Fresh Air - Best Of: 'Merrily We Roll Along'; MSNBC Host Ali Velshi

Episode Date: June 8, 2024

Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along flopped when it debuted in 1981. But its Broadway revival has been a hit, garnering seven Tony nominations. We talk with director Maria Friedman, who was a friend of Sondheim's, and actor Jonathan Groff. MSNBC host Ali Velshi traces his family's migration across three continents, from a village in India to South Africa — where his grandfather crossed paths with Mahatma Gandhi — to Kenya, Canada and the U.S. Velshi's new memoir is Small Acts of Courage.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Stephen Sondheim's 1981 flop is now a Broadway hit. The revival of Merrily We Roll Along is nominated for seven Tony Awards. Today we hear from two of those nominees, Jonathan Groff, one of the show's stars, and Maria Friedman, the director. Groff has performed Merrily about 300 times, but he still gets emotional just talking about the songs. I'm thinking about a specific dialogue line. It's just after...

I can't talk about it without crying. It's like... It's so beautiful. Also MSNBC host Ali Velshi talks about his ancestors' migrations from a village in India through South Africa, Kenya, and Canada. One of the figures in the story is Mahatma Gandhi, who knew Velshi's grandfather and had a powerful influence on the family. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Terry has today's first interview. I'll let her introduce it. Stephen Sondheim's 1981 musical Merrily Weep. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. We roll along, closed after only 16 performances. Since then, it's developed a cult following, and now it's a Broadway hit with seven Tony nominations, including Best Revival of

a Musical. The person behind this new production is my guest, first-time director Maria Friedman. She's nominated for a Tony, as are the three leads, Jonathan Groff, who's also with us, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez. This is Friedman's directorial debut. She's also an Olivier Award-winning actress. She worked closely with Stephen Sondheim. She co-starred in a London revival of Merrily in the mid-90s under Sondheim's direction. She also had leading roles in British productions of the Sondheim musicals Passion, Sunday in the Park with George, and Sweeney Todd. She became good friends with Sondheim, and he became the godfather of one of her children. Jonathan Groff was nominated for a Tony for his performance in Hamilton as King George III

and for his performance in Spring Awakening. He's also known for his performances in movies and TV shows, including Frozen, Mindhunter, Looking, and Glee. People sometimes complain that Sondheim doesn't write hummable melodies, which isn't true, but it's particularly not true of the songs in Merrily, as you'll hear when we play excerpts from the new cast recording. The story begins with three old friends. Jonathan Groff plays Frank, a composer turned film producer. Daniel Radcliffe plays Charlie, a lyricist and playwright who wrote songs with Frank and thinks Frank abandoned

his calling as a composer to make money as a crowd-pleasing movie producer. Lindsay Mendez plays Mary, a best-selling novelist turned theater critic who's become bitter and drinks way too much. Charlie and Mary feel abandoned by Frank. The story spans 20 years, starting in 1976. Each scene goes further back in time until 1957, when the friends first meet. Let's start with Jonathan Groff singing Old Friends from the new cast recording. Hey, old friend, are you okay? Old friend, what do you say? Old friend, are we or are we unique? Time goes by. Everything else keeps changing.

You and I, we get continued next week. Most friends fade or they don't make the grade. New ones are quickly made and in a pinch, sure, they'll do. But us, old friend, what's to discuss? Old friend, here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few. That was Old Friends from the new revival of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. Jonathan Groff, Maria Friedman, congratulations on the show.

Congratulations on your Tony nominations. I love this revival so much. I'm so happy to have you on the show. Thank you. We're happy to be here. The original 1981 production of Merrily We Roll Along was a big flop. It closed after, I think, 16 performances.

This is the first commercially successful production of Merrily. In the show, when the characters have the first successful production, they're standing outside the door listening for the applause. And when they hear the applause, they're saying, it's a hit, it's a hit. So where were you on opening night on Broadway for this show? And I'm also wondering, like, if you all went somewhere afterwards and saying it's a hit. Well, I was in the auditorium.

I can't tell you how much I miss Steve that night. Because for me, this has been a love letter to him from day one. Not that he wanted the love letter, may I say. He always used to say, for God's sake, don't do it for me, do it for you. And I'll come and see it. And if I like it, I'll let you know. And if I don't, trust me, I'll let you know. But I went into this.

