Throughout all of recorded human history, music and musicians have played an important role.
Art plays such a vital role in our culture that it’s hard to overstate it. Though the barriers to entry for many different kinds of art have been lowered now, there are still some old-fashioned traditions that live on, no matter how modern we get.
One of them is the worldwide phenomenon of busking, whereby street performers play music for money in public places.
And in the modern age, YouTube has totally reinvigorated this old art form.
If you live in a big city, chances are you’ve come face to face with all kinds of buskers and street performers over the years.
Although it’s definitely a tough job to keep trying day after day, people in major areas often ignore these performers because they’re too busy to stop and say much of anything.
Still, sometimes these same people can get more traction if they put their performances on YouTube—and they can even get an international audience in some cases!
At least, that was the case with one performer from Bangladesh.
While plenty of street performers try to do flashy things to get attention, most of them don’t put their lives at risk.
Still, the man in this video is a snake charmer—and his performance is definitely one of the more dangerous ones we’ve ever seen. As it turns out, snake charmers are one of the oldest kinds of buskers in the world, and they often live a nomadic and fragile existence.
The man in the video is a classic snake charmer, and the instrument he uses is a pungi. A pungi is actually a traditional Indian folk instrument with a pipe and a small gourd at the bottom.
As it turns out, snakes actually respond to its sound as a kind of threat.
As the video begins, the man starts playing on the pungi while there are three wooden boxes turned over in front of him.
After establishing a rhythm and a tone, he slowly and gradually lifts up the boxes. As it turns out, the box has a cobra inside it.
Through it goes without saying, cobras are extremely dangerous to humans. In the clip, the man’s pungi actually has a decorative cobra carved around it to either confuse or familiarize the other cobra.
Although the man plays extremely close to the cobra, the snake still stands there completely still!
A few moments later, the man pulls out another box and lets out another cobra.
Once again, he crouches on the ground and plays his instrument, and both of the cobras are standing stock still. After that’s done, he brings out yet another cobra with a rag around his hand—this one is actually trying to bite him!
At the end, holding the snake up by the tail and playing to calm it, he carefully tries to set it down. But it actually darts into the crowd and almost bites someone!
Needless to say, there’s real danger in what the man is doing.
Since the video was uploaded, it has earned more than 91 million views on YouTube.
While we’re used to American street performers and their ways of getting attention, the man in this clip is doing something truly extraordinary.
Though we’ve heard stories about snake charmers before, most of us have probably never seen one in real life. And what most people don’t realize is that the practice is still so dangerous—and so thrilling!
Salute to the man in this video for putting his life on the line for his art! Be sure to watch the whole thing in the link below:
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