Last weekend, Pakistan businessman-turned-singer Taher Shah took to the internet with a music video – in which he wears a papal-style maroon robe with a train and sparkly wings stuck to his back, singing his latest song, Angel. Oh, and he wears a tiara, too.
Crooning in English, the Karachi-based Shah sings about love, heavenly beings and mankind for over five minutes, while wandering in a green field and staring up at the sky.
The song has taken the internet by storm, and the trolling has been merciless.
Within 12 hours of being uploaded, the video had received 200,000 hits and triggered such a social-media frenzy that #TaherShah was trending on Twitter in Pakistan, India and the United Kingdom. More than 30,000 tweets have been posted since the video went live.
While some tweets commend Shah for his confidence, others troll the bad vocals, garish costumes and shoddy production value of the clip.
Indian celebrity Twinkle Khanna tweeted: “Pakistan doesn’t need nuclear weapons they can just drop this purple bomb on us.” Indian fiction writer Amish Tripathy called Shah “a new weapon of Mass Devastation!”. And one Twitter user posted a photograph of an ancient Singer sewing machine with the caption: “Still a better singer than #TaherShah.” Among the many jokes was a fake tweet by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi: “We stand firmly with the people of Pakistan in this time of grief.”
Reactions were similar in 2013 when Shah first tried his hand at music with a song called Eye to Eye. It shot to fame minutes after it was released and went viral on social media. The video showed Shah dressed in a white suit against a white background singing, in English, about "sensational eyes, emotional eyes, colourful eyes, exciting eyes, fabulous eyes, spectrum eyes, human eyes, my eyes".
On his official website, www.tahershah.com, Shah has posted a few details about himself but coyly refuses to give his age. The website's picture gallery features, beside Shah in his purple robe, a young boy, believed to be his son, wearing a blond wig, crown and wings. Next up for the never-say-die Shah? He has plans to launch a television channel.
artslife@thenational.ae
