Nirupama Menon Rao: What global politics could learn from symphonic orchestras

The great paradox of orchestral music is that power only appears when ego disappears. Politics once understood this. It no longer does. The international system today resembles a rehearsal that has lost its score. The stands are there, the instruments are polished, the stage is lit—and yet there is no centre of gravity. Everyone plays. No one listens. The conductor’s gestures are ignored. The tempo collapses. Federico Fellini captured this nightmare with disturbing precision in Orchestra Rehearsal. His musicians, trapped in a decaying hall, begin to mock the very idea of order. They revolt against structure. They shout. They strike. They ridicule. What begins as liberation ends as ruin. The sound becomes violence. A wrecking ball breaks through the hall, and the orchestra, chastened and frightened, begins again—not from wisdom, but from fear. We are living inside that film.

Bob Dylan understood this earlier than most. In A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, he sang of blue rivers poisoned, of broken ladders, bloody hands, darker woods. He was not singing about weather. He was singing about moral weather. A civilisation that had lost its ear for consequence. We have multiplied that loss. The idea of the orchestra once stood for something larger than art. It was an image of civilisation itself: difference held in balance, power restrained by form, conflict shaped rather than erased. This is what counterpoint means. Two independent melodies moving together, not as com promise, but as tension deliberately sus tained. The beauty does not come from agreement. It comes from relationship.

Global politics has erased relation and kept only assertion. Nowhere is this more painful than in South Asia. A region layered with memory, ritual, musical inheritance and philosophical debate should have been an orchestra of civilisations. Instead, we have allowed grievance to harden into identity, suspicion into habit, and silence into default. Diplomacy falters. Summits vanish. Civilians inherit the dregs of distrust. Yet our civilisations were not built for permanent hostility. They were built for argument, dialogue and absorption. We forget that Sanskrit debated itself, that bhakti challenged orthodoxy, that Sufism listened before it sang. Listening is not alien to us. We have simply abandoned it.

The South Asian Symphony Orchestra was born from that abandonment. Not as a decorative gesture, but as a refusal to believe that the region had lost its capacity for harmony. When musicians from Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka and the diaspora gather in one orchestra, they do not bring flags. They bring breath. They bring pulse. They sit close. They hear each other’s mistakes. They adjust. They soften. They begin again. This is what politics has forgotten how to do. The work at the centre of our programme is not incidental. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which the orchestra will perform this weekend, is not merely famous. It is revolution. Beethoven was almost completely deaf when he wrote it.

Imagine that: A man who could no longer hear the physical world writing music not of bitterness, but of fraternity. Not of revenge, but of embrace. When the final movement of the Ode to Joy breaks open and the human voice enters, it is not a musical effect. It is a moral rupture. Instruments fall silent. Humanity must speak for itself.

Alle Menschen werden Brüder.

All men become brothers.

Not “should". Not “might". Become. That line is not sentimental. It is radical. It threatens the logic of power, the com fort of hierarchy, the old gravity of dominance. In a century shattered by eugenics, genocide and weapons that can erase cit ies in seconds, this line does not feel naïve. It feels almost unbearable in its ambition. To perform the Ninth in India is not to copy Europe. It is to declare that suffering does not belong to one continent. That courage does not belong to one history. That hope is not the property of the West.