even says that he hates her.

But yet, she still believes in his loyalty. She believes that they are not separated. That he complains is that he loves her.

The song plays with the concept of ‘roothna’ or ‘ruthna’, being sulky or sullen. It is ‘when someone close to you gets UPSET, OFFENDED or SLIGHTLY ANGRY and STOPS TALKING/COMMUNICATING for some period’. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-English-word-for-the-Hindi-word-ruthna

“Ruthna” implies a temporary emotional withdrawal often intended to prompt reconciliation; “to sulk” and “to pout” capture the behavioral aspect, while “to be offended” or “to take offense” capture the feeling. (Ibid.)

So, in the song, she understands that he complains because he loves her. And she loves him too. The complaint is evidence of their love. It brings them together instead of breaking them apart.

Obsessively, I listened to this song. In it was the mystery of love. Of an Indian man’s love. I have not watched the film. However, the form of the song is important. It is a qawwali. This was originally a song form in Sufi Islam designed to be hypnotic and to inspire religious ecstasy and love. Hindi films use the form to convey earthly love. The divinity of love is being expressed in ‘Shikayat’ (Complaint).

How different, I thought, the Hindi film is from life. The understanding of this song, does it happen in real life? Real life is full of misunderstanding and confusion. As we know it, real life is full of misguided assumptions, tangle and confusion, mind games that meander and go nowhere.

The song has inspired me to watch the film. Perhaps in the film, there is the reconciliation of the lovers. A happy love story for a change. Instead of another witnessing of the death of love. And the death of the lover. Who is reviled for being in love.

a duet of love (microfiction)

26.10.2025

Without a fault, that was what this duet of love was. Voice, perfect. Words, beautiful. Music, immaculate.

Then why did the song inspire such sadness?

Melancholy ran through the melody and his mind. In his life, there was no duet of love. In his life there was either a song of yearning and unslakeable thirst or a lamentation of grief. Out of all in the world, there was not one that would make the music with him, share the song.

These Indians, these Hindi speakers, what words of love they would sing. They would promise their life. They would promise their love the stars and the moon with her peerless radiance in the night sky. And his own promises of love? They had never let him fulfil them. Instead, them and their world had stood up against him, threatening to crush him if he expressed what was inside his heart.

But India knew this. He had known it himself. Still he had dared to love. He had had to love stealthily in a world full of hate. Dressed in black in the night, like he was a thief in mourning.

Difference does not find love.

Integrity and love do not hold hands.

For resolution there is no romance.

Desire does not dance.

The classic Hindi song and the classic Hindi film pursue one theme: love in and against a world of hate. This new generation with their inexperience and their betrayals mock the Hindi film and the Hindi songs. The traitors to love scoff at her, pursuing practicality, power and convention.

For those of the old world, for those full of love, loyalty and passion – even obsession – the Hindi love song is the template of ourselves. For our love, we can give our life. For our love, we can give the moon and the stars and the sun. What we cannot give is our honour, our promise. And that is what a world without honour asks for. But honour has been promised to the Mother Goddess. You can’t live without love but you can live without a love duet. It is poison. But we swallow it.

Hallyu the Korean Wave Review – Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition

01.04.2023

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/hallyu-the-korean-wave

At home, they sit in a neglected and increasingly dusty pile – with my other language learning books picked up mainly from charity shops – or the internet when the owners lost their interest in learning them (14 languages in total and building). Untouched, they are marked out for future study when my life is not just about work and academia, carefully compiled: a set of Korean language books. I picked them up in a free hotel book sharing point in a country where they have many Korean workers (it is not Korea, my friends).

Although I never got onto the Korea loving bandwagon with ‘Gangham Style’ or ‘Squid Games’, and I didn’t watch the film that won the Oscars (‘Parasite’), I have taught several Korean people when I used to volunteer to teach English to refugees and migrants over five years. I watch some K-Pop, although it is just one band called (G)-IDLE as I like watching the young women dance and perform and I enjoy the cinematography of the music videos. So it was with this light acquaintance in need of improvement and because I wanted to see the Friday Late at the V & A that I meandered my way at the end of the night into the ‘Hallyu the Korean Wave’ exhibit.

