Exactly a year ago, I think it was on January 2nd 2010, I had made a blog entry advocating the singing of secular songs that are musically admirable after Bhajans. It was my reasoning that even secular music issues from the Divine principle and hence singing them after Bhajans should be encouraged.
However yesterday I was shocked to read a headline in the Deccan Herald (January 16, 2011) that a "Bhajan singer killed for refusing to sing vulgar songs" as demanded by the audience. This incident is supposed to have taken place in Deoria district of Uttar Pradesh. The man's name was Jagannath and was very popular in the area. He used to be frequently invited to religious functions. He led a group which specialised in musical recitation of the Ramayana and that was what he was precisely doing on that fateful day.
As the report goes "After the programme was over, some among the audience, mainly the young ones, asked him to sing vulgar Bhojpuri songs but he refused. There were women and children also in the programme and besides Jagannath essentially was a bhajan singer. So he refused. Enraged with Jagannath's refusal, the youths allegedly thrashed him with sticks and lathis, wounding him seriously..." and so on.
It is upon reading this news that I realised how mistaken it is to associate the sacred and the profane. I can retract my action and delete that blog entry, but I let it remain as it is so that people can understand what Arnold Schwarzenegger was saying when he famously asked : "You know why opinions are like assholes - because everyone has one!"
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