René Seifert - Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

I remember when I heard this song for the first time in the back-seat of a car driving through Mumbai, it's humid heat, it dusty streets when hardly any traffic moves forward, I was taken in immediately. It came from a CD which I understood was from the same artist, and as distances in the speed of snail in Mumbai provide ample time, the song came at least three times. I must have heard it a few times on random occasions, but never "got a grip on it". Untill I recently bought a compilation of "Top 50 Bollywood Songs". And as I lost it, so I found it. "Bulla Ki Jaana Kaun", by the Indian artist Rabbi Shergill. My phantom pain of missing out on the songs got more than alleviated by the additional detection of the video on YouTube. Here it is, and it is as stunning as the song, it's very much like India, it's kind of also a bit of "my India".

"Bulla Ki Jaana Maen Kaun" actually means "I don't know who I am" and pays tribute to the famous Urdu poet Bullae Shah, a beacon of peace between rivalling Muslims and Sikhs in Punjab. It's worthwhile noting that the poet wrote at the beginning of the 19th century, yet his message hasn't lost anything from its relevance today. In sync with the lyrics, the video shows what the mystery of India is about. Many people, different people who in spite of their various background form a "unity through diversity" as writer and diplomat Shashi Tharoor explains in his fluid book "The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone". And the pre-eminent statement "I don't know who I am" serves much less a confession of one's disorientation or, worse, lack if identity than the acknowledgement of one's humility during the pressing quest for truth. 

Hope you like the song, too, along with the video, the entry-scene of the magic Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, with it's fast cuts, it's deliberate blurs, it's changing places, colours and faces. In all the possible abstraction of a song, its whole mood reflects precisely that India is a never-ending stream of discovery. Where now knowing who you are, is both a starting point and and end in itself.