The exhibit is exciting, eclectic and vibrant and speaks to the young. Inundated with interest, the walls showcase Korean film, music, beauty and fashion. All of the senses are awakened and rejuvenated by an immersion into a colourful Korean cultural life.

When you go in, you are confronted with several screens showing ‘Gangham Style’ and its parodies. Of course, this song is synonymous with K-Pop and is probably one of the only contemporary songs that everyone in cities around the world probably knows. We get to see the audacious pink suit that Psy wore for the music video. But the surprising thing to learn is that the song and the suit mock South Korea’s ‘hyper-consumerism and material pursuit’, using the district of Gangham as an example. The suit is a sneer at what the elites wear in that area and the iconic dance moves are snipes at posers and wannabes that emulate that kind of lifestyle.

If Korean culture is currently chic, then the next section of the exhibit makes us reflect on the historical miracle of how a colonised, war-torn country which was ravaged by the Cold War and also ‘one of the most violent conflicts in modern history’ in the Korean War of 1950 has followed a ‘remarkable trajectory’ to become a ‘leading cultural powerhouse by the early 2000s’. The formula seems to be ‘governmental control, daring strategies and IT innovation’, alongside quick hands and quick minds.

I will write about the parts that excited me the most in what followed on the journey through the massive space that the exhibition enfolded. A long term fan of athletics and gymnastics, I was entranced by the Volunteer guide uniform for the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. The clothing draws inspiration from the national costume which is called hanbok. The outfit is beautiful, graceful, an accomplishment of functional style inter-weaved with the Olympic spirit and colours. It is the perfect metaphor of endurance, of a people that have kept their traditions while becoming truly international, even though enmity and colonisation attempted to destroy their way of life. Here, as elsewhere in the exhibition, I was reminded of the affinities of Korea’s history with India’s. In fact, there was even a Hindi film poster which showed a pirated (‘adapted’) Korean film, which influenced my finding of affinities with my motherland even more.

It was also a surreal experience to see the wig worn by Choi Min-sik in ‘Oldboy’. This is probably the most memorable Korean film I have watched. When I was immersed in this filmic universe, I just assumed that the wig was the actor’s real hair. In the exhibit, removed from the face, the wig was patently, even insolently artificial. Yet it still teemed with an energy, almost like that of life. The make up and hair director of the film, Song Jong-hee intended to infuse the wig with wildness to convey the ‘feral emotions’ and the effect of the years of incarceration on the protagonist of the film. To me, raised in Hinduism and Sikhism, where hair is sacred and the god Shiva is known for the strength of his hair, the hairstyle raised the resonance of India, religion, power, feelings hard to express or even describe.

A particularly interesting section of the exhibition was the exploration of beauty standards in Korean culture, since the nation is a ‘global trendsetter’ in this area. The historical background until the 1910s (perhaps longer?) is seven hundred years of maintaining beauty as a ‘moral obligation’ as attractiveness symbolises not only social status, but also virtue.

Where did I spend the most time in the exhibition? I sat before a big screen watching a compilation of snippets from K-Pop videos, admiring the crystal sharpness of today’s video cameras, the lightning flashes of Korean dance moves and the stunning physical beauty of the people. It was intoxicating. Yet, as I watched, the critical part of my mind kept on turning over the question of whether what I was watching was something authentic and organic, something different, or just indoctrination and influence from the Western world, a parroting of the Western music video. I am still not sure.

