Agus Pratama, Afghan Star
When I joined Tolo TV one of my first assignments was Afghan Star, a music program similar to American Idol.
For 10 years this show had given Afghan men and women a precious chance to sing and shine. It remains the most popular TV show in Afghanistan and I relished the challenge of working on the 10th season of the show with my fellow producers Hamid, Sajid, Zuhal, Fatema, Tamim, Musadiq and Mujtaba.
Now on the surface, this TV show might have seemed like a cheap knock off of American Idol. But in Afghanistan it did more than provide young men and women their 15 minutes of fame. When in power, the Taliban banned music and singing – and they hated Afghan Star and what it represented with a passion. Just showing up and auditioning for Afghan Star was a powerful personal statement about the kind of life these young Afghans wanted to live in.
With that in mind I went about my work. Just like American Idol our show featured auditions throughout the country’s major cities but this year we also offered online auditions for people outside the country. As could be expected, they came from all over the world hoping for a spot on our show: Afghans in Germany, Afghans in Holland, Afghans in Canada and so on it went… until he showed up.
On a grainy video a thin, young man introduced himself in thickly accented English before launching into a ballad in perfect Pashto, one of the major languages spoken in Afghanistan. None of this was out of the ordinary for our online auditions, save for one important fact – unlike everyone else, the applicant was not Afghan.
His name was Agus Prattama and he was from Indonesia, of all places.
Out of a sea of Afghans here was this young man from a far away island nation dreaming of becoming an Afghan Star. I immediately sat up in my seat when I saw his video.
To put this into some context, for almost two decades young Muslim men had been seeking out Afghanistan to fulfil their dreams of living the short, brutish and nasty life of a jihadist. They came from all over the world to fight and die in Holy Wars against Red Afghans, Soviet Russians and most recently against Godless Americans. .
And then, there was Agus – the outlier from Indonesia. Here was a young Muslim man that yearned to come to Afghanistan not to pick up a Kalashnikov and Koran but to pick up a microphone and sing the latest Pashto and Dari pop hits instead. Right away, I could see that Agus had a poignant story. I loved his motivations for wanting to come to Afghanistan and believed Afghans throughout the country would be touched by his unabashed love for their music.
I had to have him on the show but we faced a problem.
According to the rules of the online auditions only Afghan nationals or men and women of Afghan descent were eligible to apply via online auditions. As an Indonesian without any Afghan blood, Agus was ineligible to join the show. Not to be deterred I sat down and wrote a lengthy appeal to Massood Sanjer, the Channel Manager of Tolo TV at the time, asking him to provide some kind of exemption for Agus that would allow him to join the show.
Thankfully, it did not take much lobbying. Never one to miss out on a great story, Massood quickly saw the value of inviting Augus over to the program and agreed on a compromise with us. Agus would not be allowed to compete in the main competition but we could invite him as a special performer for an upcoming episode. Thanks to Massood, the path to Afghan Star was now clear for Agus.
Together with Zuhal, I shared the good news with Agus over Skype and a few weeks later he took his first trip outside of Indonesia, arriving at the Kabul International Airport on a blisteringly cold winter day. Several of our producers had went ahead to meet him at the airport but he was worried about getting lost among strangers in a strange country and refused to come out of the arrival terminal until he met with Zuhal, our producer who had been his principle point of contact with the team.
After Zuhal rescued rescued him from the arrival terminal, Agus became a star from the moment he stepped out of the airport. He was followed by our cameras and producers everywhere he went. As part of his backstory our producers Sajid and Zuhal took him to Karga Lake, a popular weekend destination outside of Kabul and over to the Tolo TV guesthouse to meet our finalists for this season. Agus and the contestants didn’t share a common language but they could sing to each other and so that is how they communicated. Agus would sing a song in Pashto and the finalists would come back at him with a song in Dari. In the video I reviewed, he looked at home and among friends.
When I did manage to free myself from work, I was able to join Agus and Sajid on a trip to downtown Kabul. He was keen to do some shopping for friends and family back in Indonesia but Agus was not so keen on Kabul in December. Coming from a country blessed with an eternal summer, Agus had never experienced cold like this before. Instead of shivering like most people he developed a bizarre reaction to the weather. He would gag – as if nauseous. Walking around the downtown markets with Agus, Sajid and I tried to keep a straight face and look after him but we couldn’t help breaking out into fits of laughter as he gagged his way on through the bazaar crowds.
