EINSTEIN once said to his Princeton University students: “Never read good books! Only read the BEST!!! Life is short ... If you concern yourselves with only the good, you will never have the time, in your lifetime, to get to the BEST.” This advice echoed what Aslam Azhar, an eminent media person, had himself already felt and thought about in those early years in the 1950s.
Referring to the above, he says, “I had, by good fortune, begun to understand that the ability to distinguish between the bad, the good and the best derives from one’s critical faculty.” He applies this theory to the three categories he was asked to give his views on: films, music and books.
The critical faculty within oneself, Aslam Azhar elaborates, is best developed in the early years of growing, around the age group or between years five and twelve. But it needs to be consciously nourished also in one’s later years. If, during the early years, the growing child and young person is exposed to good sounds, good pictures, good literature, then she and he can learn to distinguish between the best and the good and the bad.
Coming back to the issue of his favourites, he bluntly replies, “None now.” This is because he feels that in this consumerist age, all film-makers, everywhere in the world, cater to the lowest common denominator of cultural taste — sensation and sentimentalism, sex and violence.
In an earlier age, not long past, there were the Ingmar Bergmans and the Kurosawas and the Satyajit Rais who made films in the tradition of poetry, that is, in the language of metaphor (in Urdu, iste’aara). They worked to understand life, and then to interpret it so that the viewer would gain from the understanding. Watching their films, the viewer’s mind and imagination had to stay awake!
“When I read a book of fiction or poetry, and when I listen to good music, my imagination is awake and at work. My mind is awake and working.” On the contrary, he says, when we view a conventional movie these days, whether in the cinema or on television, our mind and imagination are not required to be active, “because everything in the story has been pre-digested for us by the film-maker, in vivid close-ups and contrived realism”. Then where is the art, he questions. “Not in these commercial films,” he makes his point.
Aslam saheb’s favourite musical scores have been in the classical and folk genres. In classical music he enjoys both South Asian and European, as “the two invoke in the listener very different responses, both emotional and intellectual”, and, in his view, both complement each other.
In folk music, he is especially addicted to the music of sufi inspiration, by which he believes the greatest of our folk music has been inspired. But he also enjoys the folk and country music of the European cultures, which comes very close to the spiritual mood of our own folk music.
The best time for listening to music for him is in the quiet of the evening, and the place is his home, with family, wife daughter and sons, so that it becomes “a shared experience”. Never in car or bus, for listening to good music is “too important an activity to be profaned by the intrusion of street noises.”
The book he has most recently read (and re-read) is the poetry of Pablo Neruda of Chile, “the greatest poet of the 20th century” writing in a Western language (in his case, Spanish). He has also read (and re-read) the great historical novel by Ivo Andric, The Bridge Over the Drina, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. “No better literature has been written as an introduction to Balkan and Ottoman history,” he justifies.
FAVOURITE FILM: Works of the great Japanese, Kurosawa
FAVOURITE BOOK: Anything by Faiz and Neruda
FAVOURITE MUSIC: Patthaaney Khan, Abida Parveen and Roshanara Begum, among others, in the East, and Mozart and Beethoven in the West.
EINSTEIN once said to his Princeton University students: “Never read good books! Only read the BEST!!! Life is short ... If you concern yourselves with only the good, you will never have the time, in your lifetime, to get to the BEST.” This advice echoed what Aslam Azhar, an eminent media person, had himself already felt and thought about in those early years in the 1950s.