Surely, ‘Hallyu the Korean Wave’ is one of the most memorable exhibitions that I have been to. I was also pleased to see that the exhibition seems to have been put together from Korean descent people, which seems to give it the authenticity that is lacking from Orientalising Western depictions of Asian people such as Indians. I learned a general history of modern Korea, was amused, inspired to learn more, ever more determined to one day make a serious foray into the language. I felt the unity of Asian culture as a man of Indian descent, almost a sense of belonging. Out of the three exhibitions I went to in the V & A that day, the exhibition was my personal favourite. I never felt even a moment of boredom in it and my attention was focused entirely on the exhibits.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/hallyu-the-korean-wave

The Artistic Failures of a Mr. Nobody

02.02.2018

A little while back, I read an article in a newspaper, possibly the Guardian, about a writer who had never made it and had never been published. The novels that this man had dedicated his life to, forgoing employment and the material things of life, were described as “execrable”, or some such choice word. Here was a Mr. Nobody who produced “artistic failures”. No one wanted to publish his writing. No one wanted to read his writing. Yet, day after day, Mr. Nobody sat at his desk and pushed out the words.

Mr. Nobody could be anyone. There are thousands of people in the same position: writers, poets, artists, singers and musicians. Certainly, Mr. Nobody is myself. One wonders, though, how Mr. Nobody can bear his numerous disappointments and the miscarriages of his babies in the world. Today I want to write a little piece about this artistic failure and disappointment. I regard artistic failure as a lack of recognition. The reader will forgive this narcissistic exploration. Chekov wrote that it is only a mediocre novelist that goes on and on about writing a novel, not the successful writer. So be it, yet even the mediocre novelist must have an opinion and reflect upon his or her failures and successes.

The story is a common one. After years of publishing creative work in student newspapers and magazines as a young man, I thought, optimistically, that the next step would surely be publication with a serious publisher. I expected the wider world to take note of what I had published in the student publications. I sent off my poetry to magazines and publishing houses like Faber and Faber. I tried to get my short stories published in American magazines. I applied for book reviewing and journalistic positions. The result? Rejection after rejection. Gradually, I stopped sending my stuff out to companies and applying for work. I published online, thus cutting off any potential revenue from my work. Now, my poetry was up on my blog and I found out that poetry publishers wouldn’t publish work that had already featured online. The amount of readers that I had could be counted on one hand. It was the same thing with my short stories and book reviews. I put the music that I had composed and sang to online. When it was my own original music, perhaps twenty people would listen to my songs at most. I took up art about two years ago and post work on my Instagram account. The work has generated zero income and I have never managed to go over seventy likes on a picture.

Having reached middle age, it is clear that I am an artistic failure. Like Mr. Nobody, my creative work has never been published, has never generated any revenue and is read, listened to and seen by only a small handful of people. I have not received real recognition for my work. Producing this creative work, which costs money and takes up time when I could be earning money is therefore something of Sisyphean enterprise. Like the Ancient Greek character, I push the boulder up the mountain every time I sit at my desk to produce anything and it never gets anywhere. How does a person bear the constant disappointment and frustration? How does he or she bear the indifference and apathy of the general public which would tend to suggest that these cultural productions are worthless?

These questions have been considered by creative thinkers in the past. I recently read a short story about the issue called “Enoch Soames” by Max Beerbohm which was first published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (May 1916). Enoch is a poet who does not get the attention that he feels he deserves. His belief in his work, however, is undying. He therefore makes a pact with the devil to travel into the future because he is convinced that his work is ahead of its time and will be revered by future readers. He thus stakes his soul on his belief in his work since this is the devil’s fee. However, on arriving into the future, Enoch finds that he is still a Mr. Nobody. Beerbohm’s story reflects a somewhat delusional belief which keeps a Mr. Nobody going. Mr. Nobody believes that, if not today, then maybe tomorrow there will be the attention and the notice. Mr. Nobody lives in a strange world of time, chance and happening, much like the lottery ticket buyer. After all, Mr. Nobody has read the rubbish which is published everywhere and which is popular. He’s seen the hacks claiming the prime place in the affections of people. Mr. Nobody knows that it is a just a question of luck and the capricious and fickle whims of the public. It is not what is of value that is valued. What is of value is frequently discarded to the rubbish pile of history while that which is worthless is heralded as brilliant and daring. The darlings of the public are not infrequently mountebanks and monsters. Mr. Nobody therefore, irresistibly, inevitably, sets himself at defiance to the world. He stands in contempt of this world. This contempt hardens Mr. Nobody’s strict belief in himself. Mr. Nobody says to himself each and every morning “It does not matter if none believe in me. For I am only to believe in myself and everything will follow”.

