📢 Short & Sweet
Clubhouse Radio, a podcast explaining the Israel-Jerusalem conflict & eulogizing Leicester City
Welcome to The Jerky Loudspeaker - an independent sports and culture newsletter, I’m super excited to have you here! Before you dive in, let me quickly break down how the newsletter is structured. Think of it like a mini newspaper, with three sections:
Deep Dive - Each piece/series in this section will be an in-depth analysis of the thoughts and emotions that arise from my interactions and experiences with the arts
Consumption Corner - A weekly review of what I’m watching, reading and listening to.
Balls, Bats & Baskets - As always, sports on the back page. In this section I’ll geek out about the happenings in this world of balls, bats and baskets.
Passion Projects - Once a month, I feature Q&As with creatives from different professional and personal backgrounds.
Deep Dive
The best hour I’ve had all week
I woke up late Sunday morning and got a notification on my phone about a room being hosted by Kommune - an Indian creative collective that works primarily in the live performance space. I saw that Ankur Tewari, one of my favorite Indian artists, was also a part of the room and joined immediately in the hope of catching a ‘live’ performance. And so began, the best hour I’ve had all week.
The room was run like a radio show - hosts (in this case, speakers) taking song requests from the audience (in this case, listeners) and also playing their own preferences. The theme for the morning was Sukoon which roughly translates to peaceful and song choices reflected this emotion.
But it was behind these songs that brought the room to life and sparked conversation. One of the participants asked for a Dire Straits song to be played and after the song came to an end, another man in the room spoke about how he’d found great solace in this song during a period of internal crisis in his life. A filmmaker from the US asked to play a Carnatic song because it used to be played in his childhood home every morning and how during the pandemic, it helped him stay connected to India.
Naturally, there were a lot of musicians in the room and I found it fascinating to hear them speak about how their songs came into existence. For example, after someone requested Ankur Tewari’s Dil Beparvah to be played, he spoke about how he and Prateek Kuhad wrote the song. He said that the only thing Kuhad and him had in common was that they were independent artists in India pursuing their passion for music. The song is about the absurdity in following your heart, he said. Another artist in the room played a song he wrote in the aftermath of his mother’s death in 2019 and spoke about how cathartic the entire songwriting process was for him.
When invited to become a speaker, I picked this song by the band Frequency Space Time. I first heard this song last year when I was quarantined in my college apartment in Boston. I spent a fair amount of time in those lockdown months in the balcony I had attached to my room and this is a song I always associate with evenings spent on that balcony.
Ankur performed his new single, Tootay, live in the room and then departed. And soon after, I did. I opened Instagram and saw a message request - it was from the filmmaker in the US, asking me for the name of the song I’d just played. A few hours later, I saw this on Twitter:
Why is having your music taste appreciated so validating? Introducing people to new music is an underrated pleasure of life.
Consumption Corner
What I’m reading: A piece in NatGeo Traveller about a quarantined writer who begins to re-evaluate his relationship with isolation. I came across this gem of a paragraph in this piece
All our lives, we are taught to “become independent,” a celebratory state that I realise more and more, is a delusion. Even our global politics suffered from this delusion. Two of the worst-suffering countries, the United States and the United Kingdom, have been swept by recent waves of populism, where the driving rhetoric has been of dismantling ties with global networks of interdependence.
What I’m watching: India produces nearly 60% of the vaccines in the world. But only 13% of its population has received the COVID vaccine. This video does a good job in highlighting the ineptitude of the vaccine rollout program in the country.
What I’m listening to: If like me, you found yourself lacking the historical context and knowledge to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict, then this episode on the Today Explained podcast is a good starting point.
Balls, Bats & Baskets
The Tales of Leicester City
Dubrovnik is a charming little city on the coast of Southern Croatia that’s a perfect blend of the medieval rusticity of Eastern Europe and the seaside tranquility of the Mediterranean.
My phone gallery tells me I visited the city on a family vacation in the summer of 2016, but my footballing memory tells me it was the penultimate weekend of the 15/16 season and Leicester City were one win away from winning the title. On our first night in Dubrovnik, my father and I set off on a scouting mission in the city to track down pubs that would broadcast the game the next day.
Here’s a travel tip : An Irish pub, no matter where in the world, always broadcasts Premier League games. We tracked down a few Irish pubs across the city, just in case we had to duck into one of them at the drop of a hat.
And it’s in one such dimly lit Irish pub in Dubrovnik Old Town, I watched Eden Hazard curl one into the top corner and send the title to the East Midlands. The pub, grasping the historic magnitude of the Chelsea - Spurs game, had projected it onto a big screen on one of their walls. The energy in the place was upbeat, but it wasn’t euphoric in the way you’d expect for such an occasion. It didn’t matter, because it was compensated by the delirium I felt on the inside.
Every once in a while, sport gives you these moments that timestamp your memory. The type of moments that you’ll always remember exactly where you were and what you were doing. Leicester City winning the title was one such moment for me.
Amidst these claws of delirium, I noticed shades of disbelief. I’d witnessed something special, but I wasn’t able to grasp its significance. In sport, there’s a natural tendency to shift away from the present moment; to look back on legacies and look ahead to the future. But, the unforeseen nature of Leicester’s triumph didn’t allow us to do so and sucked us into the now. Take a moment, appreciate what you’ve seen because it may never happen again.
It was tough not to be enamored by their brutal disregard for the status quo and the sheer audacity of their title challenge. Everyone sees themselves as an underdog and Leicester was the ultimate underdog story. And that’s what it comes down to. Football isn’t about statistics, it’s about stories. And when you come across a good one, you don’t rush to the sequel. You cherish it.
Last Saturday, when Leicester clinched the FA Cup after defeating Chelsea, I felt the same joy in their success. But, my emotions weren’t stirred in the manner they were in 2016. The title win was a beautiful aberration but the FA Cup was the culmination of strategic planning and systematic squad building. The title win was an epic, but the FA Cup feels like the first chapter of a new era. The title win was all about the present, but the FA Cup is all about the future.
I’d love to hear what you thought of this week’s edition! To share your thoughts, comments or if just want to chat, hit me up at shubhank4@gmail.com!
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In last week’s edition:
Deep Dive: My five stages of fitness during the pandemic
Consumption Corner: A deep dive the politics of the Kumbh Mela, the SAF documentary & a Nikhil D’ Souza song I’m obsessed with.
Balls, Bats & Baskets: The Arteta Conundrum
Read it here!