Freddy Mercury. A Paki? Or a Zanzibari?

Bohemian Rhapsody - the superb Freddy Mercury biopic which triggered this post

[Scene: Heathrow airport, 1970]

Baggage handlers are on the tarmac unloading suitcases from a plane.

A longhaired, buck toothed, leather jacketed handler pauses. He was distracted by an eye-catching striped bag covered with stickers that hinted at its travels around the world.

Handler 1: “Oi, you missed one, you Paki.”

Handler 2 (Farrokh Bulsara): “I’m not from Pakistan!”

These are his first words. Farrokh Bulsara, soon to become Freddy Mercury, announces himself in his (excellent) biopic Bohemian Rhapsody with “I’m not from Pakistan”.

So, where is he from? 

From Zanzibar. 

Except that that doesn’t actually answer any questions. Why was a middle class Parsi family in Zanzibar? What was Freddy Mercury's back-story?

It turns out that the Bulsara family's back-story parallels that of the Gujaratis who were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. 

Zanzibar was a British protectorate in the mid twentieth century. Bomi Bulsara, Farrokh’s dad, worked for the colonial government as an officer in the Zanzibar High Court. Farrokh was born in Stone Town, Zanzibar. The family were comfortably off. They lived in a spacious apartment (now a Freddy Mercury museum) and employed a live-in nanny. They sent their son to boarding school in India, to St. Peter's in Panchgani. This wasn’t unusual. Indian boarding schools were designed for the children of colonial officers stationed in far-flung outposts of the Empire.

The Bulsara family’s comfortable Zanzibari base dissolved along with the Empire. 

In 1963, the British Empire transferred power to the Sultan of Zanzibar, Jamshid bin Abdullah, who was to rule as a constitutional monarch. The Arab Sultan held power for less than a month. He was overthrown in the Zanzibar Revolution, led by a charismatic former brick-layer called John Okkelo. The Socialist Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba was declared.

An orgy of violence was unleashed. Arab and Indian minorities were targeted. A BBC story says 17,000 people (out of a population of about 250,000) were slaughtered on the streets. Genocide claims are still being debated. Those who could fled. 

Six months later, the Socialist Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba ceased to exist. It was merged with Tanganiyka to create Tanzania (a synthetic coined name). This was eight years before Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda.

The Bulsara family arrived in the UK in 1964 as refugees from this chaos. Freddy was 17 then.  

How did that tumultuous backdrop shape Freddy Mercury? 

Freddy didn’t talk much about politics or about his family’s heritage. We can only conjecture. My conjecture is that that Zanzibar taught him the truth of Jim Morrison’s immortal words at the end of Roadhouse Blues:

“..Alright! Alright! Alright!

Jim Morrison. Freddy's philosopher?

Hey, listen! Listen! 

Listen, man! listen, man!

I don't know how many you people believe in astrology...

Yeah, that's right...that's right, baby, I...I am a Sagittarius

The most philosophical of all the signs

But anyway, I don't believe in it

I think it's a bunch of bullshit, myself

But I tell you this, man, 

I tell you this,

I don't know what's gonna happen, man, 

But I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

Alright!”

Farrokh Bulsara was a Virgo, not a Sagittarius. But it seems he came to the same philosophical conclusion as Jim Morrison: that it isn’t all about how long you live, that it is about how much life you live while you’re still alive. 

Thanks Farrokh/ Freddy. For being a Paki, a Zanzibari, a Parsi, a Brit, a hero.

Farrokh Bulsara in Panchgani

Blog Rules

This blog is about everything except family and work.

This blog is not serious. This blog’s only intent is to amuse, engage, entertain.

This blog is not about my work. My work is serious. I will mostly steer away from work-related content. If I do touch on work-life, the views expressed here are strictly personal.

This blog is public. This blog is a third space. Comments are welcome. I will moderate comments to control spam and random rants.

This blog is mine. The content is mine. All copyrights belong to me (not to Google), unless I’m channeling content that is already owned by someone else.

This blog is not newsy. Pondering eternal, universal truths is more my style than keeping pace with contemporary news cycles.

