Tariq Ali

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2008

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the radical thinker, writer and broadcaster Tariq Ali. Forty years since the streets of London were filled with demonstrators, Tariq Ali describes how he came to be involved in anti-establishment politics and how, from an early age, he felt drawn towards those people who were the underdogs of society. He was born to privileged, atheist parents in Pakistan, he led his first street protest at 12 and his first strike at 15 He became increasingly political until, after a military coup, his parents were advised to send him out of the country for his own safety and so he came to study at Oxford.

He travelled to Vietnam at the height of the war to observe and document the suffering there and also travelled to Bolivia and Palestine. His role as an anti-establishment agitator was cemented when he led two revolutionary marches in London in 1968. Forty years on - and after a successful career as a film-maker and writer - he says it remains important to voice dissenting views and he insists that despite his privilege and status he remains firmly outside the establishment.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Meda Ishq Vi Toon by Pathaney Khan Book: The collected works by Marcel Proust Luxury: A mini DVD player.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My castaway this week is Tariq Ali, a novelist, filmmaker, historian and playwright,
0:32.3	he first made his mark as a charismatic student leader in the late 60s.
0:36.0	His striking looks, thick wavy hair and ponchon for wearing a red mac made him a radical celebrity.
0:42.0	Born to upper classclass atheist communist parents in Pakistan,
0:46.0	his intellectual rigor and political nouse were honed from a very early age.
0:50.0	He led his first street protest at 12, his first strike at 15.
0:55.0	His role as an anti-establishment agitator in chief was cemented
0:59.0	when he headed two major revolutionary marches in London in 1968. The years have passed, he's found
1:04.9	success as a novelist, documentary maker and commentator, but his categorical anti-establishment
1:10.2	spirit remains intact, expressed regularly in print rather than on the street, but nonetheless
1:15.3	passionate for that. Let's start, Tarrick then, with you as a teenager. You're in your mid-teens,
1:21.6	you're in the Himalayas on holiday and what happens how do you get involved in well
1:26.5	it was a strike really? It was a strike and you know this was an old Hill Station colonial health station, beautiful place
1:34.7	called Nathia Gully where we used to go every summer and in those early days in the
1:40.6	50s the sewage system was very primitive. So you had sweepers, as they were
1:48.2	called, who would come and clean the toilets, the old thunderboxes and take them and dump it somewhere. And one day I was
1:55.2	talking to one of them and I said how much are you paid and he said you know gave me the
1:59.4	figure and it was just piffling and he said we try hard really to get a raise. And I said, well, you've got to go on strike. And he said, what? I said, you have enormous power if you stop during your work the whole place will be
2:15.2	stinking to high heaven and they'll be falling on their knees pleading with you
2:20.9	to work and they don't strike and the whole place this sort of
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.