Pop sensation Taher Shah graces the world with ‘Angel’ because why not

The joke that is still funny

KARACHI: Every time my friends say Abid Shaka’s insightful vlogs will stop being funny at some point, I die a little on the inside. Not because I know that’s the truth, but because it hurts to see talents like these return to oblivion when they should otherwise have been celebrated. Awais Lovely came and went. Engineer Agha Waqar is now a thing of the past. Nobody gives two cents about Asif Raza Rana anymore. One after another, the gladiators fell and we became a graveyard of heroes.

Over two years ago, pop sensation Taher Shah emerged from darkness and swept across the country. Within days he was everywhere. But then something happened. He vanished ... and left us forsaken in this miserable world. For years we wandered in this wilderness. However, if until yesterday you were still wondering what is missing in your life, you need not go far.



Lo and behold! Taher Shah is here to save the day for one last time. In this picture that surfaced on social media yesterday and the song Angel that made its way to the internet in the wee hours of Saturday morning, there’s a fairy, or an angel as the lyrics suggest, donning a purple velvet cloak walking in a prairie. Never before have I seen an angel with chest hair, holding a smaller version of itself in its hands.

PHOTO: FACEBOOK

Some might call it genocide, but believe it or not, this is the second coming of the Messiah because disappearing isn’t enough; you have to come back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige’. Taher Shah is the trick that still works … the end of the rainbow ... the joke that’s still funny.

On the contrary, what scares me the most is the sincerity with which he continues to soldier on. How can a man with zero talent piece together one masterpiece after another, one wonders? Taher Shah is proof that nothingness certainly does not beget nothingness.

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If you tell me that Angel is just another song then I will tell you that you’re a liar. It is the seed of an idea; a glimmer of hope from which intellectual mileage can be drawn.

I pondered over Angel with all my reasoning powers and arrived at the conclusion that Taher Shah is a phenomenon that simply cannot be grasped.

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However, something still tells me that some cogs are moving somewhere. Somewhere behind this chaos lies an incoherent idea ... a new world order germinating ... a revolution in the making … a monster waking up from slumber. In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. In this very vastness and obscurity exists the concept we call Taher Shah.

I have no shame in admitting that I was unable to wrap my head around Angel. However, in the process of thinking it through, I discovered myself anew.



Today I have begun to second-guess myself but Taher Shah stands, quite literally, as the elephant in the room; the burning question that tells man that never in this life will he be able to understand the universe in its entire complexity.

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I, for one, have bought into the notion that Taher Shah is not a man. Beneath this purple velvet cloak is an idea. And ideas, as they say, are bulletproof. Be afraid. Be very afraid.