Fathers Day

Put your inspiration poems or quotes here...
Post Reply
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Fathers Day

Post by kmaherali »

"Dilbaro" (Cover) - Muskan Jiwa

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W71WF_VM2k

Beloved

Muskan Jiwa (13) sings "Dilbaro" to wish her loving Dad (and hero) Zulfikar "Happy Father's Day". Muskan is thankful for the unwavering support, unconditional love and constant encouragement she receives from her Dad, day in day out.

The popular song "Dilbaro" featured in the Bollywood movie Raazi (2018) was sung by Harshdeep Kaur, Vibha Saraf & Shankar Mahadevan. Lyrics were written by Gulzar and music composition was done by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. Raazi received 15 nominations at the 64th Filmfare Awards.

JollyGul is presenting this song with lyrics and translations as part of Father’s Day 2022 celebration on our platform.
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

"Papa Kehte Hai Bada Naam Karega" (Cover) - Granthik K

Post by kmaherali »

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h4lLRkdmkY

Papa Kehte Hai Bada Naam Karega

My Dad Says I'll Make Him Proud

Granthik K (11) sings "Papa Kehte Hai Bada Naam Karega". Granthik is a singer-performer from the City of Nagpur in India. He has been singing from the age 6 and has won many hearts by his voice and amazing singing abilities. He has participated in the popular reality show Sa Re Ga Ma Pa and also has special interest and talent in singing Sufi songs.

"Papa Kehte Hai Bada Naam Karega" composed by Anand–Milind, with lyrics written by Majrooh Sultanpuri and sung by Udit Narayan for 1988 movie "Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak" was a major hit song at that time.

JollyGul is presenting this song with lyrics and translations as part of Father’s Day 2022 celebration on our platform.
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

It Took Me 49 Years to Ask the Right Question About My Father

Post by kmaherali »

Most of us with absent fathers think, "What about me?" We rarely stop to ask, "What about him?"

Image
Roy Ayers during a taping of the TV show “The Midnight Special” in Burbank, California, 1977.Credit... Jeffrey Henson Scales/HSP Archive

By Nabil Ayers

Mr. Ayers is the author of the memoir “My Life in the Sunshine” and the president of the record label Beggars Group U.S.

I always know when Mother’s Day is approaching. I love thinking about what new vegetarian restaurant I might take my mother to, or which of the many great photos of her from my childhood I’ll post on Instagram. Father’s Day, on the other hand, has never been on my mental calendar. I usually learn it’s coming when I see an ad for a sturdy piece of luggage or golf gear.

I hardly know my father, the jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers — we’ve met only a few times. He and my mother were never really together. With his consent, she got pregnant deliberately, knowing he wouldn’t be part of our lives. I’ve always known that story, and for most of my life, I’ve been OK with it. I had a wonderful childhood thanks to my mother and several formidable male role models. So I never really felt my father’s absence. He didn’t break any promises. He didn’t leave. He was just never there in the first place.

In my mid-30s, I finally got in touch. Roy was surprisingly open, and when we sat down for lunch, our conversation felt easy. But what I’d hoped might become a semiregular meeting turned into a bright spotlight on his absence. When I tried to stay in touch with Roy after that lunch, he rushed through phone calls or left them largely unanswered.

Though we live in the same city, my father and I haven’t had a meaningful conversation since that lunch years ago. It took an unexpected incident last summer for me to realize that I can still celebrate Father’s Day without my father’s presence.

In June 2021, I scored tickets to a screening of “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” at Marcus Garvey Park, the actual location of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival performances documented in Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Oscar-winning film. About 20 minutes into the concert documentary, the exuberant host Tony Lawrence shouts, “Ladies and gentlemen, from right here in Harlem, soul time!”

And with no warning whatsoever, my father’s image filled the two-story-tall screen, framed by the brilliant yellow, blue and brown backdrop of the festival stage. He looked breezy in a white tuxedo shirt, its cuffs flapping loosely, the top few buttons undone.

Image
Roy Ayers performing in Harlem in 1969 from a scene in the film “Summer of Soul.”Credit...Searchlight Pictures/Hulu — Onyx Collective

On the screen that day, I watched my father play the vibes as if his life depended on it — with a confident focus and control that demonstrated a tremendous commitment to his craft. It became clear to me that music was his life. Music took 100 percent of his energy, and there was no room for me in that equation.

I was 49 last summer, and that performance was filmed about two years before I was conceived — just before Roy’s solo career blossomed. In that moment at the screening, I witnessed my father in his element, and I saw a side of him I’d never seen. I saw an energetic, disciplined talent who was on the cusp of writing and recording some of his best music — some of the best music of a golden era. And I saw a 28-year-old man who looked a lot like I did at that age — a younger version of myself, with all the passion and promise of youth.

My father was so good, and what he did was so important to him, that it became easier for me to understand why I was never — and would never be — a priority in his life. That 1969 performance helped me to realize that I have everything I’m ever going to get from him. It was time to stop hoping for more.

Most of us with absent fathers think, “What about me?” We rarely stop to ask, “What about him?” It took me 49 years to have that thought. But when I finally did, it allowed me to let some things go.

