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."

Saturday, February 27, 2016

When Will I see Godse Bhatji's 'Maza Pravas' on Marathi TV?

सुहास जोशी, Loksatta/ Lokprabha (लोकसत्ता/लोकप्रभा) December 9 2015:

“…सुरुवातीच्या काळात प्रसिद्ध लेखकांचं गाजलेलं साहित्य हाच मालिकांचा आधार होता. आज केवळ मालिकेसाठी म्हणूनच वेगळी कथा आणि त्या कथेचा विस्तार हा प्रकार रुजला आहे…

… मुळात मालिकांसाठी म्हणून अशी एखादी ठरावीक रचना असावी, असं आपल्याकडे फारसं कधी झालं नाही. मालिकांच्या भागांच्या संख्येपासून ते विषयापर्यंतचे अनेक प्रयोग आपल्याकडे सर्वच टप्प्यांवर झाले आहेत. सुधारित तंत्रज्ञानामुळं चित्रीकरणात आणि संकलनात अनेक प्रयोग करता आले. पण गेल्या काही वर्षांत येथे साचलेपणा आला आहे. त्याचं कारण म्हणजे सार्वत्रिक सपाटीकरण. मनोरंजनाच्या आणि टीआरपीच्या नावाखाली सारं काही झाकण्याची वृत्ती वाढली आहे आणि हे सपाटीकरण आपणच आपल्या पद्धतीनं केलं आहे. अमेरिका अथवा युरोपच्या मालिकांचा प्रभाव वगैरे म्हणण्यात काहीच अर्थ नाही.

चित्रपटांबाबत जसा एक मसालापटाचा फॉम्र्युला असतो तोच प्रकार हल्ली मालिकांमध्येदेखील दिसून येतो. त्याचबरोबर आणखीन एक महत्त्वाचा मुद्दा म्हणजे चित्रपटांचे जसे सर्वागाने सर्वच प्रकारच्या प्रसार माध्यमातून र्सवकष परिक्षण केले जाते, तसे मालिकांबाबत फारसे होताना दिसत नाही. जे काही दिसते ते केवळ चकचकीत वर्णनात्मकच…”

[An observation- Ms. Joshi says above that "अमेरिका अथवा युरोपच्या मालिकांचा प्रभाव वगैरे म्हणण्यात काहीच अर्थ नाही."..."There is no point in blaming American or European TV serials for their influence"....I wish it happened!
In USA and even in UK, a golden age of TV arrived some time ago and they have produced some of the best TV ever in that period.]

Apparently 5.7m viewers saw Andrew Davies' (BBC) adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'.

John Sutherland has written about it and proposed a few more candidates for TV adaptation.

"...TV is the perfect lubricant and abbreviator. You could even argue it enriches; giving a visual dimension (and in Davies’s case an erotic dimension) to those small black marks on a white surface. Of course the TV adaptation “gives the plot away” – but most of the high-hanging stuff isn’t the-butler-did-it kind of thing, and no spoiler alert is needed. We know Napoleon isn’t going to win.

The higher up the tree you go, the sweeter grows the berry, says the folk song. What fruit is hanging up there, in the top branches, awaiting the adaptor’s subtle hand?..."

And I felt how badly Marathi speaking people were missing such quality TV. (Are they?)

Once some very good books in Marathi were serialized for TV. But I don't remember when the last such effort ended.

Recently I read Karthika Nair talking about Shivaji Sawant’s (शिवाजी सावंत) 'Mrityunjay' (मृत्युंजय ), the book that surely inspired a part of her book 'Until The Lions'. Nair's book, in turn, has been adapted for the stage and being performed around the world.

I don't remember seeing Mrityunjay on Marathi TV. I learn it was adapted for Hindi TV but ended abruptly.

(by the way- I don't like the book at all but hundreds of thousands do.)

I personally would like to see Godse Bhatji's (गोडसे भटजी) 'Maza Pravas: 1857 cya Bandaci Hakikat' (माझा प्रवास: १८५७ च्या बंडाची हकीकत) on TV. It probably is the only book in any language that lets you feel what it was living in those tumultuous times.

Below I have reproduced two pages from the book that capture a part of the drama in the book.

The page on the left describes how the terror of the 1857 action sucked him dry of any sexual desire even when he is in an embrace of a young woman and the page on the right describes the plight of Rani Laxmibai and her defiant spirit in the face of overwhelming odds.

I have yet to come across a better book in Marathi that describes the real life drama and action.