After all, Mr. Nobody does not just model himself on Sisyphus, but also models himself on Cassandra. Cassandra was cursed to speak words of truth that none would believe. If her words of prophecy had been listened to and followed, Troy would not have fallen to the Greeks. Mr. Nobody believes in the value of what he expresses. If, one day, Mr. Nobody is to be recognised as someone who was saying something of value, then he believes it is the misfortune of others not to have heard his voice. Mr. Nobody believes that in frustrating his expression and his voice, which is only fully expressed in the presence of an audience, the public is hurting itself.

Such is the ego and the arrogance of a Mr. Nobody. Ego is the apt word because one thinks of how Sigmund Freud divided up the work of the different components of subjectivity. Ego would produce and produce. It had a limitless creativity and spontaneity. However, the superego guarded the gates of expression. It would sit in judgement of what ego had written and censor the material, not allowing certain things past the gate. Mr. Nobody is the ultimate version of the ego while the public, as ever, is the superego. Mr. Nobody wants ego to prevail and burst through every attempt at resistance. Mr. Nobody does not believe in “compromise”, the word that Sigmund Freud picked out for the repressive mechanism of the superego. And, one wonders, without the arrogance of the ego, would creative work be possible? In the creative work, the human being says “I am and I am beautiful”. The creative human being is not just arrogant but a narcissist. And where the creative being does not assert that claim, then, says Mr. Nobody, that creative being has failed. If creative work is not the expression of self, it is nothing. But what of it? For, of course, Mr. Nobody is neither published, read, or listened to. Where Mr. Nobody is concerned, the world blind and deaf. And these are the artistic failures of a Mr. Nobody.

Music and Patriarchy: The Gendered Opposition of Bodily Performance and Bodily Abstraction

11.05.2018 –

Abstract: Women are seen as bodies, not minds. As such, they are seen as suitable for bodily performance in a patriarchal society rather than for composing music which is perceived as a non-bodily and abstract form of representation. This division between body and mind underpins the division between the private and the public sphere.
Keywords: Music, Feminism, Patriarchy, Body, Mind, Secret Superstar, Public, Private

Knowledge of the history of women’s musical practices is aided by a concept which I call ‘musical patriarchy’. The division of musical work into a largely male public sphere and a largely female private sphere is a trait of Western music history and also of many musical cultures from all around the world.
Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15.

I was listening to some songs by Vidya Vox, the famous YouTuber recently. I had downloaded them for free off of her website. Vidya sings in a combination of Hindi and English, as well as other languages. She does cover versions of songs and mash-ups. I grew curious about the singer and her music, so I put her name into a search engine. It turned out that the music behind Vidya’s songs comes from her white husband. Here was yet another female singer that didn’t produce her own music and that traded on her Indian ethnicity and sex to entice audiences while relying on a masculine, Western sound and mind.

Racial dimensions aside for the time being, the question was, why were there so few famous female music producers both in India and the West? Personal experience, as usual, prompted the question. One of my amateur pursuits is singing and song-writing. I also compose the music for my songs and make the music myself. Although my musical education in England was peculiarly lamentable, I went ahead and learned how to do everything myself. Is my music perfect? Of course not. It doesn’t have a professional sound and even my singing is just recorded on the computer using the free and in-built software. However, the point is, that I can sit down and compose my own music and, if I had enough free time and money, I could produce my own tracks to a good standard. I could even lay down tracks for the melodies and sounds that I can invent in my head but am currently unable to represent in concrete musical form due to my lack of ability and skill in playing music. Why can’t more women do the same thing successfully?