If it in any way sounds arrogant, then I've not made myself clear I was really calm on opening night I sat in the auditorium I did a lot of people watching around the applause and I watched a whole audience sitting at the front of their seats I heard an opening night that was quiet sort of I don't know it felt like the whole room was pushing as one towards the story. I felt totally relaxed because I've been with this show now on and off for 30-something years. And it was what I, everything I wanted on that stage, there it was. Jonathan, were you listening carefully to the applause to see which way it was going to go? It's so funny you ask that because like Maria funnily enough the success you could hear in the silence. You could it's absolutely right Jonathan it's in the silence yes in the breathing as one

when they heard things that they collected those moments a bit like a sleuth they're going backwards they're like you just hear the whole audience as one yeah there's some lines that happen two hours and 40 minutes into an evening after an audience one line that has been laid out one line that takes over the course of maybe three seconds to say, and now you've had a whole show, a whole intermission, and this, it reappears, several of these lines reappear at the very end. And when you feel those land, it's like, whoa, this, these people are really listening and picking up that detail that starts with his writing. It feels incredible to be inside of those moments.

Are you talking about lines in the song Our Time? Yes, I'm thinking about a specific dialogue line. It's just after... I can't talk about it without crying. It's so beautiful the line comes after the character of Mary this is in the first scene which is

chronologically the end of their story but it's the first scene that the audience is seeing and Mary who's the dearest friend of Frank leaves and it's like it's like his heart walks out the door. And just after that happens, this young, sort of like what would be the young version of Charlie, this young writer says,

how do I get to be you? Devastating line. That's a devastating line. And Frank says to this young man, don't just write what you know, pointing to his head. Write what you know, touching his heart. And some nights that line gets a bit of a laugh because maybe it's a bit of a douchey thing to say. And it's called upon again at the end of the show in the very final scene. Charlie says it to Frank, and it starts everything. It starts their collaboration, it starts their love story, it starts, it's the beginning of everything.

And it's just thrown away. Yeah. He says, you really like what I wrote? Yeah. He says, yeah. He says, you do. You don't just write what you know, you write what you know. And that's it. And that's two hours, including interval yeah later and the whole audience just go oh you just feel the pain there's just many many moments like that that start collecting

jonathan how could you tear up after having done so many performances of this? How is it that it's still so emotional for you? Like, just here, let me take my heart out of my body and just place it at your feet. Feels like that is in the energy of the writing. And then Maria came in and asked us all to do that. They did it. They had the bravery to do it. And so everything actually is a word that comes up a lot in the music and in the script. This word everything. And in a kind of cosmic sense, Maria gave us the gift of inviting all of us to give everything. And I mean, we've, including off-Broadway, we've done this over 300 times. Instead of it getting rote or instead of it getting stale, it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper.

That's a quote. Yeah, yeah, it is. There's another thing, though, what I find really interesting is that we have one tool that is our very, very best friend as an actor, and that's staying present. The greatest actors are present. They're not doing yesterday's show or a plan in their head. And because we change and the audience change, you know, we have different days, we're tired, we've had an argument, we've fallen in love, whatever it is, our life is running in town alongside the play,

that if you are skilled enough and open enough as a performer, the person in front of you will be changing slightly every day. And when an actor presents you with something different, you can do two things. You can resent it because it takes you away from what you plan to do, or you go with it and it makes you richer and deeper. We're listening to Terry's conversation with actor and director Maria Friedman and actor Jonathan Groff. Friedman directed the new revival of Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along. Jonathan Groff is one of the show's stars.

We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. So, Jonathan, you're tearing up talking about some of these songs and what they mean to you. But you can't really do that on stage because you have to be in the moment. How does that work? How do you get your voice out? I know when I cry, my voice just kind of quivers and it's hard to speak. It's interesting. Right before we started rehearsals, I was obsessively listening to the music, became obsessed with the score.

And I was trying to know the music before the first day of rehearsal because the music is not changing because this is a revival of a famous Sondheim show. And I would get to learning our time and I would just weep. And I was like, okay, I guess once I'm in rehearsal, I'll stop aggressively weeping and we'll be able to sing the song. And then our first day of staging this song in the show, sat there with Maria and Dan and Lindsay, and we're just all weeping. And we're just, we're crying. I don't know, we're mourning the inner child, we're the dreams, all of it. And it wasn't really until we had the audience there that I could actually pull myself together. Because understanding, okay, this is a story that we're telling for an audience. And what Maria, especially in the intimacy of the off-Broadway experience at New York Theatre Workshop, where we were for more important than you're feeling embarrassed that the audience is so close to you.

