Welcome to The Jukebox.
Every Wednesday evening, I will share a stream of thoughts and links from rabbitholes I fell into over the past week. These topics can range from the history of galawati kebab to a new movie. Never mind the reader, even this writer doesn’t know what might catch his fancy. Hence the name.
This week, we start with rare musical instruments.
🪈 Preserved Language
Bhiklya Ladkya Dhinda is a 92-year-old member of the Warli tribal community in Maharashtra. The Warli are historically agrarian, with a near-religious reverence for nature, wildlife, and the elements.
For seven decades, Dhinda has been the sole practitioner of a musical instrument that exists almost nowhere else on Earth: the Tarpa. In Dhinda’s family, the lineage of the Tarpa stretches back three generations, or 150 years.
On January 26th this year, Bhiklya Ladkya Dhinda was awarded the Padma Shri—India’s highest civilian honour.
The Tarpa itself is an aerophone, sometimes described as a hornpipe or a single-reed wind instrument with a reservoir. Fun fact—it is constructed entirely from locally sourced, biodegradable forest produce.
Playing the Tarpa demands endurance. The player must sustain high breath pressure to keep the stiff bamboo reeds vibrating. The instrument, Dhinda explains, is “lifeless like a stone” until breath animates it. The Warli believe you give the instrument prana: breath as life force. To play the Tarpa is to transfer a bit of yourself into it.
The Tarpa is strictly seasonal. It is the instrument of the Kharif harvest, played from September, at harvest time, until Diwali in October or November. Playing the Tarpa outside this window—especially in summer—is traditionally forbidden. The Warli believe its sound has the power to summon the harvest spirits and the rains.
The dance that accompanies the Tarpa is often performed to please Ann Dev—the God of Food. The dancers move across the fields, their rhythmic stomps simultaneously working the crops and blessing the ground beneath them.
💎 Some Other Rare Instruments:
The Yazh (India)
The Manguaré (Amazon Basin)
The Tonkori (Japan)
The Qeej (Vietnam)
The Odi (Uganda)
🧑🚀 Name on the Moon
This weekend, NASA are scheduled to launch their Artemis II mission—the first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission will carry four astronauts on a 10-day journey.
Artemis II is groundbreaking for several reasons, most specifically:
Firsts: Victor Glover will become the first person of color, Christina Koch the first woman, and Jeremy Hansen the first non-American to leave low Earth orbit and travel around the Moon.
Distance: The flight will take the crew farther from Earth than any previous human mission, before reentering Earth’s atmosphere at a record speed of approximately 25,000 mph.
This mission is also part of NASA’s preparation for Artemis III (targeted for 2028), which will land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole. Which makes this a good time to truly appreciate what ISRO achieved with the Chandrayaan.
But! There’s another cool thing. NASA are inviting you to register and <checks notes> send your name to the moon. Should you sign up, your name will be added to an SSD card and beamed to the sparkling dot in the sky.
Scouring the internet, I found this incredible list of things we’ve sent to space before. We’re talking dinosaur bones, wristwatches, an Andy Warhol painting—because why not—and the Olympic torch, amongst many other things.
Speaking of things that have been sent to space, remember Laika? Evidently, a total of 32 monkeys have flown in space, including rhesus macaques, squirrel monkeys and pig-tailed monkeys. In 1972, five mice nicknamed Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey orbited the Moon a record 75 times aboard command module America as part of the Apollo 17 mission.
🔖 Bookmark
Most books talk about people. Some books talk about the country at large. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong does both.
At the centre of the story is Charulata Chitol, a three-year-old child in a fictional railway town called Bhombalpur. The book starts with Charu telling her father, a railwayman, “I want to count people.” And so, she begins a journey that forms the spine of Bhattacharya’s novel.
The background motifs form a mosaic of a young India. Charu’s life collides with the crushing railway strike of 1974, the slow modernisation of a nation growing into its bones, and a breathing, heaving Bombay.
And then there’s the prose. Bhattacharya has this incredible ability, almost Naipaul-esque, to dress a scene in precisely the correct shades. There is a page where he describes a railway station down to the flaky rust on its beams and the length of the wire on which the fans are suspended; and there are pages where the story moves like a train at full gallop.
If you haven’t read Bhattacharya’s work yet, by all means, start with Railsong. But you could also start with either of his two other books, or this essay, or this, or this, or maybe this one. Or text me and I’ll make you a Rahul Bhattacharya playlist.
Before I go, here’s a playlist of Amazigh Blues—a form of blues music played in the Sahara desert. That second track, Koya Blues, is a banger.
That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon.
Eclectic collection of stories ❤️
The word that come to mind is - generous. Thank you for sharing all this, Sarthak.