I’ve felt many ways about my father over the course of my life: ambivalent as a child who rarely thought about him; thrilled when, as an adult, I finally got to meet him and have a real conversation; angry when he didn’t return my calls after that. I’ve felt our connection when I see our similarities — our high cheekbones and our physical laughs. And I’ve felt bitterly disconnected when I think about our differences. But as I watched this performance from over 50 years ago, I encountered a new feeling: pride.

My father is now 81, and he’s still touring the world playing music. I believe music will occupy his energy until there’s none left, and that belief makes me happy for him and for the many people whose lives he enriches. I’m no closer to my father this Father’s Day, but I’ve made peace with that.

I have always felt uncomfortable talking about my father, even with my closest friends. But as I watched Roy perform in “Summer of Soul,” I turned to my friend, pointed at the screen, and said, with newfound ease, “That’s my father.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

My Father Makes Me So Angry. I Take Care of Him Anyway.

Post by kmaherali »

Image

By Ada Calhoun

Ada Calhoun is the author, most recently, of “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me.”

The brilliant eye and dazzling wit that make my art critic father, Peter Schjeldahl, beloved by his readers often come across in person as, frankly, sort of mean. In public, he is an enthusiast. In private, he is mercurial and unreliable, and prefers smoking cigarettes in his office to playing with his grandchildren.

When I was growing up, his work was everything to him, and he made no apology for that. My parents stayed together, but he was still pretty checked out. He drank heavily until I was a teenager. He never seemed to find me interesting, nor has he shown much interest in my undeniably terrific son and stepson.

When my 11-year-old effused over “To Kill a Mockingbird,” my father told him, “It’s no ‘Huckleberry Finn.’” (My husband and I employ the line to describe disappointments of all kinds. How was dinner tonight? Not bad. But no “Huckleberry Finn.”)

My father wasn’t abusive, but he never did any of the things that might qualify him as a “good father.”

For years, I fought becoming a writer. When I’d shown early promise in that direction, I’d cringed at comments like “You’re a chip off the old block” and “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“I’m nothing like him,” I wanted to say.

I thought I could prove that by going in a different direction. And so I was compulsively reliable.

When I was in college at University of Texas, Austin, in the late 1990s, studying Sanskrit (very different!) and working at photo labs (also different!), I had to admit to myself that where I really wanted to work was at The Austin Chronicle, the alternative weekly there. I had crushes on half the staff writers, or maybe I just wanted to be them. Only one way to find out.

The problem was how I’d keep my father from knowing. I worried that if he read anything I’d written he’d say something withering. Plus, I hated the idea of someone seeing our shared last name — Schjeldahl is distinctive; the relationship would be obvious — and thinking that I got where I was because of him.

Filling out paperwork when I was hired by the newspaper (first as an intern, later as a reporter), the “doing business as” line glowed with promise. Publicly, I wouldn’t have to be the art critic’s daughter. And for my byline I turned my middle name, Calhoun, into my last.

For many years, I worked as a writer without most people ever knowing who my father is. I was once asked to come in for an interview at a magazine where he worked by someone who, when I told him of the connection, was surprised. That was proof I’d pulled it off — built a career independent of him. It felt really good.

A few years ago, I came upon research in my parents’ basement for a biography of the poet Frank O’Hara that my father had tried to write in the 1970s but never finished.

Assuming that the failure was due to his character deficiencies, I decided to finish his project. I had two motivations. One benevolent: to find common ground and help him tie up loose ends as he neared 80. One competitive: to beat him at his own game. (“You might be more like your father than you think you are,” a friend told me at the time.)

Ultimately I did not win and we did not get closer. We fought more than ever. And I failed with the book as he had failed. As I was faltering, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and his apartment burned up in a freak electrical fire. Then Covid hit.

During quarantine, my husband and I hosted weekly movie nights at our place, making big meals and screening old movies. My father said he loved these nights. And yet, he was as distant and difficult as he’d always been.

What do we owe our parents? Do we owe them more than what they gave us? If we’ve given them a thousand chances to be better for us, do we give them one more?

As I was making enchiladas, yet another dinner that I anticipated my father not quite appreciating, I called my friend Tara and asked how I could keep taking care of someone who made me so angry.

“By doing the right thing,” she said.

“Which is?” I replied.

“Making enchiladas.”

In dealing with an imperfect parent, I’ve found comfort in doing what is right — putting a plate of food down in front of my dad even if he doesn’t particularly notice.

I didn’t finish my father’s biography of O’Hara; I turned it into a book about my father and me, about the ultimate unknowability of people we are supposed to unconditionally love.

There’s a line from “Middlemarch” that I think about all the time: “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

I did not, to be clear, believe my father would live to read the book I wrote about our relationship. He was given six months to live almost three years ago. I wrote it thinking I would never have to share it with him. But he did live and he did read it.

I worried that he would hate it, but he didn’t. He always cared only about writing, and in this moment I was glad. He did not love the book because his daughter wrote it; he loved it because he believed it was a good work of art.

I decided that my father saying that about my book could be enough. I could place all the things he did that hurt me on one side of a scale, and on the other I could put the gift of his high praise. I could choose to let the scales balance.

I feel lucky not to have a father so wonderful that I feel I could never live up to his example or so terrible that he haunts me. Maybe it’s easier to become yourself in reaction to someone who’s neither evil nor saintly.

Might the middling fathers be, in a practical sense, the best ones?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Post Reply