Say what they wrote. You have to send these ideas into the story and communicating the ideas was essential in getting me over that kind of crying that makes it unable to speak. And so I still feel quite emotional when I'm singing it and tears do come. But the necessity and the need to articulate the thoughts and the ideas. The same thing. I don't know about you, but I have cried probably almost as much over joy and beauty and possibility. So I say use it. If it comes because you're excited and you're sitting with your best friend and it's possible, I know I have welled up and teared up with pure joy and hope many times, a beautiful sunset, a moment where I'm sharing ecstasy with friends. I don't mean

that in the chemical sense. But that will make me cry. So if that's what Jonathan feels when he's feeling those things, let it happen. Why not? Maria, how did you cast Jonathan in the role of Frank? By meeting him. We talked on a Zoom. And then I took him to Steve Sondheim's house, who had already passed away. Because I wanted Steve to be, I don't know, somehow part of the decision. I wanted Steve to meet Jonathan properly. And we sat and we talked in his house for ages. And then Jonathan drove me to my hotel. And I got out the car just going,

well, that's that then. It did mean that we all had to wait an enormous amount of time for him, but I would do that 10 times over. Maria, you played Mary, one of the three leads in the show, in the mid-90s. And this is the time when Sondheim was rewriting it as you were rehearsing it. How did he direct you as—well, he wasn't directing the show, but I'm sure he was making suggestions to you. No, he was directing the show. He was directing it. Okay, like literally or actually? I mean, he's a great collaborator, so he wouldn't step on the toes of the staging, but the staging is only part of directing.

So how did he direct you in that character? And could you compare that to how you directed Lindsay Mendez, who plays Mary in the new revival? There's a kind of reverence about Steve, which he hated. So they had the published score, and I was being made to sing like it was Charlie, like down here, because it was printed in that score. So I was like, Charlie was like, anyway, he came into the rehearsal room and he just looked at the musical director. And I said, what? Why is she singing down there? And they said, well, it's in the score. He said, I write for people. I don't write an idea.

So up it went by a fifth and suddenly it was, guess what, in my key. And I had been saying to them, he won't mind, but they were like, he's coming in, it's got to be in this thing. So that was the first thing. I tore up the it's got to be in this key. So when an actor arrives with me and it's out of there, we change the key. We make it fit them. Second thing is, it's all about the detail. So if ever you skimmed past a thought or an idea or a subtext, he would sit cross-legged looking into my eyes, maybe two foot away, and just going, nope, what are you thinking? Nope, what's that? What are you doing? What are you thinking?

And then he would fill you or make you fill up yourself with your ideas it's what we're talking about the pauses the bits in between the connective tissue that allow you to just be full with that part that was one thing the other thing is I I played her incredibly wild the first scene where she's drunk and I was like screaming and throwing things and falling on the floor and everything it was pretty it was really fierce and always different so I would every single day do something different so that the cast would jump out of their skin I'd go up to somebody else and whatever he said to me I'm really worried about you this comes

too easily to you and over the years I was so happy because I thought oh my god maybe this is like a premonition I'm going to be one of these crazy angry banshees alcoholic whatever but because he said that I promise you I kept an eye on myself. Like in real life? Yeah. Because it was easy for me to be that wild. I didn't have that kind of safety valve that I see a lot of actors have. It was all out.

Were you letting out your bottled up anger on stage? I think probably. That's what he said to me. He said, there's some massive part of you that's angry, Maria. And I'd always thought of myself as playful and funny and good to be around. But then I kind of, I realized, of course, that is the actor I am.

I don't say yesterday is done. I'm bringing it all with me. So it's all available. It's all available, that stuff. And I had a very complicated childhood. So all those things that were unprocessed find their way into the corners of what I do as a performer. So I hope that something that I was given to him

is kind of to be mindful that there's a separation between acting and your real life. Make sure that you're not bleeding the two into one another, that it's a technical requirement that mustn't cost you so much that it makes you sick, because it could do when you're asked to do that much. Thank you both so much, and thank you for this production. I just enjoyed it so much.

