I have heard many times that once Jamsetji Tata was denied entry to some luxury hotel by the English. Frustrated at that he promised that he will create similar class of hotels and he did; this Taj Hotels thing.
This rant is mostly about 5* hotels in India including Taj. Why they don’t have this jet thing in the toilet ? They do know that Indians use that. Right ? Even the Taj ones don’t have. So what the heck that frustration was for ? To create something the way English use it ? Eh…Cool !
This song used to play a lot on radio during my school days. Yesterday from somewhere this line “aj tain mainu maar pawai nan’de” was running in my mind. Then I searched for this song and stumbled upon this live version by Ranjit Kaur. The YouTube description of the video says that it was in Canada in 1982. That makes this song almost three decades old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0HsVa4YWPU
I was not able to find the album version. So not sure even the album version exists somewhere or not. Here is the album version finally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxcVr1iYSwo
It is written by Babu Singh Maan. The reason i am posting this song here with lyrics is to highlight how beautiful our music used to be before this “noise pollution” hit the industry.
I am posting the complete lyrics also. See the simplicity and beauty of words. It draws a complete picture of the rural life. Then see the simplicity of music; just harmonium and dholak. Ranjit Kaur’s amazing voice and the grace. It is a pure gem. Enjoy the beauty. You may post in the comments if you aren’t able to understand the meaning of any stanza. I will try to explain.
ni nanaane beimaane akhan fer gi rakaane tain hi veer nu kasooti looti lai nan’de aj tain mainu maar pawai nan’de
tu hi khich dhooh ke mainu teeyan wich lai ke gai awein sangdi sangaundi ne main peengh jhooth lai peengh chad gai hulaare siron chunni lath gai pind sauhrian de mach gi duhai nan’de aj tain mainu maar pawai nan’de
ghar aa ke kise ditti daar khamban di bana kise chandre ne ditta loon sewiyan ch pa khaure hasde hasaunde nu ki sapp sunghia uhne ik meri suni na sunaai nan’de aj tain mainu maar pawai nan’de
tu e bhain o bhara main begaanian di dhee ni nanaane hunda sarian da ikko jiha jee hor khaure us chandre de dil wich kee aje firda e mathe watt pai nan’de aj tain mainu maar pawai nan’de
mainu pata’i kahton ‘Maan’ mere kol na khaloye uhde laajwar la la kahton sass leede dhoye poore panj din aj saanu russian nu hoye saadi kise ne v sula’h na karai nan’de aj tain mainu maar pawai nan’de
(laajwar – neel (Blue), this Robin Blue or Amar Ulaja thing used on White clothes after washing them)
Called home and was talking to father saab. He told about a recent incident in our village. A husband & wife worked in the High School there. Husband retired sometime ago and he got few lakhs as his full & final amount. Their son who is a drug addict was demanding that money from his father. He said no to any money as he needed to get the two girls married off with that money. One day his son beat him up and hit him on the head. Probably due to that he lost his mental balance and one day committed suicide by jumping in front of the train. Villagers called the boy and first he denied to come and then came well dressed wearing black goggles. While giving the statement to Police he said “I am feeling stressed now, will record my statement after 2-3 days”.
Thankfully it is not. What you get to see is Bollywood’s use (use as exploiting something; i say use because Bollywood includes Punjabi songs in a movie to make the album hit not to promote Punjabi music) of Punjabi music. Far away from that adulterated stuff you get to hear there exists some beautiful Punjabi music of so many different genres including dance numbers, sad songs, spiritual poetry and so on.
Break the stereotype, go explore FolkPunjab.org and enjoy some beautiful music. A whole new world awaits you.
Most of the stuff that non Punjabi’s know about us Punjabis is typical stereotyped stuff shown in Bollywood movies and Punjabi songs. Most of it is some non-sense wrapped around “balle balle” as if dancing is what Punjabi’s do all the time. So thought about doing some posts telling the reality instead of what is being shown on small or big screen. How it actually started was that once I drafted a post explaining that how in Punjab there live people of all religions, not only Sikhs as a lot of non-Punjabi’s seem to think. But this post remained in the draft for months. Then last week a colleague in office was talking about something similar. From there an idea struck me to write about multiple topics related to Punjabi stereotypes. In each post I will try to talk about one topic (or more if they are very closely related). The posts are not going to be very very detailed but would briefly talk about the subject. You can add your criticism/views/corrections of any facts in the comments section. Some of the posts might be ridiculously short but length isn’t really the important thing here. Important is to make the point about some issue that we are seeing around us.
So here we go with the very first post in this series. In this the issue I am going to talk about is:
Punjab is a very rich state
That is what a lot of people outside Punjab think courtesy Punjab’s rich past and what is being shown in movies, songs etc. But the reality is that it used to be rich but it is not anymore. These days economy is in shambles. State is under a debt of Rs 1 lakh crore. There is no money to pay salaries to the Govt. employees and to make both ends meet Govt. properties, lands are being sold. There are hardly any new Govt. jobs. Not much is happening in the name of industrial growth so there are not many jobs in private sector too. Menace of drugs is posing the most serious danger the state has ever seen. According to some reports almost 60-70% or more of the youth is addicted to some kind of drug or alcohol. There are villages where each family has lost one of more of the family members to some kind of drug addiction.
Agriculture has failed. Landlords might be doing fine but farmers with few acres of land can hardly make both ends meet. Many of the small farmers have taken loans to the tune of lakhs from banks and because of poor agricultural growth are not able to pay it back. Not being able to support their families they are taking the suicide route to end their lives. There are many families where the only earning members have committed suicides and the debt ridden families are left to struggle with their lives.
With all this going on one can pretty much understand how rich Punjab these days is !
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