Dhat teri
Iski har saza kubool ho jise
Yahan wohi wohi bari hua hai
Ispe jo mukadmaa kare
Aji wahi wahi mara hai

Ka Kha Gha

Released almost a decade ago in 2015, but feels as fresh as a well aged spirit. So many things to like here – music arrangements with the abundance of wind instruments and a diversity of quirky sounds rarely found in bollywood music, yet not one of them feels gimmicky or out of place. The ever changing rhythms and time signatures telling a story of their own with ample twists and surprises. (More three and half minute intros please, more trumpet solos please!)

Inki botal bhi goron ki gulaam hai
Roothi hai mehbooba
Roothi roothi sharaab hai
Hey aam hindustaani teri kismat kharaab hai

Aam Hindustani

The lyrics, so conversational and the vocabulary so familiar that the commentary almost creeps up on you out of nowhere. The show-stealer though, hands down, is the vocals. The singers are in a league of their own.

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I had quite a regular life, nothing to complain about, really, I think it is a good life. I am very grateful for it, but at the same time I was just missing a lot of things. I missed the connection with the natural world, being in the city. I missed working with my hands and using my body, and I missed getting physically tired, instead of mentally tired from watching screens all day and sitting inside, it just dulled me down. Also, the continuous rhythm of everything being the same at some point — like five days going to work, then there’s a weekend, then Monday everything starts over again, the same place, same kind of people… I needed to break the pattern.

Break the pattern.

(It’s been a long hiatus. I would be amiss not to address the almost eight year gap between this and the previous post, but I’ll plead guilty and leave it unaddressed. Instead, I want to talk about the incredible documentary that got me to break the silence on this blog.)

Martijn is a gifted storyteller. The production quality of this series is off the charts, which is not surprising once you learn that Martijn is a professional photographer himself. But there’s so much more. He takes his time, much like the way one has to find their body’s rhythm when undertaking any long strenuous physical activity. He invites you into his mind, which is often the stage for the largest struggles during any long journey, especially the more physically demanding ones. He talks about the people he meets and their stories, those building blocks of our memories and experiences. He shares the life-threatening reality of facing nature’s elements — wind, water, heat, altitude, and terrain — which otherwise appear trivially mundane in modern civilisation. And he takes us places. The redwood forests of California, the salt flats of Bolivia, the arid deserts of Utah, the many volcanoes along South America. Places known and unknown, explored and unexplored, magical, terrifying, stifling, but almost always utterly beautiful.

Perhaps you’ve been a cyclist all your life, perhaps you haven’t really been on a cycle since your school days. Perhaps you’ve taken to cycling recently, like me. There’s a lot to geek out on for cycling enthusiasts, but regardless of your enthusiasm for the two-wheeler, Two Years on a Bike is full of riches to give and very little to take.

• Watch the 4-part documentary: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4
• Get the book
• Follow Martijn on Instagram

(via Anshuman Manur, who aptly recommended this to me during my longest ride yet)

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(via Steven Deobald)

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Beginning with the nation’s Independence and the exploration of the jazz scene in the country back then, the Standing By story then proceeds to the ’60s and ’70s and the rise of the beat groups, the mid-’70s to late ’80s with the nationwide spread rock and, later, metal, the ’90s with MTV and the music video explosion and finally to the dance music boom of the present day.

The first three episodes are out and they’re well worth a watch for any Indian alternate music fan.

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“Just clone the dev branch, add those three grunt tasks, and recompile…”

“Just use this software/platform/toolkit/methodology…”

“Just” makes me feel like an idiot. “Just” presumes I come from a specific background, studied certain courses in university, am fluent in certain technologies, and have read all the right books, articles, and resources. “Just” is a dangerous word.

More such dangerous words: quick, must, simply.

Update: Few more from Jason Fried: can’t, easy, only, fast.

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(via Frank Chimero)

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This is my first introduction to Steve Reich and what appears to be his pioneering minimalist music. I can’t wait to dig deeper into his large body of work, and if this piece is any indication, I have some incredible hours of music ecstasy ahead. Joy!

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People don’t fully appreciate how incredible this is. Pluto is 7.5 billion km away. New Horizon speed is 50,000km/hr

The human mind cannot comprehend such numbers properly. We have absolutely no points of reference from our daily lives.

— Siddharth Singh (@siddharth3) 4:47pm and 4:48pm, 14 July 2015

7.5 billion kilometres. Spend some time with the fantastic If the Moon Was Only 1 Pixel model of the solar system to get a crude feel of what that can be like (because no human knows what it actually is like). But we’re still talking about just our solar system here. Things get really crazy when you go interstellar.

Now add to this the eternal question — are we alone in the universe? Go on, go read about the Fermi Paradox.

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We flagged off our secret ‘Himalaya One’ project in the summer of 2013. The first trek started in Naggar (Kullu Valley) and ended in Kafnu (Kinnaur Valley). The walk in between spanned 200 kilometres, 19 days and a little over 100 hours of walking. We have tried to compile the best of the footage captured in 6 minutes.

It’s hard showering praise on these Himalayan treks and not ending up sounding repetitive, but what the hell, this looks absolutely incredible. The exercise sequence in the beginning was such a clever way to exploit the GoPro. And secret ‘Himalaya One’ project? Hmm…

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