Shame On You,  Rahat Fateh Ali Khan

I have often disputed  my Goddess Devi  Ma Lata Mangeshkar’s  assertion  that to be  a good artiste you need  to be a good human being.

Rahat Fateh Ali Khan is  a good  singer. But he  is not a good human being.

 The  viral video which shows him repeatedly hitting a man, identified as  his ‘shagird’ Naveed Hasnain,  with a  chappal  and abusing him , shrieking about where his “bottle” is,  Rahat has proven he is  not a  good man at all.

 To make  it worse, he now claims this is an  attempt to  “tarnish” his image.

Tarnish his  image??? The  video  shows him assaulting the whimpering man, a man who is very clearly disempowered  and in  no position to retaliate or even defend  himself. Where  is the room to besmirch  the great singer’s image when he has stomped and defecated  on it(his image)all by himself?

Rahat Fateh Khan needs  no help in tarnishing his   image. He has done a very good job of  it  himself.

Explaining the indefensibly  unambiguous assault  in a video Rahat says, “Whatever you have seen in these videos is about an internal matter(!!) between an ustaad (master) and a shagird (protege). When a protege does a good job, we shower a lot of(on) them and when they make a mistake, we punish them as well… I had apologised to him at the same(sic.) time…”

 Rahat also explained that the “bottle” which he  kept asking for while assaulting his  “shagird”  contained “holy water”

   Going  by the  number of structural and  ethical errors  in  the  video that he  has put out to explain his unacceptable behaviour, it looks like he was drinking from the same holy water while recording the explanatory  video.

We have  always welcomed Rahat Ali Khan to India. He has sung some of  his best songs for Hindi films. But after this discordant incident I am not sure he is welcome here.