Congratulations, and good luck at the Tonys. The show's nominated for seven of them, including for each of you. So, you know, I wish you the best. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. Maria Friedman directed the current revival of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. Jonathan Groff stars in the role of Frank. Merrily is on a limited run through July 7th.

You might know our next guest, Ali Velshi, from his work on MSNBC, where he's chief correspondent and a regular presence, hosting his own weekend show called Velshi and filling in frequently for the network's primetime anchors. He also hosts the Velshi Band Book Club on MSNBC and a podcast of the same name. Velshi has written a new memoir, and it's mostly not about his career in journalism. It's a remarkable family history, which begins in a village in India in the 19th century and winds over the generations through South Africa, Kenya, Canada, and eventually the United States. His ancestors' travels were driven by powerful currents of history, and its members encountered some notable figures on the journey.

Velshi's grandfather, for example, could be found as a little boy riding on the shoulders of Mahatma Gandhi, part of a relationship that would have a lasting impact on the generations to follow. Velshi's book is a compelling narrative about a family in the Indian diaspora and a reflection on the meaning of citizenship in its many forms. Besides his work on MSNBC, Velshi is a weekly economics contributor to NPR's Here and Now. He spent years reporting on business and economics and worked previously as an anchor and correspondent for Al Jazeera America and CNN. His new book is Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. Ali Velshi, welcome to Fresh Air. Dave, thank you. And thank you for that great

introduction in which you really captured the sense of the book. So let's talk about this family history that you've shared with us. Your ancestors came from a village in India in a province in Western India, Gujarat. Is that how we say it? Gujarat. That's right. Gujarat. Yeah. You visited it as you were kind of researching this book. What kind of place is it? Well, it's a remarkably prosperous province. It's the same place where the Indian prime minister comes from. That said, my family didn't come from the prosperous parts. They came from a little village, a little trading village in which farmers from the surrounding area would come in and trade their goods for things that would be

sold to them in many cases by my family. So they were small merchants, but that said, they were prosperous, except that India was hit by several droughts in the 1800s. And countries can often withstand these things, but India had been denuded through colonialism. It was a very wealthy, productive country when the British found it, and it was an economically unsustainable country when the British left in 1948. So by the 1800s, my family just couldn't sustain themselves there. migrating group of people, they got a letter from some friend who had gone to South Africa and had written back describing it as being a place where the streets were paved with gold. So my great-grandfather's older brother said, this isn't going to work. We're going to have to go somewhere else. And he was the first one in the family in 1893 to sail to South Africa

in search of a better life. And ultimately, the whole family went over and started a new life in South Africa, where I also thought they were business people, Dave. But what I learned is they were people who had sort of push carts or, you know, like little wagons in which they, you know, they'd pack it with green groceries or dry goods and sell it door to door to people. Ultimately, they developed those into real businesses. But they started from scratch in South Africa in search of a better life after the drought in India forced them out. Well, the family gets established in South Africa, and they build businesses, I think a grocery store. And around this time, there was a young

Indian lawyer who was from the same Indian province as your family. He then had the name of Mohandas Gandhi. He would later be Mahatma Gandhi. What was he up to in South Africa? So he had arrived because he was a British-trained Indian lawyer. And there were two Indians in South Africa who had a dispute with each other, and they'd hired lawyers. They were suing each other. And one of them hired Gandhi because as an Indian, he would sort of understand the plaintiff to the case. And he would be a sort of a liaison between the actual official white lawyers who were fighting the case. Gandhi, of course, knew nothing about South Africa. So he buys a ticket to get him from the port where he arrives in Durban to Pretoria and gets on this first class train and, of course, gets promptly kicked off

because non-white people are not allowed to sit in the first class of a train. They didn't know that because he had ordered his ticket by mail and he didn't know it either. Anyway, he just come to fight this one case and he ended up staying to fight the injustice, the racial injustice in South Africa. At the time, he was no great radical. He just wanted the laws to be respected, and he wanted Indians in particular to have more rights than they were enjoying at the time. But he needed a bookkeeper because his law practice was going fairly well, and my great-grandfather needed a bookkeeper, and they both happened to share the same guy. Gandhi lived in Johannesburg at the time. My great-grandfather lived in Pretoria.

