About four decades later, Dr. Ashish Kaul caught up with the man behind it in San Francisco, where Jahangir, now a recipient of Pakistan’s Sitara-i-Imtiaz and often called the “Michael Jackson of The East“, generously agreed to sit down for an intense and unusually warm conversation.
Dr. Ashish Kaul in conversation with Hassan Jahangir | Changemakers, www.NewsTrustIndia.com
Some travellers need a passport. Hassan Jahangir needed only a cassette. In 1987, a young singer from Karachi released an album called Hawa Hawa, and the song did what no diplomat, no treaty and no summit has ever quite managed: it crossed the Indo-Pak border unchecked and landed straight in the hearts of Indian music lovers. Roughly 15 million copies sold in India alone. Wedding baraats, school buses, roadside dhabas: for a whole generation, that tune was the wind itself.
Nearly four decades later, Dr. Ashish Kaul caught up with the man behind it in San Francisco, where Jahangir, now a recipient of Pakistan’s Sitara-i-Imtiaz and often called the “Michael Jackson of Pakistan”, generously agreed to sit down for an intense and unusually warm conversation.
What emerges is not a celebrity interview but a memoir spoken aloud.
He remembers Mumbai in the late eighties and early nineties, when he was mobbed by fans who did not care which side of the line he had been born on. He recalls the fandom with a smile that has not faded, the crowds, the affection, the sense of belonging to a city he had only visited.
He goes further back, to a Karachi childhood and a mother’s transistor radio. Intrigued by the voices inside, the boy took it apart to find out who was singing from within. The radio did not survive. The curiosity did. That same stubborn, do-it-yourself instinct runs through everything that followed: a bodybuilding regime he designed himself, and a career in which he insisted on learning every skill, from composing to performing, on his own terms, without a godfather or a shortcut.
Then there is the afterlife of Hawa Hawa. Bollywood has borrowed it not once or twice but, by his count, eight or nine times, most recently in a 2017 film. Jahangir speaks about this with more amusement than grievance, the way a father speaks about a child who left home and keeps turning up at other people’s parties.
The heart of the conversation, though, is his reflection on India and Pakistan, and on music as the one currency both countries have always accepted at par. His memories of Indian audiences, his views on the bond that melody builds where politics fails, and his hope for what that bond can still do, are offered with the candour of a man who has lived on both sides of the applause.
Hassan Jahangir never needed a visa. He had a voice, a broken transistor and a tune that refused to recognise borders.
Hear the entire conversation on News Trust India’s Changemakers segment.
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