Dhurandhar, Punjab, and China

“You’ll never meet a hater who is doing better than you.” — Konstantin Kisin

Dhurandhar, and the Paradox that is Punjab: While Jaskirat is a composite character, Pinda is based on Harwinder Singh Sandhu, alias Rinda, a real Punjabi gangster linked to Pakistan-based terror networks, who was reported dead from a drug overdose in 2022. In this context, Dhurandhar presents itself as the most concentrated cinematic statement about Punjab’s paradox in recent Indian popular culture. Two men from the same Punjab. One becomes an asset of the republic; the other becomes its enemy. Neither finds his way home. And the film’s final scene, Arijit Singh’s closing song Phir Se playing softly as Jaskirat stands at a gate that closes on him, watching a family that has moved on without him, is not a triumphant ending. It is an elegy. The hero has given everything, and there is nothing left to return to. In that image, Punjab speaks.

Why Indian Classical Singers Begin With ‘Aaaa’: Western art music is mostly score. The composer writes the symphony; the conductor renders it; the audience is in the room to hear what Beethoven heard in his head... Indian classical music does the inverse. The composer writes the seed. The performer grows the tree. And no two performances of the same lines, even by the same singer, will be the same tree... So when the singer holds kaun galī gayo Śyām for the fifteenth time, here is what is happening on your side of the hall. The first hearing is recognition: ah, the words. The fifth is when the words stop being words and start being texture. The fifteenth is when the longing of Radha’s question — Vipralambha Śṛṅgāra, the rasa of love-in-separation — is no longer being described to you. You are tasting it directly. (You are, briefly, the searching Gopī.) There is an even more radical claim about what’s happening to you while this goes on.

How Does China Build Everything So Fast: It took China 9 hours to rebuild a railway station, 28 hours to construct a 10-storey apartment block, 10 days to build a mobile cabin hospital. China built over 45,000 km of high-speed rail in just over 10 years. In comparison, it is taking India to make its first Bullet line of Mumbai-Ahmedabad (~508 Km) more than 10 years since it laid the foundation in 2017. And it is not just India. USA, Canada, UK are all at a snails’ pace as compared to China... Wang says one of the most important distinctions between the US and China is that the US is a society run by lawyers and China is a society run by engineers — and that many of our differences flow from this divide.