Kabaddi (ka-bad-ddee) is a team sport with seven to ten players in each team on court and a few in reserve. The court is divided into two sides, each team dominating a side until the break when they swap sides for the second half of the match.
If Team A wins the toss, they send out a ‘raider’ whose objective is to touch as many of Team B’s players as possible in their own side, and return to his side within 30 seconds, all while chanting the word ‘kabaddi’ over and over again. Team B’s Defenders try to contain him on their side of the court. If the Team A player is not able to return to the Team A court, he is declared out and the Defending side gets a point. If the Team A player manages to return, he gets a point and the Team B player he touched has to exit the game. The side with the highest points wins the match.
Kabaddi is presumed to have originated in India. It is also known as Chadugudu and Hu-tu-tu and its variations are played across South Asia. It is the National Game of Bangladesh.

What is this album about?
This is one of the few albums by the Wadali Brothers, well known exponents in the vocal musical tradition inspired by the Sufi poets. This mini-album contains three of their most popular songs – Tu Maane Ya Na Maane, Ghoonghat Chuk O Sajana and Duma Dum Mast Qalandar, giving a glimpse into the raw devotion that their music is renowned for.
Who is it by?
Ustad Puranchand and Ustad Piyarelal Wadali belong to Punjab and are the fifth generation in a line of Sufi singers. While they have sung for film and cut music albums, they have a clear preference for live shows over recordings. They have been awarded the Sangeet Natak Academy award in 1991 and the older of the two brothers, Ustad Puranchand has been awarded the Padmashri in the Arts category by the Indian Government in 2005.
Why should listen to it?
Sufi music has always been traditionally performed at dargahs (shrines) of Sufi saints and they express different forms of longing for the divine. While Bollywood has incorporated a lot of Sufi music into soundtracks, the Wadali brothers believe that their songs are voice offerings to the divine – their music is perhaps the next best thing to hearing a live performance at a Sufi shrine.

The gravity-defying traditional sport of Mallakhamb has seen not only a revival in recent times, but also widespread popularity. The word ‘Mallakhamb’ (Malla=wrestling, Khamb=pole/pillar) referred traditionally to a pillar used by Indian wrestlers to exercise stretches and twists to make their bodies lithe and their spines, supple. The name has come to signify a group of gymnastic sports, of which Pole Mallakhamb and Rope Mallakhamb are the most common.
In Pole Mallakhamb, the gymnast must balance on a standing wooden pole with a bulbous head. The gymnast performs twists and yogic asanas while balancing on the pole. Perhaps the most awe-inspiring part of this form of mallakhamb is the transitions betweens asanas and the foot-hold balance where the gymnast balances perpendicular to the pole. In the variant called Hanging Pole Mallakhamb, a shorter pole is suspended vertically from a mount, and the gymnast demonstrates his skill on this constantly moving length of wood. The key here is to maintain the center of gravity. In Rope Mallakhamb, a thick cotton rope is suspended vertically. The rope is grasped in the space between the big toe and second toe of either foot and the gymnast winds it around the body to perform some seemingly impossible balancing exercises and asanas.
The sport has its own National Championship in India and there are training centres primarily in the state of Maharashtra, where the sport originates from.

The British Raj used the term ‘Hindoostani’ interchangeably for two languages, Hindi and Urdu, with Hindi spoken by the Hindus and Urdu spoken by the Muslims. In post-Independent India, Standard Hindi was selected as the Official Language, incorporating much of the Khariboli dialect spoken by those living in the region surrounding Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. While this dialect included Urdu words, the script adopted for Standard Hindi was Devnagari.
In a multi-lingual country whose diversity is often jokingly described as ‘a different language or dialect every few miles’, it was bound to be difficult to implement one language as the national language of India. Hence, English was included as an additional language for official purposes.
Hindi is spoken as a mother-tongue by 180 million people, and as a second language by 300 million people. It has 11 vowels and 35 consonants. Those consonants borrowed from languages like Persian, English and Arabic, are denoted with a dot. Some of the most famous writers and poets in the Hindi language include Kabir, Goswami Tulsidas, Munshi Premchand, Maithili Sharan Gupt, Jaishankar Prasad and more recently, Nirmal Verma. Hindi classes are available in many cities across India and there are also proficiency exams in the language.
Source for numbers data: Central Hindi Directorate (Department of Higher Education)