Music: India Chalo!

Artists: Ali Azmat

Ali Azmat was at the World Social Forum held recently in Mumbai.

The conference`s main agenda was to bring to Asia the whole flavor, flamboyance and festive radicalism of the global anti-corporate/capitalism and pro-environmentalism movement first initiated in the early `90s by various Western and Latin American Socialist, Anarchist and Environmentalist groups and lobbies.

The idea behind the whole hulla gulla in Mumbai was to make 'third-world' and developing nations like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan realize the new exploitative agendas and strategies of post-Cold-War capitalism, especially the exploitation exercised in this respect by world`s major corporations, ranging from those involved in the oil business, to those responsible for making designer sneakers and much hyped soft drinks; how they are misusing cheap Asian labor and facilities, and cold heartedly using impressionable Asian markets to make massive profits of which the Asians get but a tiny share. A noble undertaking indeed by various Asian NGOs and peace groups and various 'aware' Indian and Pakistani artistes. In fact I too was invited (by a local NGO, for 'the services my writings have done to highlight corporate hegemony and exploitation in Pakistan`s cultural circles and the damage being caused to cultural activities and growth by religious fanaticism'), but I declined the invitation. Even though the prospect of traveling to India after about 17 years was certainly alluring (the last time I visited that country was way back as a 17-year-old collage student), but the idea of meeting an army of Indian and Pakistan NGO workers and artistes wasn`t all that appealing. Why? Well, because at least MOST of them were part and parcel of exactly the SAME scheme of things I have been scribbling against for the last ten years or so!

NGOs financed by western donors with vested social and political interests, and artistes on the payrolls of various cynical multinationals, were being attacked at the forum. Then, of course, there were certain journalists there as well who write for magazines and Newspapers that have a management that simply REFUSES to print anything in this respect because it will supposedly affect their business relationship with the multinationals which hand them millions of rupees worth of advertising. Wonder what they were doing there nodding at all those anti-capitalist and anti-big-business speeches?

The list also included members of certain right-wing Urdu papers. The same ones that make sure to have a myopic, quasi-Islamic angle to all their stories and recently were pleading to acquit Dr. Qadeer Khan of all charges EVEN if and when it was proven that the former 'hero' and the father of the bomb had turned into an hideous greedy BUM!

But best of all was the little piece another Pakistani 'peacenik' at the conference wrote in this week`s The Friday Times. There was a delicious irony in reading Ali Azmat`s piece. Ali, lead singer of Junoon (which ironically is one of Coca Cola`s biggest rock acts in Pakistan) and Ali Azmat who also recently appeared on a massive Walls ice-cream hoarding (Walls owned by Pakistan`s largest multinational, Unilever Pakistan)

You must remember (because he seemed to have casually forgotten), that the Coca Cola Company was one of the main targets of the Mumbai forum. Ali however went on and on about how large businesses and corporations are sucking the blood of poor nations like India and Pakistan, and how they have become like 'Terminators' and the machines of 'The Matrix.'

If he (all of a sudden) has become so aware about this phenomenon, then shouldn`t he be back here canceling Junoon`s lavish, soul-selling contract with Coke and boycotting ever coming in a multinational`s ads or hoardings? How come it took him and Junoon (all of whom belong to my generation), more than a decade to realize all this? How come Salman Ahmed and Ali (and, mind you, not Brain) continued to attack me as a 'useless rebel-rouser' and 'impractical' when I started to criticize them ever since they signed on with Coke in 1996?

Ali is an intelligent and passionate man. He rose to stardom from obscurity by sheer dint of his own talent. But even he must learn, somewhere along the line, that you can`t hunt with the hares and run with the hounds. If his article sounded contradictory, then him with a Coke bottle and a Walls Feast bar was downright disappointing. Because many years ago I was convinced he would be the one to musically and personally articulate the roaring lyrics of the 1993 Junoon song, `Talaash`. Now him sounding like a faddish, cola-selling and choc bar licking anti-corporate radical is actually quite a hilarious if not downright disgusting sight.