Despite the cold, Agus gladly drank in the rest of it. He stopped and grabned photos with the young boys selling carpets and in the bazaars and asked for selfie’s with old men pushing along their fruit carts down Kabul’s streets. And at the end of a busy day, he would go back to his room at the Kabul Park Star and post about his adventures over his social media accounts. And as Afghans grew to know more about him, they too began to love this sweet oddball from exotic Indonesia.
A few days before his performance on Afghan Star, Tolo News came out to do a story on him. We all met up in the garden outside of the Lapis offices at Tolo. Shakeela Ebrahimkhel, a tough respected journalist with Tolo News had come out to do the interview. She sat down with Agus and talked about how he had found his way as an unlikely Afghan Star special guest. Agus revealed that he had been singing all his life, mostly Indonesian ballads but while working at a manufacturing company that specialised in pipes, he met Afghan refugees living in the area and began to learn about their lives and culture.
It was these refugees who first introduced Agus to Afghan music. Intrigued, he began researching Afghan music over the web, watching and listening to YouTube videos featuring classic and contemporary Afghan singers. Soon he started to try and sing some of his favourite songs, applying his powerful vocals to Pashto and Dari lyrics. And he just kept at, getting better and better with each try – till the day Agus sent in his video to us. At the end of the interview, Shakeela asked for a preview of his upcoming performance. Agus obliged her, launching into a ringing Pashto ballad.
In front of Agus sat this remarkable journalist journalist, she had been married off as a teenager during the Taliban and then later widowed as a young woman, forcing her to raise her three young children alone and without help. Shakeela was tough as nails but seeing this young man from a faraway place passionately sing a song from her own culture moved this hardened journalist to tears. She’d never seen anything like it. In that moment, I knew I had made the right choice bringing Agus to Afghan Star. Stuck at recording studio we, couldn’t be present in the millions of homes across the country but I was now sure Agus would reach out and touch their lives.
What Agus didn’t share with Shakeela was that he had been orphaned as a teenager, he lost both his parents in a horrific car crash. When I learned of this later, it put everything I knew about Agus in a new light. This young man radiated warmth and kindness to those around him and to be that kind of a person after a devastating tragedy like that takes a special kind of soul – and Agus had it. I was glad that through Afghan Star he was going to have a chance to shine brightly for his parents up in Heaven.
But the night of his scheduled performance it looked like he wouldn’t be shining for anyone. I arrived at the Red Cross set to find Agus sprawled across the floor of the contestant waiting room, fantastically no-joke sick. The freezing weather, the strange food and pressure of singing for millions of people finally caught up with him. He had flown hundreds of miles for this moment and we had spent thousands of dollars setting this up but I was not about to shove him onstage in that kind of a condition. I reassured him that if he didn’t feel well enough to perform he didn’t have to go on stage.
But tonight, nothing was going to stop Agus. When the time came around for his performance, all the shivering and moaning stopped. A newfound strength flowed into him and he stood up, eager and ready to make the most out of this moment. I ran out onto the set and next to Sajid, just outside the view of our broadcast cameras waiting for Agus to make his entrance. The lights dimmed and out he came, swaddled in beautiful traditional Indonesian robe. The crowd leaned forward in their seats… and for Afghanistan and himself, he sang:
Top 11: Agus Pratama / مرحله ۱۱ بهترین : آگس پراتما
Fast forward a year from that moment, Agus returned back to Indonesia – with thousands of new fans from Afghanistan. He regularly posts new songs in Dari and Pashto to his social media accounts and they rake up thousands of reactions. Hamid left Afghanistan with his family to start a new in the United States through the Special Immigrant Visa program, Sajid also made his way to the US with the same visa program, Fatema and her fiancé left Afghanistan for Germany and now live there as refugees, Tamim is with another employer in Kabul and everyone else including Zuhal are still with Tolo.
As recently as last week I was watching Senior CNN Correspondent Nick Paton Walsh’s report on Tolo as a follow up to the aftermath of the January attacks that left several of our friends colleagues dead and wounded. Towards the end of the program, I could clearly see he was reporting from the Afghan Star recording studio. Behind Nick and in the cutaways I recognised everyone from the team; there again was Wahdat with his wacky hairstyle operating one of the cameras and our handsome Jim Morrison lookalike Shakib, creeping along his dolly tracks for a shot.
Clearly, against the darkness Afghan Star continues to shine.
To Afghan Star team in Kabul and around the world, Agus and everyone else I met and worked with at Tolo, I urge them that to no matter what, keep on singing. <3