Pretoria is where the government was. So it's only about 45 minutes drive now. But back in the day, it was like a two-day journey. You needed an overnight. And when Gandhi would come to Pretoria to negotiate with the government, he would stay with my great-grandfather. And as such, the two of them became friends. So they were friends. I mean, they weren't political allies. Correct. And you write in the book how Gandhi's approach to activism changed over time from a kind of a reformist, let's get laws enforced approach to something that was, which was broader and deeper. And we would come to know as his, you know, nonviolence. And he decided to establish a

community, a school, an ashram in which people would be trained in the discipline that it takes and the patience and the commitment to undertake that kind of activism. And then he does this remarkable thing involving your great-grandfather who he really knew just as a friend. Tell us what happens here. Yeah. And I've done a lot of research, and I went back to the archives. There's no record of any political activism or involvement or opinion that came from my great-grandfather or people in my family at his level. So Gandhi and my great-grandfather are sitting around,

and he explains to my great-grandfather that he frankly thinks that the Indians are weak, that nobody wants to rock the boat. Everybody understands that life's not fair, but, you know, they want to prosper in business and they don't have the stomach to do the things it takes to fight injustice. So he wants to start this ashram, this commune, basically. And he asks my great-grandfather, the man who was going to become my grandfather, his seven-year-old son, Rajabali, could be his student at his ashram. And I don't have records. And that means moving there, right? He would live there. It was a residential school. And my great-grandfather, I think,

must have thought this was a terrible idea. He's a businessman who's finally found a bit of prosperity. And what he doesn't need is a big association with this rabble rouser, and particularly to send his son to his school. So my great-grandfather musters up the only answer he can think of, and that is to say to Gandhi, who is a Hindu, he says, look, you're a Hindu. We are Muslims. I can't send my seven-year-old son to go live at your school. Who will teach him his religion? To which Gandhi responds, I will learn your religion and teach it to him, which, you know, took all the excuses away. And my great-grandfather, who really did have affection for Gandhi and trusted him and liked him, agreed. And so my grandfather at the age of seven became Gandhi's youngest student. And,

you know, it was a Spartan place. There was no hot water. There was no meat. There were no beds. You had one blanket to sleep on and one to cover yourself with. You grew all your food and you walked everywhere. And this little boy who was seven years old was too, you know, got tired for all the walking they had to do. And Gandhi would put him on his shoulders and walk him into town, you know, when they needed to buy supplies and things like that. So that's what happened to my seven-year-old grandfather. Right. So your grandfather at age seven goes to live with Gandhi and these others at this ashram, this community. Do you know how long he stayed there? Stayed there three years because the experiment started in 1910 and ended in 1913 after which Gandhi left South Africa, ironically believing that his work there had been a failure.

You know, to cast our eyes forward, I mean you write that when you were growing up in Canada, I mean in the middle of the 20th century, that you observed that your father, that is to say the son of this man who had spent these early childhood years in this ashram with Gandhi, that your father was someone who you observed was always very disciplined, always productive, that chores were a part of everyday life, that politics and building social and political communities, that in effect, this approach, this outlook, this patience and discipline and commitment to justice, this was a legacy of that time from Gandhi? And I didn't register that growing up, right? I just thought my dad was a little bit unfun, you know, where I'd want to laze around and watch cartoons, which is what I believed people my age

did. He said, well, if you've got time on your hands, you should do this, or we should mow the lawn, or we should do that. And I was like, I don't want to mow the lawn. I want to watch cartoons. But this idea of constant productivity and improvement, it extended beyond chores because our social activities were all political or civic activities. They were volunteers on every organization they could become involved in. Now, part of that was the discipline that was instilled by my grandfather, his sense of every moment is a moment in which work should be done, productive work should be done. And the other part of that is that they had grown up in a country where by the color of their skin, they were not entitled not just to vote, but to participate in civic activity without

risk of arrest. So they get to a country like Canada where it's like, I can do whatever I want. I can be part of this process. No one has told me and no law is written that prevents us from being as involved as we can be. And in my parents' view, that's the way it should be. And my sister and I grew up in a house where that was thought of as important. Ali Velshi is chief correspondent for MSNBC. His new memoir is Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. We were talking about your family having established itself in South Africa, really at the end of the turn of the 20th century.

