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."

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

R G Gadkari's Sindhu, A Hitchcock's Blondes

I read Ram Ganesh Gadkari's (1885-1919) (राम गणेश गडकरी) "Ekach Pyala" (एकच प्याला) when in school.

I had mixed feelings. I was deeply stirred by its melodrama and use of Marathi but I also felt it was a tearjerker. (Read a related post on Ekach Pyala here.)

Play's protagonist Sindhu सिन्धु made a deep impression on me. But I wasn't attracted to her. I thought she was like many middle-class, largely Brahmin, women I came across in Miraj.

There was one very fair skinned, twenty plus, sharp-featured, five-yard saree-wearing Chitpavan Brahmin woman who passed by our house almost every day.

Wherever, any time of the day, she saw cow dung lying on a street, she stopped in her tracks, lifted it in her right palm, positioned that palm over her right shoulder, dung facing sky, and carried it to her house.

I thought Gadkari's Sindhu was like her except the length of saree as Sindhu surely wore nine-yard one.

How wrong I was!

I realised it when I read M. V. Dhond's (म. वा. धोंड) 'Chandra Chavathicha', 1987 (चंद्र चवथिचा; In English- "Fourth Day Moon").

Dhond uncovers, what Gadkari doesn't do overtly, attractiveness of Gadkari's Sindhu.

For instance after a long separation from her husband Sudhakar, Sindhu, whose marriage is not that old, is looking forward to mating with him. She is humming a suggestive song to herself.

In short: Sex is on her mind.

Dhond reasons that the 'fourth day' also implies the last day of a woman's monthly menstruation cycle, when having suffered variously, including even lack of bath, on account of prevailing social customs, women looked forward to a reunion with their husbands.

I was fascinated by this. Now, Sindhu started to look like many attractive middle-aged married women one comes across.

It reminded me of Hitchcock's presentation of his blondes Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren.

Why?

Hitchcock: You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We're after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they're in the bedroom.

Truffaut: What intrigues you is the paradox between the inner fire and the cool surface.

Hitchcock: Definitely...Do you know why? Because sex should not be advertised...because without the element of surprise the scenes become meaningless. There's no possibility to discover sex.

[Interview: Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Tuffaut (Aug/1962)]