THE BRIDGE WEEKLY The South Asian music & culture dispatch — from Sammy Chand
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Nayab Midha had a twenty-minute set. That was the whole act: a handful of poems stitched together with a musician friend’s songs, thirty or forty tickets on a good night. Then “Muskurao” went viral overnight. Three hundred people bought tickets to her next show, and she had one week to become the artist they thought they were paying for.
What she did with that week is the story of Rajkumari. Seventeen handwritten pages. No trial run. She walked on stage in Ahmedabad and didn’t come off for three and a half hours, “because I didn’t know what to cut, what to keep.” The room stood for five to seven minutes. “It was an accidental show,” she says. “It was the pressure that made me do it.” Two years of trimming later, Rajkumari runs two and a half hours, and it’s the show she has been performing across America.
The leap came earlier, on a phone call. After two and a half years at Infosys, the job her father insisted on, she was offered a role organizing poetry events, and she called home: “I heard you for two and a half years. Now you have to hear me out… if not now, then when?” His answer: “Okay, go for it. And anything you need, I’m here for you.” Then COVID shut the event company down and left her jobless for two years. She calls it a blessing in disguise. “If you don’t have that faith,” she says, “don’t take the risk.”
Which is what makes the rest of her story remarkable. Nayab won’t accept the word niche. “It pinches me,” she says. She takes it “as a personal fight.” Poetry, she reminds us, is how people carried stories before there was pen and paper. And she has done the unglamorous work around the art: convincing venues to book a form they couldn’t preview, sorting the permissions, proving there’s an audience. Her own words: anyone who wants to do Hindi poetry now won’t have to fight for a venue. That isn’t a performance. That’s infrastructure.
In New Jersey, seven or eight hundred people filled the room, and a woman who worked there came backstage to tell her she was a superstar. “That was the moment it hit me,” Nayab says. “Oh my God, we’ve done something here.” She has. She has planted a field of trees whose shade she may never sit under, and a generation of poets will walk through doors she opened without ever knowing who held them.
Ask her where this art form is in five years and she sees Madison Square Garden, Radio City, the Royal Opera House, and “thousands and thousands of people pursuing this art form.” Ask her what she’d tell a nine-year-old girl back home in Sri Ganganagar, and it’s two words: be fearless. “Because I wasn’t given that advice much.”
From a twenty-minute set to a sold-out room — Nayab’s audience, in her words
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RA Radio on The Bridge — This Week’s Guests
Two Rukus Avenue Radio Hosts Join Sammy.
More on Rukus Avenue Radio
Plus Who Does She Think She Is? with Sabeen Faheem (Thursdays), Leaders Creating Rukus with Aashi Arora (Mondays) and The Garage Mahal with Neesh Riaz (Tuesdays) — all on RukusAvenueRadio.com and the iHeartRadio app.
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Inside the Music — The Bridge Data Desk
Six Weeks, Six Thrones.
Numbers no one else has, because no one else has the board: computed from The Bridge’s weekly Top 20, June 12 through October 11.
Six weeks, six thrones. Since Labor Day weekend, no song has held №1 for more than seven days. Rebel. Treat Me Special. Yeh Duniya. Bandhe Zulfon Pe. Finally. And now Guzarish. That makes twelve different №1s in the eighteen countdowns since June 12, and not one record has held the top for longer than three weeks all season. On this board, the crown doesn’t get defended. It gets passed.
Who held №1, week by week, since Labor Day weekend
One week each. Six different songs, six different artists.
Satinder Sartaaj does it twice. “Guzarish” climbs back onto the board and all the way to №1, his second №1 of the season after “Nazma’n Di Paalki” in July. That puts Sartaaj next to Sahib Samra as the only two artists with two №1s this season.
Arrivals on the Top 20 — records that weren’t on the previous week’s board
Eight arrivals this weekend, double the four a week ago: Guzarish’s return at №1, plus seven debuts. Three of those debuts landed in the top six: Jass Manak’s “Kante” at №4, Shreya Ghoshal’s “Bairi Piya” at №5 and Karan Aujla and Merci Beats’ “Rap Killa” at №6. That last one gives Karan Aujla two records in the top six, with “Ashke” up to №3.
The fall of the week. Priya Ragu’s “Finally” climbed №4 → №2 → №1 over three weeks and slides to №7 in its first week after the crown. Hania Aamir’s “Pablo” and Zeeshan Ali’s “Bandhe Zulfon Pe”, both on the board since September, each drop ten places. When eight records arrive at once, somebody has to make room.
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The Board — This Weekend’s Top 20 · EP 637
Guzarish Returns at №1. Seven Debuts, Three Inside the Top Six.
Movement vs. the October 2–4 board. Eight records exit: Treat Me Special, Tere Jatt De, Like That, Yeh Duniya, Devil, Ho Jayenge Ghum, Suno Zra and Nuksaan. Eight arrive: seven debuts and Guzarish’s return. RE = re-entry.
Rukus Avenue Radio — 24/7
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The Bridge Community Spotlight — Saturday, October 17
Smoke & Mirrors — JiVA’s fourth annual gala
JiVA Mental Health’s fourth annual gala. JiVA is a nonprofit working to dismantle mental health stigma and expand access to culturally responsive care, with a focus on South Asian communities. Dinner, open bar, a live illusion show, a charity auction and dancing; ticket revenue funds JiVA’s care and programming. This Saturday. Last year sold out, so reserve now.
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This Week on The Bridge · Daily 9 AM PT
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New & Notable — The Release Wire
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The Bridge Awards 2026
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Listen
The Bridge airs weekdays at 9AM PT on iHeartRadio, in every US market. The Top 20 Countdown runs all weekend.
iHeart — iheart.com/podcast/53-the-bridge-by-sammy-chand-279975775/
Apple Podcasts — podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bridge-by-sammy-chand/id1819531039 Spotify — open.spotify.com/show/3PUPeB45JBJ6CxDXTudsHo Amazon Music — music.amazon.com/podcasts/8c38c055-d095-47dd-8a46-897ad0bbd529/ YouTube — youtube.com/@TheBridgeBySammyChand RA Radio — rukusavenueradio.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Follow @sammychand · @rukusavenue · @rukusavenueradio
Tips and corrections: sammy@rukusavenue.com — Sammy
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The Bridge with Sammy Chand — Syndicated daily via Premiere Networks / iHeartRadio — @sammychand · @rukusavenue · sammy@rukusavenue.com
Rukus Avenue Music Group · 9909 Topanga Canyon Blvd, Chatsworth CA 91311-3602
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