Ambarish Satwik
@AmbarishSatwik
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On Thomas Paine's bones and what happened in Mahad (Maharashtra) in 1927. Thread.
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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,
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There was the big show the next day at the University of Berlin. Koch’s surgical sidekick, Ernst von Bergmann, was going to be on the rostrum. It was a ticketed lecture, where under the gaslights, Bergmann would inject the lymph into willing patients. Doyle wanted in, but the
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The Berlin Job Berlin, August 1890. The city was dressed up like a society girl with a new pearl necklace. Six thousand doctors, all starched collars and watch chains, had answered the Kaiser’s invite to show up for the 10th International Medical Congress. The headliner at the
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Women have sung lullabies in ghettos, in refugee camps, under occupation, during famines. To hold the weight of the world outside the child’s breath a little longer. It’s when a voice in the dark becomes a form of shelter: not all of this will reach you. Not tonight.
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
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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
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Cc: @sanjayuvacha There’s no such thing as a vegetable biryani because there’s no such thing as a vegetable.
Artichokes are one of those things the French love and serve with the conviction of a people who’ve spent centuries convincing themselves they invented pleasure. An artichoke is an aborted flower. What you want from an artichoke is arrested development. You’re not after the
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There’s a moment after the last scraped leaf. After the heart. When you drink water. That’s when your mouth betrays you. The first few sips of water taste sweet. Sweet in a way that surprises. Like water after Saunf, or Amla. This is the work of cynarin, a compound hidden in the
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Artichokes are one of those things the French love and serve with the conviction of a people who’ve spent centuries convincing themselves they invented pleasure. An artichoke is an aborted flower. What you want from an artichoke is arrested development. You’re not after the
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The film Masaan, written by @varungrover, begins with a sher by Pandit Brij Narayan Chakbast. zindagī kyā hai anāsir meñ zuhūr-e-tartīb maut kyā hai inhīñ ajzā kā pareshāñ honā anāsir: elements zuhūr-e-tartīb: manifestation (zuhūr) of order (tartīb) ajzā: parts, components I’m
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The Moka Pot: Instructions for Inheritance Don’t wash it with soap. You’d rinse away The trace of every yesterday. The oils that cling are not unclean. They mark the soul, not just the sheen.
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What the salad tried to do to us. The first ambition of any plant is to make itself uneatable. Long before anything clever walked on earth, plants settled on poisoning anything with a mouth. If you can’t run, you better taste terrible. The only way to stay alive was to face
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Fascinating nugget about the economics of magazine-writing in the pre-television, pre-internet era. Thanks to literary archaeologist @AmbarishSatwik !
Somewhere between the twilight of the Jazz Age and the beginning of the Great Depression, Scott Fitzgerald was being paid $4,000 per short story by the Saturday Evening Post, the highest circulated weekly magazine in the United States. This is roughly $70,000 per story in today’s
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Somewhere between the twilight of the Jazz Age and the beginning of the Great Depression, Scott Fitzgerald was being paid $4,000 per short story by the Saturday Evening Post, the highest circulated weekly magazine in the United States. This is roughly $70,000 per story in today’s
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All the great chefs and food writers seem to think that truffle oil is vomitously dire. Only because it’s a kind of treachery. Because it doesn’t have any truffle in it. It’s olive oil with 2,4 dithiapentane, a lab synthesised aromatic chemical that’s also found in truffles.
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Truffles have a 5 day half-life of scent. The aroma of a truffle fades almost immediately after it’s dug up. Each day a little more of it escapes. It’s at its best within five to seven days. After that, its presence has already halved. By the time it lands in Delhi from wherever
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Why blame our start-ups and PEs Saar.... when among the best sarkari innovations we have is GST on caramel popcorn?
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And this isn’t just a scientific idea. It’s larger, almost philosophical, reaching into how lives are made. What unsettles, sometimes, is recognising that the most familiar forms, the ones we take to be native and sacred, may have appeared elsewhere, in different clothing. That
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Let’s start with the lie. The so-called Walnut Fudge from Moonlight Bakery in Srinagar is no such thing. There’s no fudge. No fudge adjacent. No dairy, no chocolate. What it is, technically, is a tart, a wafer-thin pastry base (so thin that it seems to apologise for existing)
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