Rehan Ansari January 1, 2000

Tags: nri

Rehan Ansari is a featured Chowk columnist. Visit him at I Love Nawaz Sharif.

href="/tag/Pakistan">Pakistan after seven years, the first time in her adulthood. She was transfixed by the entertainment shows on Star and Zee. She spent her formative years in the west but she was never hooked by MTV as she was by MTVAsia. Now it seems no surprise that she went back and auditioned for a Zee show that is produced out of New York City.

Friends and family from all over Pakistan are emailing about the interview with Mira Nair which they have seen, and inquiring about others in the pipeline: Zakir Hussain, the hot mail guy, the credit card king from California, the automobile-spareparts tycoon from Ohio, the mega hotelier from Atlanta, Ismail Merchant… None of the Pakistanis asks her if she is interviewing any Pakistanis. We take it for granted that our pop icons will be Indian.

The director of the program has Saniya ask the NRI's about their relationship to the motherland. She also puts the question in another way. Overwhelming numbers of her interview subjects' families (ten of the twelve people interviewed so far) are originally from Pakistan. Their families come from Multan, Quetta, Lahore and towns my sister says she has never heard of previously but now knows are in Pakistan. She asks them if it has occurred to them to visit these places. They all say no.

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When Saniya was interviewed for the job, the NRI producer mentioned that she reminded him of the world of Haseena Moin. In the early and mid 80s when Haseena Moin dramas kept entire cities indoors during prime time, I remember how my ten-year old sister obsessed over Tanhaiyan. Tanhaiyan was a quintessential Haseena Moin play: characters lived by wit alone. Very little slapstick, even the villains did not swagger. It was not macho that was villainous but the envious gesture. And it was the heroine always at the centre of the wit and repartee. That is how they would win the day when it came to men and families. Marina Khan was one of the beloved stars of the show, and the one my sister stalked right to the office of her day job at a doctor's clinic. Perhaps that’s when I should have realized this girl was going to make it to TV land. From the days when dinosaurs like PTV and Doordarshan ruled the airwaves till Zee's current reign, one who understands what made Haseena Moin click knows what can appeal to an audience that occupies vast stretches of India, the Middle East, England and North America.



Tongue in cheek tales I am privy to of the of the lordly NRI (that may or may not find their way into the resolutely upbeat tv programme). They tend to possess vast houses that include five-star hotel type bathrooms, and discos, and swimming pools and cinema screens. And they seem to love playing with gadgets, even if it is a remote that raises and lowers curtains way dozens of feet above eye level. But few children wander in these homes. If there are some cadging about the twinkle in their father's eyes resounds in the dullness of the child's own eye.

The NRI of California, who made it to America by 1965, seems to have missed everything cultural of the Berkeley 60's. The youth movement, anti-Vietnam protests, Civil Rights, Feminism, 1968, everything that the intersection of Haight Ashbury in San Francisco signifies was simply outside the door of their office and lab. Zakir Hussain being the exception. He credits the 70s and his friendship with Van Morrison and George Harrison with making him more than a "tablchi." On the other hand when asked if he regrets leaving India he says: "tau chora kab tha?"

About the NRI of the South: imagine that one has invented sari and wine parlours. In Atlanta malls you can go to a shop where wives can imbibe saris and husbands wine.

The NRI of New York City: never ever refer to the production company of Merchant-Ivory as Ivory-Merchant in the face of Ismail Merchant.