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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Really hoping to see many #YodaPress readers here this weekend! Come for our terrific new titles, our classic backlist ones, some yummy cake and serious coffee, and show your love for #indiepublishing.
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Shower thought. First contact etiquette when you finally meet aliens: if the eyes face forward, flee. If the eyes are on the side, you can give the creature a hug. Eyes that face forward on a skull suggest a predator. The frontal gaze is not admiration. Forward facing eyes allow
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Our Lady of the Gilauri.
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,
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Video from the Films Division documentary by NK Issar and @SundeepDougal’s YouTube channel.
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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,
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And we who watch can only feel How time loops softly on the reel How grace is handed, not displayed, Along the road the brave ones made. How beautiful is this huddle of women, how beautiful this continuity. It’s rare in sport for triumph to look this tender.
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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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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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