And they stayed there for many, many decades. Living lives circumscribed by racial laws that imposed a lot of restrictions and the family though, they were very industrious and entrepreneurial. They built this baking company, the African Baking Company, ABC Baking I think, came to be one of the largest commercial bakeries in the country. And it wasn't just a business, right? Tell us about its reach, its impact. Well, it was one of the largest, as you said, commercial bakeries in the country. They baked at their peak 4,000 loaves of bread an hour.

And the funds from the business were used in some cases to fight apartheid. My father's brother, who was a partner in the business but was sort of more active in the anti-apartheid fight, would be traveling to various training camps and socialist meetings across Europe in the effort to overcome apartheid. Back in those days, it was Soviet Russia and its allies who were leading the fight against apartheid because apartheid was actually being propped up by countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. And the government didn't like this agitation. In fact, my grandfather and my father would employ convicts because in South Africa, you became a convict just by virtue of being arrested and not having the right paths to be in the right place. So everybody became a convict. They would arrest black people and the penalty would be five or 10 pounds or you go work on a farm. It was meant to be because of free labor. Anyway, the family had been

agitating for a long time and into the late 50s and 1960, 1961, the government just decided to clamp down and make business harder for them on a weekly and then daily basis to try and drive them out of business. I mean, there are fascinating details here. Like, you know, in many of these decades, it was illegal to sell a loaf of less than two pounds, I believe. But a lot of the black Africans could not afford that. Yes. So they would cut it in half in defiance of the law, right? Sell them smaller pieces.

Remarkable that that's an act of civil disobedience, right? But apartheid had such Byzantine nonsensical laws. Like why did somebody write a law that said bread has to be sold in no less than two-pound loaves? I mean, it's nonsensical. But some people just couldn't afford that. So my grandfather and my father would set out tables and they would sell, you know, half a loaf if that's what you needed. They would give bread away. They would go to court every Monday morning to bail out workers who had been arrested over the weekend because arresting people in South Africa was literally a way to find labor for the white

farms. So they were very, very active. It was part of that Gandhian ethos and it was part of their civil resistance to try and fight apartheid. But from the time that apartheid was implemented in 1947 until my family left in 1961 and much later, apartheid just got more draconian and worse every year. So it didn't look like they were moving the needle or improving anything all that much. They were just getting into a lot of trouble by the government. You have to tell us about the yeast raids. So yeast was a controlled substance in South Africa because, again, apartheid was a ridiculous thing. The reason it was a controlled substance is because under the law, black people were not allowed to consume alcohol. Now, everybody all

through history who's wanted to consume alcohol has figured out a way to do it. And so people would make their own in these informal and sell it in these informal bars called shabines. Well, to make alcohol, you need a starter. To make beer, you need a starter, and the starter is yeast. Bakeries had yeast. So police would raid my family's bakery to measure the records of how much bread was baked versus how much yeast was left in the fridge. And they'd literally, if there was a mismatch, someone would be in trouble. Armed police would actually show up at the bakery unannounced and conduct a yeast audit. So those are the kinds of things that they did. And ultimately, they did go after my uncle, my father's brother for this, sort of accusing him of being a yeast bootlegger. And I don't know whether that's true or not. I know that he probably believed that black people, like any other people,

should be able to, you know, drink the beer they want to drink and that shouldn't be regulated by the government. But life essentially became intolerable as the racial restrictions became more and more draconian. And after, what, 60 years or so in South Africa, they decided it was going to be time to move, to look for a new place. Yeah. Kenya looked like a good place. Why? Yeah. to move, to look for a new place. Kenya looked like a good place. Why? Yeah, the winds of change were blowing over the rest of Africa, not South Africa, because South Africa was not a British or a French or a Belgian or a Portuguese or Italian

or a German colony. It was its own thing. The Afrikaners ran the place. The British had left. The British colonies in Africa were all becoming independent. And my father had two sisters who had married people who lived in Kenya. So they felt they had a beachhead there. And they all wanted to leave in 1961. There was some question about whether the government would let them take the proceeds from their business. And so it was a long negotiation because they accused my family of being communists. And in fact, my dad's brother was a communist. And so they decided to leave. The government decided they had to sell their business, not for what it was worth. But in the process of doing so, my dad started a bread war. He started,

he lowered the price of bread to the point that four of his competitors were taken out of business and, you know, they went bankrupt. And ultimately, they destroyed the bakery and my family left to go live in Kenya where they hoped they would have a brighter future. Right. And they did leave. But really, literally almost on the eve of departure, your grandfather, the one who had lived with Gandhi as a youth, Rajabali, who saw the bakery, which he had put so much of himself into literally being torn down. What became of him? The heart of a bakery is its ovens, and the ovens needed a bulldozer to be destroyed. So a week before, very shortly before they left for Kenya, my father and my grandfather stood there and watched the ovens being bulldozed.

