‘Congratulations! Yogendra and Savita Jawadekar have been selected as members of the Rotary Peace Mission to Pakistan by the core team of Rotary district 3140!’
The president of our ‘Rotary Club of Badlapur Industrial Area’ declared the above message very joyfully in our meeting. Our Rotary district had planned for a friendly visit to our neighbouring nation and an interaction with the Rotarians at Lahore and Karachi. We were supposed to travel in January 2008. The two of us were a part of a sixty member delegation. There were engineers, businessmen, doctors and many other professionals in our team. There were going to be discussions about how we could work together on community service projects.
Though Savita is a general surgeon and I am a paediatrician, we had a special role in the delegation apart from our job as medical professionals. We were supposed to sing and build a rapport with our hosts. We had been working on this for quite a while. I had always felt that ghazals, appreciated on either side of the border, were a very effective medium of communication. Savita and I had been a part of ‘Swachchhand’, a group of doctors who would stage musical shows of self-composed Marathi non filmy songs. We were used to singing in live performances. I had also occasionally written a few verses in Marathi which were performed in our ‘Swachchhand’ shows.
But writing in Urdu or Hindi , that too in the complex format of ghazals was a different ballgame altogether. I decided to learn the craft and attended a workshop conducted by Dr. Sandeep Gupte, a renowned Urdu poet. He made it sound quite simple (and was very generous in helping me when I needed help), but it took a lot of effort on my part to learn the craft and pen a few ghazals and nazms which discussed various issues of Indo Pak relations.
Here a few couplets I had written —
‘Mein na shayar hoon , hoon na mein fankar,
Sirf kahta hoon dil se kya nikla’
Jo munasib hei , karoonga, mushkilen aaye tto kya !
Sarhadon ke faasle bhi mein mitaaoonga kabhi !
Jo raah mil ke chalenge aman ki hum sab loag,
Tto kaise jeet sakenge faraib se kuchh loag !
Jab manenge insaan ko hum insaan
Tab har sawaal hal hoga!)
I also composed music for my ghazals and set them to tune. Abhay Upasani (a surgeon, a classmate) was enthusiastic enough to accompany us on tabla and readily joined the group which was supposed to travel to the neighbouring land.
The members of the Rotary 3140 delegation met to finalise the itinerary and we gave out cheques to our travel agent. But the very next week, Ms. Benazir Bhutto was suddenly assassinated and the political scenario changed in such a way that we had to cancel our tour.
But the ghazals and the ‘friendship trip’ had not remained only a ‘Rotary Project’ , but had already become a personal dream! Savita, our children Aalaap, Aarohee and I went to a recording studio in Thane and recorded the songs with just tanpura, harmonium, tabla as accompaniments and kept the CD in the cupboard.
Coincidentally, I bumped into Yousuf Saeed, a filmmaker at Baja Gaja festival in Pune. He had travelled to and stayed in Pakistan to make a documentary film about what happened to ‘Hindustani Classical Music’ in Pakistan after partition. Watched his film and realised that he was genuinely passionate about his work. I shared our recording with him. He liked the ghazals and went on to publish the audio CD ‘Dosti ka Paigam’ which did go across the border. An article was written on it in the Lahore edition of the ‘News International.’ This CD was also appreciated by Farjad Nabi, a prominent mainstream filmmaker and director from Pakistan, who probably liked the ghazals not in spite of but because they lacked the glitz and glitter that a commercial product would have. It was conveyed to us by the publisher that the ‘rawness of the heart to heart talk’ by a common man from one side of the border with his counterpart on the other side appealed to the hearts of the people who listened to the music and the lyrics.
Nothing happened thereafter on the Rotary front for years, although Rotary District 3140 bifurcated into 3141 and 3142 ; and we found ourselves in 3142 . Things were not conducive for a trip across the border at all.
And then the Covid pandemic happened. Though the ICUs were full and our colleagues in Covid units were overwhelmed with work, the clinicians like us who were not working in hardcore Corona hospitals had a lot of free time. We had also become accustomed to conducting and attending virtual meetings.
