By Indrajit Hazra

It’s tempting to think of Bob Geldof as one of those pop stars with a cause, whose concerns amount to little else than a value addition to his own public persona. But he is much more than just a pin-up for a guilt-wracked, well-heeled West. In an age when the Bonos and the Angelina Jolies of the world abound, Geldof was one of the first public figures who went beyond being an ‘ambassador of goodwill’ and actually rolled his sleeves up to put money where his mouth is.

What made Geldof stand out and be counted as a serious force was his mobilisation of pop stars in 1984 to raise money for starving children in Ethiopia. The project, Band Aid, became a pioneering mission in relief work. But instead of stopping there, Geldof proceeded to learn more about why poverty was so rife in Africa and tell the world about it. Third World debt was one of the prime reasons he identified — a chicken-and-egg conundrum by which African nations were trapped in a paying back loans from Western banks. This was what led to the legendary mustering of forces in 1985 of Live Aid that saw two simultaneous mega-concerts in London and Philadelphia and resulted in the raising of more than $100 million for famine relief.

The interest in public awareness was evident much before Live Aid, when Geldof was just a frontman of the Dublin rock band, the Boomtown Rats. It was in 1978-79, while he and his bandmates were touring America, that he was captivated by a news item about a 16-year-old schoolgirl shooting her classmates and explaining her violent act by simply stating to reporters, “I did it because I don’t like Mondays”. The song, I Don’t Like Mondays, became a huge hit, pointing to Geldof’s already strong interests in the ‘real world’. But even after being dubbed ‘St Bob’ by the press and his growing seriousness in engaging in practical ways of solving poverty in Africa, Geldof never lost his sense of humour. In his 1990 solo single, The Great Song of Indifference, he poked fun at his public persona by singing, “I don’t care if a nation starves”, while dancing an Irish jig in the song’s video.

Geldof was the man behind the Live 8 concerts in 2005, a project that was to raise awareness — for, by this time he had become more cynical about the prospect of just throwing money at a problem to solve it — about various issues such as Third World Debt, trade barriers and AIDS.

Perhaps more than anyone else doing the sort of thing he does, the 56-year-old Geldof has remained his own man. This has not made him popular on all fronts. In the run-up to the G-8 summit in 2005, he labelled anti-globalisation protesters as “a disgrace”. Earlier in 2003, during a visit to Ethiopia, he stunned many by praising the Bush administration for its proposals to fight AIDS in Africa. But as the man had said once when criticised for courting the ‘Establishment’ in his bit to reduce global inequity, “I’ve said I’ll shake hands with the devil on my left and the devil on my right to get to where we need to be.”