My father said it's the only time he's ever seen his father cry. My grandfather was 58 years old at the time, and he was dead a week later, ostensibly of a heart attack. My father thinks it was heartbreak, and he died at 58 thinking the entire mission had failed, the mission for civil justice, the mission for rights and liberty and the fight against apartheid. And measurably, it was worse the day he died than the day he was born. Ultimately, though, the book explains much came of the work that he put into it that he never realized. Things look pretty scary in Kenya and in East Africa as independence movements were, in some cases, targeting Indian merchants like your parents.

They had a big real estate business, as I recall, or a real estate business. They looked around and looked to Canada, a place so different culturally. How did it emerge as a good place to consider for a new home? Well, two things happened simultaneously. They had a really great group of friends that they had developed in Kenya, a group of friends that existed across racial lines, which was fascinating to them. Because in South Africa, you couldn't really

have, if you were Indian, you couldn't have black friends or white friends. In Kenya, they had all of those kinds of friends. And some of their black friends in government said in a very caring way, we're worried for your future. It wasn't a threat. It was a, we're worried about you. Things don't look great for Asians in this country. And at the same time, they had a friend who was a Canadian diplomat. And, you know, simultaneously, Canada had been doing the math and like most Western countries had realized they had shrinking populations or populations that were not replacing themselves well and they needed immigrants. But if you're Canada, you're competing with the United Kingdom and the United States for immigrants. So they

were really actively looking for people, including refugees or activists like my parents. So a Canadian diplomat almost forced my parents to fill out the forms to get their rights. They were apprehensive. They really didn't want to leave Kenya. But things were getting worse. Again, mostly in Uganda, not in Kenya, but it was spreading into popular sentiment in Kenya that was feeling very menacing. And ultimately, my parents did get approval to go to Canada and they left for Canada and started again. What they did find though, because they did the same thing in Canada that they did in Kenya, they joined political parties, different ones. They went to meetings of different political parties to sort of figure out the system and they tried to get involved in civic activity. And they were

surprised to find out that definitely unlike South Africa, but even unlike Kenya, everything they tried or wanted to join actually did seem open to them. You know, you mentioned that in 1972, Idi Amin, who was then the ruler of Uganda, decided to expel the Indian population there. I mean many thousands of people and that Canada stepped up and took 6,000. Explain what your father did. He was running this travel agency at the time. What role he played in welcoming those folks?

So two things happened at the same time. One is the thing that my parents left Kenya worried about actually ended up happening in Uganda, right? They expelled all the, Uganda was a neighboring country to Kenya. They expelled all the Asians and these Asians, just like Kenyans, had been British subjects. So they thought with their colonial passports, they could get into the United Kingdom. Turns out that when you are a non-white holder of a British passport in a colony, your passport was coded differently. So the UK was not all that welcoming to you. Meanwhile, the Ugandans had just taken their citizenship away. So these people were literally stateless. And so Canada decided this

was the manifestation of this idea that Trudeau had had. Okay, here's a bunch of people. They're available to us to be workers, to come into our country. Let's see if we can get them in here. And my father joined the effort to patriot these people in Canada. So he would literally be back in those days, Montreal was the big city in Canada. These people would fly into Montreal, they'd get on a train. My father would meet them at the train station in Toronto. And as a volunteer, but working with the government, they would be there with what you needed if you showed up as a refugee. Plans for housing, plans for food, language training if you needed it, vocational training if you needed it. It was a sense of, let's build this together. And it was a remarkable success for Canada,

which now historically looks on the idea of taking immigrants in, refugees in, in particular, as a very successful thing. It worked. It ended up working very well. And by the way, many of these people who were kicked out of Uganda with nothing but the clothes on their back ended up doing phenomenally well and prospering in Canada. You know, we've talked and you write in the book about how your parents inherited the values of your grandfather who had, you know, worked with Gandhi, you know, the work ethic,

the commitment to helping others, building social institutions, fighting for justice. As you tell it, it seems that the young Ali Velshi, maybe a little less committed to all of that. Yeah, because it was all in the rearview mirror, right? They had been fighting all these things. There were great family tales, but now we lived in Canada. It didn't seem relevant. It seemed like what the old-fashioned people did in the old-fashioned countries.

