Iranian Girl Band to Kashmiri Girl Band, Pragaash: Our Mullahs not as bad as yours; we can do music!
It is always interesting when victims of one tyrannical society mock the helplessness of victims of another.
In this case, an Iranian Girl Band has expressed shock, not only at how the Kashmiri Girl band was hounded into silence, but also as to how little support they have from their society and family.
Sahar Lotfi finds it strange that an all-girls band in Kashmir has been hounded into silence. Where she comes from, her all-women group called the Ghazal Band has been blasting out Sufi music at public performances for more than a year. Lotfi and her band members live in Tehran, the centre of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution.
And the six girls rub it in when they tell people indemocratic India that not only are musical concerts by women in Iran a regular feature, often there are bigger crowds attending them. “The music culture in Iran has always been vibrant and there are private music schools, though separate for girls,” says said Sahar Lotfi, lead vocalist.
And while little help has come in for the girls of Kashmir’s Pragash rock band, Lotfi says that her family has always been supportive and it was her husband’s idea to form a band.
We know how bad it is in Iran in terms of religious extremism, but even there people do not get so uppity about the basics of life. And this shows how bad it has become in Kashmir of late.
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