I've been wanting to post up this article by Aakar Patel for a few days now - i was hoping to have some time to add the stuff that i'd been thinking about reading through the article (any desi journalist that can elicit any emotion other than derision needs to be celebrated), but given work i dont think thats going to happen.
It's an interested article, one i would encourage you to read - addressing that troubling dichotomy between art and 'accomplishment' that seems to have increasingly arisen. not art but artifice - the BBC have done a few excellent programs on the theme this season,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p05ww was (indrectly) one of them.
Aakers bumpy ride through world art is interesting, even if he looses steam towards the end. I have to say i did take mild exception to him dismissing Faiz Ahmed Faiz (perhaps Urdu's last classicalist poet) as some sort of leftist madman - and instead drawing the close on the Urdu poetic tradition at Ghalib. Ghalib is indeed be conventionally considered at Urdu's finest poet (i'd wager, in no small part because his heavily Persianised urdu is hard for most modern day readers to properly decipher, and its hard to go against the grain in such situations) Â - but in some ways Faiz's revolutionary poetry (irrespective of whether you share his leftist leanings) was the culmination of that evolution of the urdu poetic cannon, and that evolution in of itself doesnt take away anything from the aesthetic value of Faiz's poetry, something that i this Aaker completely misses.
also - and my final point, just on this (before i hand you over to aaker) is this:
Classical Urdu poetry is now finished, because the poet does not tackle the overarching theme any more.
In fact he cannot, because he would sound ridiculous talking about courage and honour in 2010. And how much courage can a poet add to Homer’s Hector, or vanity to his Achilles, or virtuousness to Tulsidas’ Ram
so have all songs been sung / books written ? Â ... .
Comatose art - Culture - livemint.com.