‘Talash’

Junoon

While it is unclear what Junoon was specifically rebelling against in 1993, we can all agree that the youth of every generation has been anguished by the state of the state in all its iterations. That said, what an anthem and a masterpiece ‘Talash’ is! This song has everything: very, very angsty lyrics set to a furious composition; the promise of Ali Azmat’s voice blooming into the commanding force it eventually would become, Salman Ahmad and Brian O’ Connell providing the music, audio clips from the news hinting at whom the song may be about, and electrifying guitar solos. The video itself is quite telling of the times: both of the country’s and the band’s.

The video too is worth a watch, as it features the Junoon gang before it went Sufi, the kind of requisite onstage harmonizing between guitarist and vocalist that all bands in the ‘80s and ‘90s did for no reason, and ominous symbols portending that something’s not right.

Of course, the band got into trouble a couple of years later for their song and video for ‘Ehtesaab’, so we suppose all the rebellion did redirect itself towards a solid cause.

Blank protest

Razia Bhatti

Sometimes saying nothing speaks the loudest, and Razia Bhatti and her team at Herald said it all with the few blank pages that were part of the magazine during a particularly rough time between the press and regime of the time. The blank pages too were ultimately banned in time, but this has to be one of the most eloquent silences in history ever.

Eject

Asim Butt

2007 gave way to 2008, and towards the end of the former, a tumultuous but exciting year if there ever was, Karachi witnessed graffiti popping up at significant points, which comprised merely of a stencil of the ‘eject’ symbol.

The brain behind this was Asim Butt’s, proud Stuckist and incredible artist. The graffiti was his reaction to imposition of emergency in late 2007.

Butt also played with erasing bits of words to convey what he believed them to stand for – e.g. spraying out the p and o in police to leave behind the word ‘lice’ – but the Eject graffiti remains a symbol and reminder of the events that pooled around it.

‘Mushir (Mein ne
uss se yeh kaha)’

Habib Jalib

While Pakistani Urdu literature is lush with prose and poetry that takes on the political and the personal in the same breath, there is nothing that equals the plain resignation and sarcasm of Jalib’s ‘Main ne uss se yeh kaha’.

Interestingly, the poem keeps coming up during politically charged times in Pakistan, and disappointingly is never out of context. In 2007, Laal sang a version of this in support of the lawyer’s movement at the time. The video for this is worth a watch, because it will jog your memory about what the lyrics stood for then, why we needed these words and images in 2007, and why they may be relevant now.