It is a tragedy that a very talented musician, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan,
is dead. Even more tragic is the fact that many of us, among his fans,
had near-zero ability to grasp or appreciate his class of music. Today, we
get "transcended", "enraptured" and "elated" by his incantations not
particularly because of the music form, but because we have worked very
hard at conditioning our brains to respond at this wavelength after we saw some
westerners praising a relatively little known musician from our country.
Let's hope that this condition and calibration of our brains stays with us
for a while and maybe we will find more talent among ourselves.
Let's also hope we do not need more Peters and Mikes to install icons for us to
idolize.

I appreciate the musical taste of the Western patrons and fans of Nusrat Fateh
Ali. What I do not understand is the sudden "implosion", "passion" and love
for "Sufism", and "Fusion Mysticism" claimed by countless Pakistanis
immediately after a Pro-Sufi musician is bestowed a knighthood
by the West. I wonder just how long will it be considered cool to become
musst over this music by this new wave of hip sufi-lites.

In all this tragedy, there is some light: the emperor REALLY was
wearing very fine clothes. Otherwise we as a nation are fully capable
of eulogizing even a gaddah [donkey] if it is The Chosen One of
the Western media.

I think Nusrat's biggest contribution to Pakistan is not his music (there
are others even more talented than him, in Pakistan), but the fact that
he, directly or indirectly, reduced the level of our inferiority complex as a
nation.

PostScript: The above opinion is applicable only to people like myself, and not to his true fans who loved his music even before his international projects.

Post PostScript: There is no anti-western sentiment implied in the above. In fact, the title can be easily re-worded as "In Praise of the Power of the
Western Media".