“Chaiyya Chaiyya” is a song from the Indian Hindi-language film Dil Se.. and features the excellent vocal talents of Sukhwinder Singh and Sapna Awasthi (neither of whom appear in the video). Like most Bollywood songs, the song has virtually nothing to do with anything and the beautiful woman with abs like an old fashioned taffy pulling machine does not appear at any other point in the film. This scene also features some very fun dancing on top of a moving train with a distressingly abundant amount of disregard for things like wires or stuntmen or probably actors union input. Despite all of this, Dil Se.. is still a pretty good movie about, um, a man who falls in love with a suicide bomber.

You may have faint recollections of hearing this song in various American tv clips, movie soundtracks, and commercials in the 2000s and 2010s when it was popular to sample, which is weird because this movie is from 1998.

This is one of my favorite Bollywood songs and always cheers me up when I’m having a bad day, or when I’m having a slow morning it’s guaranteed to get me dancing in my chair.

I hope you have had a lovely day and this night thread finds you well.