I want to go back home,
and every day I hope that day will come.
If some god strikes me on the wine-dark sea,
I will endure it. By now I am used
to suffering—I have gone through so much,
at sea and in the war. Let this come too.
—Homer, The Odyssey, book 5, lines 219–242
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Mel Brooks, The New York Times, November 2022:
"...One day he handed me a book. He said to me, “Mel, you’re an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind.”
The book was “Dead Souls,” by the magnificent genius Nikolai Gogol. It was a revelation. I’d never read anything like it. It was hysterically funny and incredibly moving at the same time. It’s like Gogol stuck a pen in his heart, and it didn’t even go through his mind on its way to the page. It truly raised the bar of what I considered to be important writing. It was a life-changing gift, and I still read it once a year to remind myself of what great comic writing can be..."
Vladimir Nabokov, 'Nikolai Gogol', 1944:
"... Nikolai Gogol, the strangest prose-poet Russia ever produced, died Thursday morning, a little before eight, on the fourth of March, eighteen fifty-two, in Moscow. He was almost forty-three years old – a reasonably ripe age for him, considering the ridiculously short span of life generally allotted to other great Russian writers of his miraculous generation. Absolute bodily exhaustion in result of a private hunger strike (by means of which his morbid melancholy had tried to counter the Devil) culminated in acute anemia of the brain (together, probably, with gastroenteritis through inanition) – and the treatment he was subjected to, a vigorous purging and bloodletting, hastened the death of an organism already gravely impaired by the after effects of malaria and malnutrition. The couple of diabolically energetic physicians who insisted on treating him as if he were an average Bedlamite, much to the alarm of their more intelligent but less active colleagues, intended to break the back of their patient’s insanity before attempting to patch up whatever bodily health he still had left. Some fifteen years before, Pushkin, with a bullet in his entrails, had been given medical assistance good for a constipated child. Second-rate German and French general practitioners still dominated the scene, for the splendid school of great Russian physicians was yet in the making...."
What followed sounds so cruel today...
"...It is horrible to read of the grotesquely rough handling that Gogol’s poor limp body underwent when all he asked for was to be left in peace. With as fine a misjudgment of symptoms, as a clear anticipation of the methods of Charcot, Dr Auvers (or Hovert) had his patient plunged into a warm bath where his head was soused with cold water after which he was put to bed with half-a-dozen plump leeches affixed to his nose. He had groaned and cried and weakly struggled while his wretched body (you could feel the spine through the stomach) was carried to the deep wooden bath; he shivered as he lay naked in bed and kept pleading to have the leeches removed: they were dangling from his nose and getting into his mouth (Lift them, keep them away, – he pleaded) and he tried to sweep them off so that his hands had to be held by stout Auvert’s (or Hauvers’s) hefty assistant...."
आता पहा राम गणेश गडकरी त्यांच्या प्रचंड गाजलेल्या 'एकच प्याला', १९१७ नाटकाच्या चवथ्या अंकांत , चौथ्या प्रवेशात काय लिहतात :
संपूर्ण गडकरी , खंड-पहिला , १९८४
माहीत नसेल तर, गोगोल आणि तळिराम दोघेही ह्या आजारपणात जातात ...
Stephen Kotkin has written an article for The Economist on Feb 11 2025 titled: "Jaw-jawing at Yalta, 80 years ago:The neglect of Asia was the great failure of Yalta".
Not a word on India!
My favorite writer Diana Preston has written a book : "Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World", 2019.
It has India. How Churchill was reluctant to talk about India's independence with FDR.
I quote a few lines from the book.
"...Roosevelt acquiesced in Stalin’s proposal that he should stay in the Soviet Legation in Teheran so he would be safer from Nazi agents. At their private meetings he emphasized disagreements with Churchill on issues such as India, the role of France and the date of the cross-Channel invasion...."
"...(Churchill’s fellow anti-appeaser but reluctant wartime Secretary of State for India Leo) Amery complained that Churchill had a ‘Hitler-like attitude towards India’ and was ‘shouting’ about India and claiming its then 500 million inhabitants were ‘breeding like rabbits’. On one occasion Amery questioned whether ‘on this subject of India he [Churchill] is really quite sane – there is no relation between his manner, physical and intellectual, on this theme and the equability and dominant good sense he displays on issues directly affecting the conduct of the war.’..."
"...Perhaps partly because of his generally hostile attitude, Churchill had been slow to realize the seriousness of the 1940s Bengal famine in which more than 1 million people died. The press in America as well as in Britain and India castigated the feeble relief attempts by the British government and also by local Indian authorities. Nevertheless, it took considerable pressure, including a threat to resign by the British viceroy in India Lord Wavell, as well as from Leo Amery and Parliament to overturn the government’s ‘scandalous’ inaction. Finally convinced, in April 1944 Churchill wrote to Roosevelt asking to borrow American merchant ships to import wheat to India from Australia...."
"...Churchill’s almost hysterical opposition to any suggestion of Indian independence was well known to both Roosevelt and Stalin. Roosevelt himself at Teheran discussed Churchill’s stance privately with Stalin, who agreed that the empire was a sore spot for Churchill. In Washington over the New Year of 1941/2, Roosevelt suggested that Churchill promise India independence and propose a timescale for achieving it as the US had for the Philippines. Churchill responded that he would resign before he would ‘yield an inch of the territory that was under the British flag’. On the fringes of the Casablanca Conference, after jocularly offering to hand Gandhi over to the United States – ‘He’s awfully cheap to keep, now that’s he’s on hunger strike’ – Churchill continued:
There are always earnest spinsters in Pennsylvania, Utah, Edinburgh or Dublin persistently writing letters and signing petitions and ardently giving their advice . . . urging that India be given back to the Indians and South Africa back to the Zulus or Boers, but as long as I am called by His Majesty the King to be his First Minister, I shall not assist at the dismemberment of the British Empire...."
"...Roosevelt also reflected, ‘The British were in too embarrassing a situation from the standpoint of the make-up of the British Empire to oppose the Russian request. India was not self-governing – and Churchill had made it clear earlier that he did not favor Indian independence – and yet India was to have a vote.’..."
India appears 40 odd times in the book, and China 50 odd times. Fair.
George Orwell, ‘LEAR, TOLSTOY AND THE FOOL’, March 1947:
“Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.”
फेब्रुवारी २१ २०२५ रोजी न्यू यॉर्कर मासिकाला १०० वर्षे पूर्ण झाली. शताब्दी मासिक उत्साहात साजरी करते आहे करत आहे पण मला फार आवडले पॉल नॉथ यांचे त्या निमित्तासाठी काढलेले सोबतचे कार्टून ...
न्यू यॉर्कर चा मॅस्कॉट कबरस्थानातून डोळे पुसता निघाला आहे आणि बाजूला समाध्या कोणा कोणाच्या आहेत ते पहा ....
मराठीत तर त्या कबरस्थानात जागाच शिल्लक नाहीये ... वाङ्मय शोभा , सत्यकथा , छंद, अभिरुची ...किती नवे घ्यावीत? ...
