* Sing Yare Dabestani, sing

via Iranian.com
Hamid Bakhsheshi:
Late Friday afternoon, I'm trying to tie things up to get out of the office and go home. I'm sure the wife has plenty of things for me to do before the weekend even gets started. As Houshang Tozi said in one of his plays, Booye Khoshe Eshgh (the sweet smell of love), "here in America wives help the husbands around the house". If my dad only knew!

Anyway, I thought I check my emails one last time and then go. I had a message from naghmeh.com. I clicked on it and went to the site. I had visited it many times before and was amazed how well they had put this site together.

This time there was couple of new songs there. One was called "Yare Dabestani" (school friend) and the other "Iran". I listened to the first one. It is a wonderful mixture of pictures, graphics and poetry with the song. Before I knew it I was melted into this video. I went back twenty-four years to high school in Tehran. I was seventeen and crazy with the ideas of a so-called revolution. Fists up in the air shouting words of disagreement and hate even. Shoot, what did I know?

It also reminded me of so many friends and classmates who died believing the same thing I did. I, too held bloody shirts up in the air and made bandanas with them. I too sat at the front gate of the Tehran University until the guards came and took me away. I too was looking ahead for a better country and a better soil to grow my roots stronger. If I only knew.

So, sing Yare Dabestani, sing. I once wanted to hang the lantern of my life on the dead pine tree. Instead I left and came to America. My lantern burns and maybe, just maybe, some one will warm from it's glow or another student will read by it's light.