मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Sunday, December 07, 2014

Guide@50: Serpent Girls of Vijay Anand and Fritz Lang

Vijay Anand's 'Guide' was released in India on December 6 1965. So today, December 7 2014, is the start of its golden anniversary year.

The movies has appeared on this blog a couple of times earlier. I still remember its large colourful posters displayed  in front of the town hall, Miraj where it ran at Deval talkies some time in 1966. Aged 6, I wanted to watch the movie! My father flatly and quite rightly refused the permission. I would watch the film a decade or so later.

I consider the movie very significant because, I feel,  it marked the end of Hindi cinema's golden age that had started with Mehboob Khan's 'Andaz', 1949.

By the end of 1965. the best work of Hindi cinema's greats such as Mehboob Khan, Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Balraj Sahni, Motilal, Nargis, Madhubala, Geeta Bali, Nutan, Meena Kumari, Shankar-Jaikishan, Naushad, Roshan, Madan Mohan, C Ramchandra, S D Burman etc. was largely behind them.

Those who like 'Guide' are often impressed with Waheeda Rehman's snake-dance, ahead of her even other wonderful dance numbers. I always feel that dance is a manifestation of suppressed sexual desires of Rosie played ably by Ms. Rehman. 

Google Doodle on October 10 2014 

courtesy: Google Inc.

R K Narayan's 'The Guide', 1958 on which the film is supposedly based, describes Rosie's snake-dance, on stage, in these words:


“…Two hours passed. She was doing her fifth item—a snake dance, unusually enough. I liked to watch it. This item always interested me. As the musicians tuned their instruments and played the famous snake song, Nalini came gliding onto the stage. She fanned out her fingers slowly, and the yellow spotlight, playing on her white upturned palms, gave them the appearance of a cobra hood; she wore a diadem for this act, and it sparkled. Lights changed, she gradually sank to the floor, the music became slower and slower, the refrain urged the snake to dance—the snake that resided on the locks of Shiva himself, on the wrist of his spouse, Parvathi, and in the ever-radiant home of the gods in Kailas. This was a song that elevated the serpent and brought out its mystic quality; the rhythm was hypnotic. It was her masterpiece. Every inch of her body from toe to head rippled and vibrated to the rhythm of this song which lifted the cobra out of its class of an underground reptile into a creature of grace and divinity and an ornament of the gods.
The dance took forty-five minutes in all; the audience watched in rapt silence. I was captivated by it. . . . She rarely chose to do it indeed. She always said that a special mood was needed, and always joked that so much wriggling twisted her up too much and she could not stand upright again for days. I sat gazing as if I were seeing it for the first time. There came to my mind my mother’s remark on the first day, “A serpent girl! Be careful.”…”


'Serpent girl' Waheeda Rehman

courtesy: Shemaroo and current copyright holder to the feature film 'Guide'

Apart from Mr. Narayan's vivid description,  was there any on-screen inspiration for Mr. Vijay Anand?

Probably yes.

I read a few books this year.

The best of them is 'A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes', 2014 by Sam Miller. Mr. Miller is easily one of the interesting persons who ever visited India. He belongs with the likes of Hiuen Tsang, Ibn Battuta...

The book gave me so much and will continue to give. Every page of the book is a treasure trove.

One of the most interesting things I learned there was great Fritz Lang's 'India films': 'The Tiger of Eschnapur', 1959 and 'The Indian Tomb', 1959.



'Serpent girl' Debra Paget performing snake dance in Fritz Lang's 'The Indian Tomb', 1959

courtesy: current copyright owner to the feature 

Fritz Lang was a greater director than Vijay Anand but when it comes to the battle of serpent girls, the clear winner is Mr. Anand's fully clothed Ms. Rehman!