We, the Rotarians of the ‘Rotary Club of Badlapur Industrial Area’ , with the help of the Rotary District Governor and his team, had a combined Zoom meeting with Rotary Club of Karachi Gardens’ , Rotary District 3271 . Savita and I sang the ghazals! We actually did reach out to the people on the other side of the border. The meeting was a great success. It was attended by approximately 100 rotarians, about 50 from either side of the border. Our neighbours were stunned. The message which our ghazals gave out was simple but direct. ‘We respect a human being for being a human being in Rotary, irrespective of the gender , religion or even the nationality! Let us follow this policy. If the world follows the Rotary policy, then there would be no conflicts!’ Three days later Rotarian Syeda Simran Hasan , the Avenue Chair of Community Service , District 3271 called up to appreciate our efforts and added that we all , as Rotarians should take up the difficult challenge of spreading the Rotary ideology to as many people as we could!
The experience of ‘Dosti ka Paigam’ as well as that of the virtual meeting had made me realise a few things. ‘Ghazal’ — the literature and the music thereof — is a powerful medium to express one’s emotions and opinions. It predictably and almost instantly connects hearts to hearts and breaks down barriers and stereotypes. I decided that I would learn and rehearse the literary as well as the musical aspects of it more properly and try to be as technically perfect as possible. I also felt the necessity to learn the Urdu script if I had to really understand and be well versed with the nuances of the meters used for writing of ghazals.
An opportunity to learn was waiting for me. Towards the end of the pandemic, we medics still had some free time. A friend of mine – Chandrakant Patankar started ‘Lolak’ , a WhatsApp group of amateur creative writers and composers. Dr. Ravindra Shivde (a practising gynaecologist and an Urdu scholar) started conducting online Urdu classes for the members of ‘Lolak’ and also helped me immensely by giving me technical tips and advice ( islaah) about writing ghazals.
As I was experimenting with the writing of ghazals, I realised that a ghazal is also an excellent medium to appreciate or criticise oneself or even question and challenge one’s own conscience. The peculiar way of using the ‘takhallus’ or the pen name of the poet in this form of poetry allows the poet to express his introspection in a very effective manner. I started to search for a good pen name and ultimately selected ‘Bhalaa’ ( gentleman) . ‘Bhalaa ‘ was an expression of my conscience. There is a special way in which this word is used in Urdu/ Hindi. It is usually used in sentences which are used for interrogation. This would give me an extra leverage to question my own conscience and express the conflicts in my mind.
Once I was sure of using this skill and was reasonably conversant and confident about using the medium, I started a YouTube channel and started posting narrations of my own ghazals on it every weekly. People seemed to like my posts.
But much more importantly, I started getting a feeling that I had the opportunity to vent my feelings and thoughts in a creative and organised way on a public platform. This gave me a lot of satisfaction. I am going to continue this weekly venture for many more weeks to come.
I also desired to learn the musical dimension of gazal more explicitly and elaborately. Though I had received some very basic training in classical music as a child and had also attended a few voice training workshop sessions conducted by the renowned composer Pt Yashvant Deo, I lacked the formal training in music that a composer or a singer should have. Again, an opportunity was waiting for me at Badlapur, right in the town where I reside. Pt. Kaustubh Datar, (a classical ’kirana’ vocalist, disciple of Pt. Madhav Gudi and an experienced playback singer) agreed to teach me in spite of all my whimsical conditions. I requested him if he could help me refine the way I sing my own compositions of my own lyrics! He was not only very kind in accepting me as a student but also imparted a lot of knowledge about ghazal singing and light music . I am very fortunate to be blessed by a very able guru such as him. His teachings were really of immense help to me in adding an extra dimension to the expression of my ghazals.
I am an amateur writer, composer and singer, far from where I would like myself to be. But I wish to continue to write, compose and sing more and more ghazals privately and publicly. I wish to learn more. I wish to experiment with the medium more. The journey of this learning process has not been without hardships and frustrations . But the joy and satisfaction that it has given me is much more than I can ever describe. I wish to continue this journey beyond all horizons.
