"Prithvi Hai," a chant Simrit performed live at Center for the Arts with dub creative, sits at the center of the newest album he has released, Become. That record, he tells the room, was written during the pandemic, when he and a couple of his brothers could not travel and made music in the same place instead. The song itself asks a question that devotional traditions have asked for centuries: where do the earth and the ether meet? Simrit's answer, given from the stage, is the heart center, and the chant turns that image into a call for unity and for standing up against injustice. What follows walks through the scene, the meaning of the title, how a call-and-response chant works in a live room, and why its origin in lockdown matters.
The recording opens on talk before it opens on music. Simrit is at the microphone, and the room is still settling. He tells the audience that many of the selections that night come from Become, and he introduces the people beside him by name, including Scotty and Ryan Aishence Willard, who are on vocals and guitar. The crowd cheers. The tone is friendly and loose, the kind of stage patter that signals a band that has been playing together long enough to be comfortable with mistakes and laughter.
That looseness is the first clue to how the record was made. Simrit describes the pandemic as a time of confinement, and he is plain about what it forced: "We couldn't travel anywhere. We were here and we made some beautiful music and these brothers convinced me to make an album." The line draws a bit of laughter, because he adds that it was not hard for them to persuade him. For a reader who has not watched, the important detail is not the joke but the sequence. The album did not begin as a career plan. It began as music made because people were in the same room and had nowhere else to go.
That origin shapes the sound you hear on stage. Songs that were worked out among friends over months tend to carry a shared, unforced feel, where the players already know where each other will land. You can hear that ease in the way the set moves from spoken introduction into sung and instrumental passages without a visible seam.
Lockdown albums have a particular history in contemporary music. Many were made by people who were cut off from touring, studios, and the usual rhythm of a release cycle, so the work often became more private and more dependent on the few people physically nearby. Simrit's account fits that pattern without dramatizing it. He does not present the album as a triumph over hardship. He presents it as a result of the time they had, and of brothers who were willing to push him toward finishing it.
The practical lesson for anyone making music, or any creative project, is in that phrase "these brothers convinced me." Much of what makes a record exist is not inspiration alone but a small circle that refuses to let the idea stay unfinished. Become is credited to Simrit feat. dub creative in the title of this performance, and the album is available on the streaming services listed with the video, so readers can hear how these studio-era ideas sound in a recorded form.
The song's title and its opening framing are built on two words from the Sanskrit tradition. On stage Simrit gives the basic meaning directly: "Prithvi is the earth and akash is the ether." He then adds that "Prithvi means the earth" and "akash means the ethers," and he frames the chant around their meeting.
Those two words belong to a much older cosmology. In classical Indian thought, the physical world is often described as built from five great elements, the mahabhutas, and earth (prithvi) and ether or space (akasha) are two of them. Earth is the most solid and grounded; ether is the element of space that holds everything else. Putting them together in a single chant gives the song a vertical reach: one word anchors the body in the ground, and the other opens into the vast and unbounded. This is background from the tradition rather than something Simrit spells out in the performance, but it helps explain why the pairing is powerful. A chant that names earth and space at once is a chant about being rooted and being open at the same time.
The most important sentence in the spoken introduction is the one that tells the audience where the two elements meet. Simrit says, "the earth and the ethers meet in the heart center. And that's where we want to be as human beings." That is the hinge of the whole piece. Grounded earth and open space are not, in his telling, opposites to be balanced somewhere far away. They converge in the heart, which is the place in the body and the tradition where the personal and the shared are said to touch.
From there he moves immediately to the social meaning: "We want to be together in unity." He then names what that unity has to do with: "Standing up for one another, standing up to all the injustice happening in the world." This is where "Prithvi Hai" stops being only a meditation on the elements and becomes a statement. The heart center is not a retreat from the world's problems. In the framing Simrit offers, it is the ground from which people stand up, together, against them.
That combination of inner image and outward action is one of the more demanding ideas in devotional music. It is easy to sing about unity in general terms. It is harder to tie unity to a specific refusal, in this case the refusal of injustice, and to keep the sound warm rather than angry. The chant attempts both, and the live setting, with its cheering audience and repeated phrases, makes the request feel collective rather than preached.
The transcript is dense with the marks of a performance that lives in repetition. Short sung phrases come back again and again, with long stretches of instrumental music between them, and the performers' voices move in and out of the texture. In a chant of this kind, repetition is not filler. Each return of a phrase gives the room another chance to join in, and each pass lets the phrase settle a little deeper into the body.
The "heat" refrain is the clearest example. It appears early, around the 1:39 mark, and returns many times through the set. A caution is needed here: the auto-generated transcript renders the sung refrain as "heat," and that spelling is probably not a reliable guide to the actual Sanskrit or Hindi words being sung. The title, "Prithvi Hai," is the more trustworthy reference, and readers who want the exact lyrics should check the album's published credits rather than the captions.
What the transcript does make clear is the shape of the experience. Long passages move with only a few words, and the sung lines return with a sense of gathering rather than resolution. A chant of this length asks the listener to stay with the same few ideas long enough for them to change how the body feels. That is the practical craft behind the spiritual claim: the repetition is the method.
The set moves from explanation to participation. Simrit starts by telling the room what the album is, where it came from, and what the song means. He then lets the music carry the meaning. Around the middle of the transcript there are longer sung lines, including a passage where he sings "Oh, here I am," a small, direct phrase that feels like a personal answer to the communal idea that has just been named. Later the music gives way to a long run of instrumental and vocal textures before the chant returns to its refrain near the end.
That arc is what makes the piece work as a live document rather than just a recording. The introduction gives the listener a reason to care about the elements and the heart. The music then tests that reason by asking the listener to feel it in the body. By the time the refrain is coming back for the final time, the idea of unity is no longer a sentence on a program note. It has become a sound the room is making together.
If you have only watched the performance, the best next step is to listen to the studio version of the song on the album Become, which is available on the streaming platforms listed with the video. Comparing the recorded version to the live one will show how the chant changes when a room of people is answering it. You might also look up the five mahabhutas in a reliable source on Indian philosophy to hear the earth and ether of the title in their original context.
For a reader who wants to go further, the questions Simrit raises are the useful ones: how an idea of inner grounding can connect to outward responsibility, and whether a chant can hold both the personal and the collective at once. "Prithvi Hai" does not settle those questions in five minutes, but it lays them out clearly, and it shows what a song made in a locked-down year, by people who could only be together in one room, can carry out into a crowded one.
