Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Do We Use Hygiene to Make Caste Distinctions? Remembering Gadge Maharaj.

Times of India December 18, 2007: "70,000 Chitpavans (a Brahmin sect) to congregate in city (Pune)."

I was borne to Brahmin parents (mother Chitpavan) and am married to one. I didn't undergo a thread ceremony until a token one just before marriage. I always dreamt of marrying outside caste or religion but couldn't.
I often feel deep guilt about the way Brahmins in the past treated the Dalits. If ever I attend a Brahmin congregation, I will press for a resolution of expressing collective apology to the Dalits. Similar to what Indians want the British monarch to do for Jallianwala Bagh.

The one thing I have noticed since my childhood in Brahmin households is their preoccupation, bordering on fixation, with bathing. The most important job to be done on any day of the year is bathing. The exercise is not often elaborate; it may or may not involve sufficient water or toiletries but has to be done with.

No wonder Saint Samarth Ramdas समर्थ रामदास(1608-1681) ,a Brahmin, who has been credited by great historian and thinker T S Shejwakar त्र्यंबक शंकर शेजवलकर (1895-1963) to have instilled values of freedom among Marathi speaking people exclaimed with excitement:

During Shivaji’s reign

उदंड जाहालें पांणी। स्नान संध्या करावया।

Lots of Water Available / For bathing and praying.

(btw- Shejwalkar gives credit for values of brotherhood to Saint Tukaram तुकाराम (c.1608-c.1650) and for values of equality to Saint Eknath एकनाथ (1533-1599)).

Is bathing for Brahmins less about hygiene and more about virtue?

SARA IVRY wrote a review of “THE DIRT ON CLEAN / An Unsanitized History. By Katherine Ashenburg” in NYT December 16, 2007. The book focuses on Western Europe and the United States.

“…In her view, cleanliness has always been fundamentally about virtue, whether you’re an ancient Greek athlete scraping your skin with metal instruments after a workout or a modern consumer shelling out $50 for a toothbrush cover that emits germ-killing UV light. “The archetypal link between dirt and guilt, and cleanliness and innocence,” she writes, is “built into our language — perhaps into our psyches…

…while at least one 18th-century British doctor dismissed warm baths as a “luxury borrowed from the effeminate Asiatics.”

From the Renaissance until the Industrial Revolution, Ashenburg notes, the middle and upper classes generally feared water and washed as little as the poor, with monarchs perhaps being dirtiest of all. Only once the comfortable classes saw how quickly disease spread in urban tenements did they take to bathing more regularly…

… In the Middle Ages, the struggle between Christians and Muslims sometimes resembled a battle of the bathhouses…

… We use hygiene to make class distinctions, something already taken care of in less-fastidious Europe…

… In the end, Ashenburg argues, all our newfangled products haven’t taken us very far at all from our origin. We are still “as repulsed by our real bodies as were the medieval saints, although without their religious motivation.”
”

We observe Saint Gadge Baba’s संत गाडगे बाबा महाराज (1876-1956) 51st death anniversary today December 20, 2007. Baba's motto was: "Live clean and simple/ Shun intoxicants/ Care for the environment."

The man with the broom, Gadge Baba, a 20th century saint, was obsessed with cleanliness of our environment, our souls and not so much about his own appearance.

If at all heaven exists, Gadge Baba surely went there. And when god met Gadge Baba first time there, he admitted: "Well, you were right. (Personal)Neatness didn't count."