courtesy: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M Sackler Gallery
This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी" (Tukaram: For a bedbug a bed is like a castle. so much climbing up and down!)... 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.”
Friedrich Nietzsche: “Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”
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....."
John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."
Justin E.H. Smith: “One should of course take seriously serious efforts to improve society. But when these efforts fail, in whole or in part, it is only humor that offers redemption. So far, human expectations have always been strained, and have always come, give or take a bit, to nothing. In this respect reality itself has the form of a joke, and humor the force of truth.”
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, January 28, 2016
जेणे पावो देखिला...Kawanabe Kyōsai's Elephant
courtesy: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M Sackler Gallery
Sunday, January 24, 2016
The Innovation We Need in Pune
The city of Pune has multiple flyovers being built in different parts.
Artist: Alfred Fruch, The New Yorker, 23 January 1926
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
चिमणरावांचे कॉफी करायचे मशीन...Crazy Elaborateness of the Contraption and the Modest Demands of the Task in Hand
Sarah O’Connor, FT, January 5 2016:
"...We are so fixated by the threat of human-like machines that we have failed to notice the spread of machine-like humans...It would not be easy or smooth but a fresh wave of automation would at least give us the opportunity to leave the robotic jobs to the robots, and find more fulfilling work for humans to do."
This post is based on my earlier post "चिमणरावांचे स्वैपाघरातील केळी कापायचे मशीन"
Read Mr. Niemann's thoughts on his creation here. "The whole idea of a machine is outdated.”
But it reminded me of the following picture.
Artist: W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944)
Men in both the pictures look like Joshi's Chimanrao to me.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Just Footwear or Powerful Cultural Symbols
Sadie Stein, the Paris Review, October 1 2015:
"...An ideal boot has to be decently made, versatile, affordable, and comfortable. And, of course, it must fit your leg..."
courtesy: A B Seeley, 1881
Artist: William Hamilton, The New Yorker, 9 December 1996
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Open Sesame? Please Confirm the First Line of Your Last Address
Artist: Geoff Thompson, The Spectator, 2015
Alas, the life is no more that simple.
Artist: Hunter, The Spectator
Friday, January 08, 2016
प्रगती? छे नव-निर्मिती: Replacing The Word Progress With Innovation
which serves neither god nor king,
given over to the mundane sciences,
to base mechanical professions!
Pernicious breed! What will you not attempt,
abandoned without restraint
to that fatal spirit of knowledge, of invention, of progress."
Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin’, 1996 :
Lepore has taken apart the book and a lot of management jargon in it and how!
I have always been mildly suspicious of the word 'innovation'. Lepore says all we have done is replaced the word progress with innovation!
"...The idea of progress—the notion that human history is the history of human betterment—dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, genocide and global warming. Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer."
Artist: Charles Barsotti (1933- June 16 2014), The New Yorker, 27 January 2003