Memo From Pakistan
Satirical Song, a YouTube Hit, Challenges Extremism in Pakistan
Youtube
The members of Beygairat Brigade, or A Brigade Without Honor, openly mock the military and religious conservatives.
**By SALMAN MASOOD**
The song, “Aalu Anday,” which means “Potatoes and Eggs,” comes from a group of three young men who call themselves Beygairat Brigade, or A Brigade Without Honor, openly mocking the military, religious conservatives, nationalist politicians and conspiracy theorists.
Their https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/world/asia/07pakistan.html) written by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, considered a giant of Urdu literature. Habib Jalib, another famous Pakistani poet, wrote several poems against Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator in the 1980s.
But “Jalib is irrelevant to the generation of urban, young, middle-class kids that Beygairat Brigade is addressing,” said Nadeem Farooq Paracha, a culture critic based in Karachi.
“This band is offering an alternative narrative to the one this generation has grown up on, and provides a counternarrative to establishmentarian and conservative notions of politics, history and society advocated by televangelists, conspiracy theorists and, of course, the right-wing electronic media,” Mr. Paracha added. “And what better and more effective way to do this than by using satire and pop music.”
The band members, on the other hand, have no pretensions of being revolutionaries, activists or intellectuals, though they do feel that the song represents those who do not believe in extremism and want to live peacefully.
“At the end of the day,” said Mr. Saeed, the lead vocalist, “we are just musicians who raised some questions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/world/asia/beygairat-brigades-youtube-hit-song-challenges-extremism-in-pakistan.html?_r=2
dont know if this thread’s been posted up before but has anybody seen this youtube video?