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, June 25, 2015

पिवळीच मी पाकोळी की....Blue Mormon Gets the Recognition

There is no butterfly in classical Indian literature, claims the late Durga Bhagwat ( दुर्गा भागवत) in her book 'Nisargotsav' (“पिवळीच मी पाकोळी की”/ निसर्गोत्सव, 1996).

"...क्रौंचवध पाहून ज्याचा शोक श्लोकत्व पावला, त्या वाल्मिकीला फुलपाखरू दिसले नाही, मग इतरांना तरी कसे दिसावे?...आणि व्यासाचे उच्छिष्ट खाणारे आम्ही? व्यासाची प्रज्ञा तर घालवून बसलोच, पण आमची प्रतिभाही आटली… मानवी अंतरंग असो किंवा बाह्य सृष्टी असो, प्रकृतीचे आकलन, व तेही सूक्ष्म असल्याशिवाय, कल्पना उंचावत नाहीत, भावना संयत होत नाहीत. विभूषित होत नाहीत. आणि म्हणूनच फुलपाखरांचा अभाव हा भारतीय साहित्याच्या अनेक अभांवाचा प्रातिनिधिक अभाव आहे असे मला वाटते… "

She asks if some one like sage Valmiki, who was inspired to write the Ramayana as he watched the killing of a male krouncha bird out of a pair, never 'saw' a butterfly, how can others see it?

But luckily, the government of Maharashtra has seen one.

"...Maharashtra has become the first State in the country to have a ‘State butterfly.’ The BJP-led government has declared the Blue Mormon (Papilio polymnestor) as the State butterfly. The decision was taken at a meeting of the State Wildlife Board in Mumbai on Monday.

The Blue Mormon is a large, swallowtail butterfly found primarily in Sri Lanka and India, mainly restricted to the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, South India and coastal belts. It may occasionally be spotted in the Maharashtrian mainland between Vidarbha and Western Maharashtra..."

(The Hindu, June 23 2015)