One could gather various ideas to answer the question. I have put the quote at the top of this piece to show one possible interpretation. The argument is that women’s music is regarded as private, rather than public. It is men’s music that is regarded as public. However, what I want to argue in this short piece is that women are not admitted to the masculine sphere of music because it is a form of representation that is regarded as abstract, invisible and bodiless, qualities associated with men and not women. It is my contention that in a patriarchal society, women are regarded as incapable of mastering the abstract discipline of music and of transcending their bodily form to enter into the realms of thought and meaning. This is why there are so few famous female musical composers and why the ones that do exist are not rewarded and recognized for their efforts. https://www.billboard.com/…/female-music-producers-industry…

I want to start, as I often do, with a Hindi film which I watched. I am talking about the huge international success which was recently released, Secret Superstar (2017). I will not go into the story too much, nor criticise the type of feminism which was portrayed in the film. Instead, I will concentrate on the relationship between femininity, the body and music in the film. There is a young girl in the film that becomes famous on YouTube for singing in burqa which covers her whole body, including her face. The burqa makes her “bodiless” and as invisible as it is possible to be without advanced technology. At this stage of her career, the girl is capable of composing her own music and songs. She doesn’t need any man to guide her voice. She is both singer and songwriter, player and composer. However, the girl doesn’t want to be bodiless and invisible, because that would mean that she remains anonymous. She wants to be known. This desire to be recognised as a person, as a singer, to enter the public stage and leave behind the private sphere of the domestic, leads the girl to a famous male composer. It also leads her to abandon the role of music composer, a being that is invisible and bodiless because he, and it is usually a he, usually stays behind the scenes. She then becomes the voice for the male music composer’s music and finds success. The girl is therefore led into the patriarchal music establishment and away from composing her own music because of her desire to become a body with a recognisable face, to be seen as a woman with a woman’s body. She leaves the realm of abstraction, invisibility and thought to become a performing body, the face of music rather than its “soul”. Such is the brand of “feminism” in Secret Superstar: a female’s desire can only be to perform as a body, to become a voice. She cannot become one with abstract thought, invisibility and the abstract and non-bodily representation of music.

In fact, if you watch Secret Superstar closely enough, you will find that the girl rebels against all forms of abstract thought. Her rebellion is chiefly conducted against her father, who is an engineer and relies on the abstract disciplines of maths. She also rebels against her education in maths and science. The young girl supports her uneducated mother over her educated father and leaves education to do so, running away from school secretly. She even effects a separation between her uneducated mother and her educated father (in the film’s defence, he is depicted as an abusive father and husband). Clearly, the girl does not wish to remain within the realm of thought. She wants blissful ignorance and to be seen as nothing more than a body, to be accepted in the realm of the body.

My speculation is that Secret Superstar reflects the existing reality of music in a patriarchal society; that there is a gendered play between the bodily performance of voice and the abstract and non-bodily performance of music. To enter onto the public stage in musical performance, the rules dictate that women have to be seen as bodies, not as minds. It is men that are celebrated as being of the mind and having rational “souls”. It is men that can give birth to music, which is, of course, related to maths (look up Pythagoras and his ideas about maths and music if you don’t believe me). Thus we have an explanation of why there are so few successful music composers in both India and the West. I have argued at length about the relationship between the body and non-bodily abstraction and their relationship to the private and public spheres throughout my writing and I believe it informs most aspects of the society that we live in. The body is therefore supremely important as a site from which to make the resistance against the forms that constrain us and the female body is, I think, the supreme form which can fight against the forces of concealment, invisibility, pretended abstraction and universality. There is a further speculation: that the music that we all listen to and enjoy is founded in a masculine mind set and worldview. The very nature of our listening and auditory enjoyment is founded in patriarchy and its conditions. Films like Secret Superstar can reveal exactly what the nature of that patriarchal sound is and how it operates, if only we watch carefully and learn. One thing is clear: such a sound hates synaesthesia since it separates listening and sight, music and the body.