Tuning in to a concert, for peace and new hope

About a year ago, a young activist was abducted and killed by terrorists in Assam. I hadn't met Sanjoy Ghose in over a decade. But it was...

About a year ago, a young activist was abducted and killed by terrorists in Assam. I hadn’t met Sanjoy Ghose in over a decade. But it was not difficult to understand why he could have run afoul of the powers that be. He was passionate. He was committed, and he was brave. And he was not alone. I still see his peers, firebrand youth activists of the late seventies, heading processions, leading agitations and even distributing pamphlets at street corners. To be a student in Mumbai in those times was to be intensely political. There were long arguments, passionate zeal about matters often a million miles away, bitter fights, campaigns, hotly aired differences over aims and methods and intense rivalry. Some of it was ugly, no doubt. But what I remember clearly coming through was a desire for not just a better, but a more humane way of life.

A decade later, when I visited colleges in Mumbai for a study on youth trends, I was amazed at how much things had changed. Everything seemed neater somehow. Students dressedalike, studied hard and were keen to get ahead. There were no layabouts arguing in the corridors, no hotheads taking up issues. Mostly, because there was no time. The competition was fierce and ambitions ran high. Everyone worked part-time or spent their spare time doing courses that would stand them in good stead in the `real world.’ An ongoing teachers’ strike at the time evinced no opinions. My questions about ideology evoked blank stares. When I asked a student, one of the brightest in his class, what books he had read, he cheerfully confessed he had never read a book in his life. Another honestly admitted that the only thing he and his friends really worried about was making money. Various studies I referred to confirmed that the trend was echoed all over the country and in the rest of the world. The days of rebellion were over. Young people were more likely to conform and to stress individual achievement over public good. They also tended to be more anxiety-ridden, more confused and more focused onmaterial gain to the exclusion of all else.

It is these circumstances that made the Peace Concert held last week at the Andheri Sports Complex such a significant event. Organised by the Indian Peoples’ Media Collective (a gathering of professionals, activists and filmmakers) with enthusiastic support of students from Bandra’s R D National College, the concert was meant to commemorate the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and make an appeal for peace. Giving the event an unprecedented urgency was, of course, the recent nuclear testing in the subcontinent.

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That reports claiming a ninety per cent support for the bomb were flawed seems a distinct possibility, given the response evoked by the organisers. As many as 24 artistes/bands, among them the country’s best known performers including Lucky Ali, Mehnaz, the Shaan-Sagarika duo, Silk Route and Pentagram agreed to perform free. Popular veejays Rishma and Suchitra threw in their services. Celebrity visitors such as Shabana Azmi, Mira Nair, Javed Akhtar,Javed Jaffrey and Milind Soman put in an appearance. Lights, space, sound and infrastructure came either gratis or at cost, and students from various colleges all over town turned up in thousands to watch.

Likely as not, the main attraction for some was probably the fact that it was free. The quick-fix-habituated audience also turned restive when special invitee Arundhati Roy decided to read from her essay on the bomb. Despite this, however, the mood that pervaded the stadium that night was exuberant. Peace messages fluttered all around, white ribbons glinted from every chest, and slogans intermittently rent the air. One musician had composed a special song (“Hip hip hip hooray/The bomb is here to stay/No matter what they say/We’re going to drop it one sad day.”) Another threw tee shirts into the audience with the message: No Nukes; No War; No Racism; No Fascism…. Not Woodstock but something quite like it.

Simplistic? Idealistic? Perhaps. Will the feeling of goodwill and humanitarianism outlast theevent? Who knows? The point is this: If even the young stop dreaming, there can’t be much of a future for mankind to look forward to.

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