This blog is alive. It will incarnate at midnight on The Night of the New Moon and stalk the streets of Mumbai meting out rough justice to those with impure hearts. Sort of. 

More specifically, this blog is a living document. It will change, it will grow. Nothing about it is defined apart from the basic rules of the road. I don’t know what it will develop into in this second coming. That is as it should be. 

Time lapse image of the North Star which shows how it does not change position.
Similarly, the Blog Rules on this post won't really change

Moonballs are Back!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, blog readers.

Rejoice! Moonballs are back!

Your correspondent has resolved to restart his beloved blog.

Yes, I've resolved to restart my blog before and not followed through. But this time the restart is for real. Blog posts will start flowing with reasonable frequency from this week on.

What happened? I celebrated a landmark birthday. Hundreds of friends got back in touch. Almost all these friends (now scattered all over the world and socially distancing) mentioned Moonballs from Planet Earth. They nudged/ cajoled/ hassled me to start writing again. I was touched. The nudging/ cajoling/ hassling worked.

And thus it is decreed that Moonballs will fly again.

Thankyou London Underground

The Tube is on strike today. Everybody's cursing (including me). Meaning, it's not a bad day to remember one of my favourite poems, an ode to the London Underground, which I discovered on the London Underground:

Here's to the gaps, the maps
And the elapse of a hundred and fifty years since that first
Steaming monster hurled
Through its Metropolitan Minotaur world.
To all the billiard ball-bottomed straps onto which I've hung.
And here's to the police office, who, when I was illegally
    busking outside Westminster Station, approached me and said,
'Do you know any Neil Young?'

St George the Dragon Slayer? Or St George the Lizard Eater?

St. George's Day Posters in London c. 2014

Is England’s patron Saint George a dragon slayer? Or a lizard eater?

The question is prompted by these posters promoting St. George's Day, prominently displayed across the metropolis, blessed by the Lord Mayor of London himself. The weapon the beast is impaled upon is, obviously, a table fork. In which case, the beast itself can’t be much bigger than a garden lizard. 

Do people eat lizards? Do heroes eat lizards?

Quite different from the way the dragon slayer was depicted in more heroic times….

St. George Slays the Dragon, by Raphael c. 1504

Wikileaks reveals…the importance of table manners

Julian Assange, photographed outside Ellingham Hall

Wikileaks has radically changed the way I see our world. Not the way I see war, liberty or the role of the state – a lot of the material Wikileaks leaked, was, frankly, unsurprising – but the way I see table manners. Wikileaks' leadership team retained what sanity they had, thanks to a regimen of strict table manners.

This thought comes from the excellent documentary We Steal Secrets: the Story of Wikileaks. In it, there is a period when the Wikileaks inner circle of about fifteen people are stuck in Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, on journalist Vaughn Smith’s country estate. They can’t leave Ellingham Hall; the MI6, CIA etc. are out to get them. So they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, with just each other for company, united only by their distrust of the outside world, each day melting into the next, as weeks run into months which run into years.

How did they manage to keep things civilized? By enforcing very strict rules on table manners. Vaughn Smith and his housekeeper enforced strict table etiquette, three meals a day, for over five hundred days of maddening claustrophobia.

Must have been the same dynamic in colonial officer’s messes, and up in the tea plantations.

Agnieszka Radwanska endorses Cheesecake Factory: the return of real marketing

Aga Radwanska @ Wimbledon

Aga Raswanska now endorses Cheesecake Factory. 

Refreshingly, she actually likes the Cheesecake Factory. She isn't just endorsing a random brand because they paid her lots of money.

She has been writing about visits to Cheesecake Factory restaurants on her blog for a couple of years now. "Can you imagine we tried almost every kind of cheesecake there during Indian Wells and Miami? Well except one — peanut butter... because I don't really like peanut butter," she wrote. "It's very close to the hotel, which is dangerous, because we could end up going there every night. We went yesterday. Maybe we'll try to cut down to every second night.". The Cheesecake Factory marketing people picked up on this, and an endorsement deal resulted. 

This feels like what celebrity endorsements ought to be about: not cynical money-making by a "media property", but a well known person sharing her genuine enthusiasm for a brand.  

Aga Radwanska @ The Cheesecake Factory