It was quaint. It was interesting. It certainly informed our decisions. Certainly growing up in the 70s and 80s in Toronto, South Africa was central to the news on a regular basis because apartheid had gotten that bad and they were running battles in the streets in South Africa. But I didn't care that much, nor did I think of it as an ethos. As I said, I thought my parents just worked too hard and I wasn't sure why we couldn't just have leisure time and why everything had to be a meeting and in a committee that they joined. I didn't care all that much. But what I didn't

realize is it was like a background app. It was influencing me the whole time, including the fact that the news was a family activity. You had to consume the news because you were discussing global affairs all the time, or at least domestic affairs, all the time. And the way you got information about that was consuming news. So I grew up in the back of my mind thinking, these news people, they're important. This journalism stuff is important. Now, as a son of an Indian immigrant family, discussing being a journalist is heresy. You know, I think my parents were hoping that I'd be a doctor. Not enough prestige or money? No, you're supposed to be a doctor or a lawyer and maybe you can be an engineer or something

like that. But I was being influenced by the idea that information, accurate information, good information was important to making proper decisions in life. So I wasn't motivated by the politics the way they were, but I grew into it. I fell into it. I was in it all the time, and it started to influence me more than I actually understood it was influencing me. Right. So you found you had a knack for and interest in storytelling. So, you know, you get into broadcasting kind of at the bottom like everybody else does. Find out you're good at it and move from one job to the next.

You became the first primetime business anchor in Canada. Then you get recruited by CNN, come to the States. You spent, I guess, quite a few years there. Yeah, 12 years. Yeah, and then left for a job at Al Jazeera America. Yeah. Where you got in the trenches and learned the tradecraft of serious reporting you'd been missing. What was it that changed you there? Yeah, not to belittle. I mean, I worked at CNN at a great time, and I learned so

much at CNN, but I was fundamentally a business anchor. And at Al Jazeera, there was much more of an emphasis on the reporting side of things. It was also a lot more. It was not just business the way I was doing it at CNN, which was sort of markets, you know, and that sort of activity. I was doing much more sort of economics and global stuff at Al Jazeera. But it was really that operation, though it didn't last long in the United States, was really committed to a very high level of journalism. And I really, really appreciate the growth that I got out of it. And subsequently, when I joined MSNBC thereafter, my boss at MSNBC was the same person who was my boss at CNN. And she said to me at one point, she said, I'm not sure you could have achieved what you've achieved. You could have gotten to the point that you reached as a journalist without having taken that break, without having left CNN for a few years to sort of sharpen my

skills. So yeah, it sort of took me to a new place, which coincided with some very, very big changes in American politics, because I literally joined MSNBC after Al Jazeera closed a week before the election of 2016. You know, I think it's certainly an unhealthy thing for a democracy to have so many citizens who are in information silos where they're getting all of their information from one, you know, very committed political perspective. Yeah, I agree with you on that. You got any solution for this?

Triangulate. Triangulate your information. I have friends who I know hold particular political views, conservatives or liberals, but they go out of their way to listen to other things because what you'll learn is, oh, what would be interesting is if you heard a particular story from different perspectives, right? I couldn't agree more. Yeah, yeah. But what it'll do is tell you, that's weird that this network didn't cover that story at all. Is that story actually true? Does it exist or is this just opinion? I think, you know, in the same way that a cell phone knows where you are because it pings three towers, you should ping three towers for your news. You should have different sources. That's the answer. Consume more information. And on the

other side, Dave, we do have to become more critical consumers of information. I think we're losing that skill, and that worries me. But that, I think, is for a younger generation. I think we can teach our kids to be critical consumers of information, and hopefully they can discern the difference between news and nonsense. Well, Ali Velshi, thanks so much for speaking with us. Dave, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. Ali Velshi is chief correspondent for MSNBC. His new memoir is Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Dea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.