South Africa mourns death of musician who worked for Hindu-Muslim unity

JOHANNESBURG: The South African Indian community is mourning the demise of musician and singer Ramesh Hassan, considered the face of Hindu-Muslim unity in the country.Hassan, aged 73, died of heart attack on Saturday.

He had changed his Muslim birth name of Hassan Saib to Ramesh Hassan because he wanted to foster harmony between Hindus and Muslims living in South Africa through music.
Hassan had planned a series of comeback shows over the next few months.

He started performing at the age of 14, belting out cover versions of popular songs of singers like Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard among others. He later shifted his skills to singing in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Urdu and the indigenous languages -- Afrikaans, Zulu and Sesotho.

In the early 1990's, boosted by the national public broadcast Indian radio station Lotus, Hassan became a household name with a song about how his wife had reacted in Tamil when she saw him with an another girl.

He toured throughout South Africa and became one of the first local Indian artists to stage a show at the then biggest entertainment venue in southern Africa, the Sun City.
The song remains a favourite of bands playing at Indian weddings here, decades later.
Like almost all South African Indian musicians, Hassan could not afford to depend financially on his performances only, so he also had business interests alongside the singing profession.

But, as he said in an interview once, he was "bankrupted" by the Pope at one stage.More than a million people from across southern Africa had been expected to flock to Lesotho in 1988 because of the scheduled visit of the Pope.

Seeing an opportunity, Hassan had several thousand Basotho blankets made, bearing the images of the Pope, to sell them to the people in the region who traditionally use such blankets.

"But the Pope's visit was dogged by political unrest and bad weather, resulting in less than 10,000 people showing up, and I had to literally give most of those blankets away, which made me bankrupt," Hassan had said.