Ambarish Satwik
@AmbarishSatwik • 19,058 subscribers
Vascular surgeon, writer.
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Rahul Ram (raconteur/musician/songster/performer/entertainer/social activist/environmental toxicologist/bassist and rock star) has transcribed the phonetics of the elements of the periodic table into a folk song. It was written as a mnemonic for a friend’s daughter. The tune’s stuck in my head now. Shrayana B Dayanita Singh spandan Ruma Satwik
Ambarish Satwik115,156 просмотров • 2 лет назад
Raag Puriya Dhanashree is dusk in sound form. It’s also the raag of deferred heartbreak. Click play on Farida Khanum singing Faiz in Puriya Dhanashree and you’re undone. At roughly the three-quarter mark in the ghazal, at 7.09 minutes, is a sher that pulls off in two lines what English poets needed entire careers to approximate. करो कज जबीं पे सर-ए-कफ़न मेरे क़ातिलों को गुमाँ न हो कि ग़ुरूर-ए-इश्क़ का बाँकपन पस-ए-मर्ग हम ने भुला दिया कज crooked, जबीं forehead, पस-ए-मर्ग after death The fulcrum of the sher is the word बाँकपन. Baankpan can’t be translated. It isn’t charm, or swagger. It’s the art of looking like you weren’t trying to look that good, and the arithmetic of knowing exactly how goodlooking you are. It’s a glance held just long enough to scandalise the air. This is my stab at translating the sher. It took a couple of extra lines and some garnish around the baankpan to recreate the emotional temperature. Don’t @ me: I don’t have Faiz’s gift for compression. When he tightens a line, it sings. When I do, it wheezes. Set my shroud at an angle. Drape it over the brow the way I would tilt my cap. Let my killers see: I died defiant, and not without flair. I didn’t fold. I posed. It was the only way to wear a head. The proud, slant grace of love is mine in death, as it was before.
Ambarish Satwik54,619 просмотров • 1 год назад
Transcendence gone handheld. Basant Panchami, someone’s living room. Malini Awasthi, Richa Sharma and Master Saleem erupting into Nazar Lagi Raja Tore Bangle Par from Kala Pani. This is combustion. Sixteen and a half unrepeatable minutes. Absolutely brilliant. This kind of jam, streamed and shared live, is perhaps the vintage of our time. We are witnessing, in the selfie mode video from Saleem’s phone, a triumph of narcissism. And also a shift in the human disposition towards experience. In another time this would have been pure event. The experience would have been private, known only by presence. The actual music would have decayed inside the recollections of those present. We are now blessed with more access than ever. The spontaneous jam isn’t complete until it has satisfied the algorithmic necessity of being a livestream. The performance must now be quantified by an unseen, dispersed audience. 866, growing rapidly and astonishingly into tens and then hundreds of thousands (remember Ali Sethi’s sessions during Covid?) Looking changes what is looked at. Saleem and the others are performing for the feed. They know in real time this moment is entering a larger field of viewing. They’re watching others watch them in an endless feedback loop of secondary experience. The more we record, the less we risk forgetting. But I wonder if we’re narrowing what we allow ourselves to feel. This is such an incredibly lovely clip, and in its joy let’s also recall what it was like to listen to something unlit by screens, wholly present to each other. What it was like to remember only from what one held within oneself. I wonder if we’ll ever refuse the lens. And let the moment remain singular. Nazar lagi raja tore bangle par in the age of the front facing camera. The kind of clip that makes you briefly forgive the species.
Ambarish Satwik34,946 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад
There were, perhaps still are, the blessed few who’ve seen Begum Akhtar take a paan. To have witnessed it was to have glimpsed nafaasat as a reflex. Observers were often struck by the smallness of the paan. The gilauri was pared down to what was essential. Just choona, kathha, supari. Maybe some saunf and ilaichi (no zarda: tobacco she smoked, leaving her paan innocent of vice). A triangular wedge tucked between cheek and grace. It stayed there invisibly, like a secret. Would stain the mouth, but never the lips. The nafasat lay in that distinction. It was a kind of calibration. There were no unseemly bovine workings of the jaw. The leaf infused her, perfumed her throat. You wouldn’t know there was betel in her mouth unless she wanted you to. Unless she laughed. Decades of paan and supari will do things to a mouth. Many have wondered if the gilauri was Akhtari’s accomplice. If it gave the grain in her voice. With years of lime and areca alkaloids, the buccal lining grows stringy and gets bands of scars underneath. Oral submucous fibrosis is a chronic, insidious, scarring disease of the oral cavity. The tongue is depapillated, the mucosa becomes leathery, the uvula shrinks. Palatal lift is less supple. Consonants get cramped at the front gate. The singer’s mucosa, once a lubricated resonator, becomes almost like dry felt. And tightened by scar. Paan-chewing cohorts show measurable drifts in voice parameters. There’s a kind of spectral roughness: the bloom left by years of petty friction and low-grade scarring. And dryness. It leaves them wanting more of the betel quid, to sluice the mouth and throat in that alkaline, tannin-rich juice. I’ve no evidence that Akhtari ever suffered that slow tightening, or what shape it might have given her sound. But here is Chha Rahi Kaali Ghataa, from her later years, when her voice had begun to carry its own weather. The dark rainclouds are outside, the storm is in the throat.
