Beautiful, uplifting 2 hours with Ruby

THE EDITOR: In these troublous times, you often look for moments that tell you the world is not all that ugly, indeed that it can be beautiful and uplifting, making you forget the things that speak to the baser elements of mankind. For me, Ruby Khan-Guptar’s birthday singing performance on IETV on Sunday, 6-8 pm, was one such moment.

For 60-year-old Ruby was incomparably beautiful and her voice was soothing and mesmerising, touching something deep within me as I listened to all the old movie hits from my boyhood days in Metro Cinema in San Fernando, fantasising about being Shammi Kapoor as he won the heart of Saira Banu in the movie Junglee with his rendition of Ehe Saan ay Tera in a way only Shammi can.

Or being Mohammed Rafi with his Meray Dosti Mayra Pyar, brought to life with Ruby’s beautiful voice. Suhani Raat, which virtually everybody knows, was her crowning jewel and I only wished there could have been more.

But Ruby’s singing performance was much more than music to the ear. With all my sense of modernity and intellectual prowess which often tend to frown on matters of ancestral heritage, Ruby’s singing inspired in me a deep sense of belonging to the finer and enriching elements of my East Indian cultural heritage, welling up in me a sense of identity long forgotten.

And I think that for all of us in this country, in our unique diversity, this is a lesson we can all learn, that if we look deeper into our ancestral past, there is much there to inspire and energise us, to make us feel a sense of real and original belonging to something of which we can be proud.

And this is not racism as in the current international discourse, not difference for its own sake, but merely a distinguishing element in a larger panorama of many other such elements, each equally distinguishable, but coalescing into a unified whole. Much as the red in the rainbow is clearly distinguishable from the green, and the blue, each colour with its own identity, but an integral part of the totality that is the rainbow, and the sapodilla tree is different from the pommecythere, but is all part of the total backyard landscape.

And the host Shirvani Sookhai, resplendent in her beaded shalwar (I think), articulate and informative without being overbearing and bombastic, helped to enhance the beauty of the moment, shepherding the listening audience with the background to Ruby’s items and with responses from people as far as India who thought that it was a revelation that a woman of the West could sing so beautifully.

But much more, Shirvani, sensitive perhaps to a wider listening audience, saw it fitting to contextualise the moment within the ravages of covid19, portraying Ruby’s singing as a balm for troubled minds in a world where such suffering and pain abound.

Ruby’s performance has been a special moment in time, light in the darkness which should never be hidden under a bushel, and as I congratulate the singer, the host and the organisers at IETV, I urge for its repeat.

DR ERROL NARINE BENJAMIN

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