Music evokes certain types of memories that are an enigma for science (link). I have personally experienced this phenomenon where hearing a certain tune transports one’s mind to a certain time period when I either heard the song for the first time, or if that song had a particular effect on me. Even scientists are stumped by this particularity (read more here).
Rahat Fateh Ali Khan (RFAK) has recently been in the news, for all the wrong reasons. He shot to prominence once his uncle, the late great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (NFAK) passed away and anointed him as his successor. NFAK was part of a historic Qawali tradition, which brought him fame throughout the world. NFAK was orphaned at a young age and after decades of hard work, reached the pinnacle of fame as a qawal internationally. His music was sampled in Bollywood and Hollywood, giving him an international fan following. Some of his Qawalis reached legendary status, among them is ‘Tumhe dillagi’, a ballad about the beloved taking one’s love too unseriously. I first encountered it when I was in boarding school and one of my roommates played it every opportunity he got, on his Walkman (good old days), without headphones. Years later, when I started med school, one of the ‘hazing’ tasks I was given was to use my pillow as a harmonium and sing ‘Tumhe Dillagi’. I passed that task with flying colors because of my previous experience. A decade after that, in 2017, I was at an AirBnB in Houston and had an Indian roommate who was also a big fan of the Qawali and we sang it together.
Coming back to Rahat (RFAK); he trained as part of a Qawali troupe with his famous uncle. In his own career, he pursued more commercial opportunities than NFAK and frequently sang for Bollywood films. He was part of Coke Studio seasons 9-12 but I didn’t particularly enjoy any of his work there. I once had the opportunity to hear him live at a fundraiser for a new cancer hospital in Lahore, in 2016. I found the experience underwhelming. The only two songs that RFAK sang and I had a deep personal connection with, were O re piya and Mann ki Lagan, both of which were sung for Bollywood films in the 2000s.
When I started med school in 2007, it was coming after six years of boys-only schooling at boarding schools. I have previously written how I had no idea how to talk to girls, in my own class (there were 87 of them) or elsewhere. Early in my second year, I discovered a chat service through a local phone company. It was like an internet chat forum from the early 2000s, but for cellphones and contained only text. You could enter chat rooms by texting a certain number and would get information on who was in that room and then you could text them on the platform. That was how I discovered ‘Ayesha’ (I don’t think that was her real name). She claimed to be a London-born girl living in Islamabad with her uncle who was a doctor and she was a student at one of the local colleges, doing 12th grade pre-med. She would ask me medical questions, study related questions and just general chit chat. We almost never talked on the phone, even after we moved out of the phone company’s platform to our own numbers. After about two months of this text only chat, she disappeared. Cue, heartbreak. I still remember sitting in my dorm, on a dark, rainy day, listening to ‘O re piya’ on repeat on my mp3 player.
There were a lot more twists and turns in the ‘Ayesha’ story. I sought help from one of my seniors at med school who I was close to, about this. He talked to her as well and thought she was mentally ill. This one time, she said she was being kept at her uncle’s house by force, and she wanted to escape, and stay with me. That was not even theoretically possible, since I myself lived in a dorm with other med students. Eventually, my senior and I traveled to Islamabad one day to meet her. We met at a Pizza Hut, she was wearing a full hijab outside but took it off as soon as we sat in a booth. She was perplexed as to why I had brought my friend with me. She sat opposite us for maybe 15 minutes and then left, with some excuse. I then got a text to come see her at her house which was nearby. It was above her uncle’s clinic. I walked over there, minus my friend, and there she was at the balcony. She wanted me to come up but I stalled, until my friend came looking for me. We then said goodbye and left. That was the last time I ever saw her. Later that night, she texted me that she had a boyfriend already and we never talked again.
Coming back to RFAK again, there are much better qawals in Pakistan than him. Farid Ayaz and Abu Mohammad, Rizwan and Moazzam, Javed Bashir and Saami Brothers are superior in skill and pure Qawali than RFAK. I’m posting three clips here, the first is from Saami brothers when they performed at LUMS in Feb 2016 and two from RFAK when he performed in April 2016. You can judge the quality difference yourself:
1.