Ambarish Satwik30,283 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад
The pure unbridled pleasure of listening to M.S. Subbulakshmi sing Dhano Dhanno Pushpo Bhora.
Ambarish Satwik81,050 просмотров • 3 лет назад
Thread. As a unit of cultural transmission, with the possible exception of religion, the lullaby has been the most successful self-propagating, word-of-mouth meme. Perhaps the most evocative of them all, the one with the most affecting, wistful lilt is the Wiegenlied. 1/17
Ambarish Satwik38,821 просмотров • 2 лет назад
October 2015, Tokyo. Golden Gai, to the outsider, seemed like a mistake that had somehow survived. Obviously some bureaucracy had allowed it to remain. A clutch of narrow alleys in the armpit of Shinjuku. Where modern Tokyo had failed to close the deal. It was like a museum with a working liquor licence. I liked it immediately. And it was where I first heard Yo Ga Aketara. There were more than 200 bars there, mismatched, misaligned, jammed into six or seven narrow alleys. The bars were small. Small in the sense that if you exhaled too forcefully, you might displace a fellow drinker. The capacity of each establishment was roughly six bodies, eight if no one insisted on personal dignity. The bar we entered was approximately the size of a cupboard, but less well-ventilated. The walls had some kind of history: peeling posters, old photographs, currency notes pinned up, shelves of bottles in rows, each marked with a name in Kanji. Possibly the names of some of the regulars who had prepaid for their decline. The woman behind the counter had the bearing of a lapsed Buddhist. Which is to say, she knew better but had long since ceased to care. She poured something strong and vile into a glass. Her movements suggested she had been doing this since before I was born. And then: the voice. A soft growl that poured out from a speaker somewhere. Yo Ga Aketara. A voice like a low-lit room. My companion told me that it was Maki Asakawa. I hadn’t heard of her, but I let Maki-san tell me whatever it was she was telling me. Her voice spoke to me, despite my total lack of comprehension. A voice, low and slow, like it had seen things, like it knew things. The music moved sideways; a double bass loomed in the background, half-there. It was jazz that had learned another language. Yo Ga Aketara. She was talking more than singing. I asked what she was saying, because that’s the sort of thing one asks in such circumstances. The bartender didn’t look up. My companion leaned in and said something about dawn breaking. Then, towards the end of the song, a train sound. The sound of someone departing, or possibly, watching someone else go. The song did not end. It left. It was already gone. I looked it up later and it’s been on my playlist ever since, lodged there like an old debt. I still don’t understand it. But then, I don’t want to. Understanding turns a thing into an exhibit. Yo Ga Aketara belongs in the dark. It’s not a song I go looking for, not something I select with intention. It’s there, waiting, whenever the moment calls for it. And the moment always does.
Ambarish Satwik22,082 просмотров • 1 год назад
Headphones and volume up, there’s no other way. The first notes and the sweet ache of the Zulu chants that you probably don’t understand get you every time. Tell me you don’t feel a surge in your chest at 0.42. May your 2025 be as stirring and alive as those first notes that send the lion rising with the sun.
Ambarish Satwik19,384 просмотров • 1 год назад
In the 1st century CE, in a particularly sunbaked part of Roman Egypt, a Greek mathematician, engineer, and tinkerer named Heron (aka Hero of Alexandria) devised a mechanical object that he used as a parlour trick. The device was simple. A sealed cauldron of water, heated from below. Mounted on it was a hollow sphere, balanced on two pivots. These, too, were hollow, drawing a hidden connection between cauldron and sphere. The pivots, placed on opposite sides, carried steam from the water boiling in the cauldron into the sphere’s empty shell. There, pressure built, seeking escape. Two small, curved nozzles from the sphere offered release. The steam rushed out, and in that moment, the sphere began to spin, propelled by its own escaping breath. It was an ordinary enough motion, governed by laws that had yet to be named. Heron called it an aeolipile, a wind ball. What Heron had devised, in the 1st century, without quite realizing it, was the world’s first steam engine. You will, of course, be more than familiar with this, but let’s just savour the mechanics of it for a second. A steam engine harnesses the force of boiling water, transforming steam’s escape into mechanical motion. If this steam is sent into a cylinder, where it pushes on a piston that moves back and forth, the movement can turn wheels, gears, or other parts to make machines work. But clearly, history has no appetite for premature revelation. A man can only see what his age permits him to see. Heron lived in a world where labor was cheap, where power meant the sweat of backs, where an empire could not yet imagine the need for machines. And so the aeolipile remained a curiosity, a piece of cleverness, a steam-driven bauble. Suppose Heron had looked at that hissing vapour and thought of using it on a piston, the world might have turned on a different axis. It is perfectly conceivable that the Industrial Revolution would have erupted a full millennium and a half earlier, transforming the Roman Empire into a mechanized juggernaut. Imagine factories rising in Rome, steam engines rattling past the Pyramids. The Romans, so assured in their dominion, might have found in iron and steam the means to make their rule vaster. And inexhaustible. It’s possible that I’d be typing this in Latin from a sun drenched Piazza on Mars. What the future owes the present, if it owes anything at all, is that undefinable power to see beyond the obvious.
Ambarish Satwik10,271 просмотров • 1 год назад
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