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."

Friday, September 13, 2024

Rajnigandha, 1974@50...Early Sprouts of Different Love?

Katherine J. Chen, ‘In Praise of “Plain” Heroines: Why Mary is my Favorite Bennet Sister ‘, Literary Hub, July 23 2018:

“...Could Mary Bennet, in actuality, be considered the bravest, most self-assured, and most independent of her sisters? Pride and Prejudice tends to throw women in two black-and-white categories: wives and spinsters. But with her outspokenness and her desire for “knowledge and accomplishments,” Mary seems the most well placed to break the suffocating confines of the traditional marriage plot. Ironically, with everything going against her, she is also the most likely of anyone to defy expectations and, ultimately, to surprise....”

I watched Rajnigandha, 1974, after a few decades, on Hotstar in November 2019.

My feeling: How it could have turned out to be a wonderful story of lesbian love (not exactly 'Blue Is the Warmest Color', 2013) without any nudity. It's to the credit to the director Basu Chatterjee (1930-) that he has allowed the film (at least for people like me) to take some hue of that love.

It's possible that the love is largely one sided....married Ira (played well by Rajita Thakur) developing those feelings towards single Deepa (played by the late Vidya Sinha), primarily because of the long absence of her husband. But it could be a little more than just the absence of male intimacy and heterogeneous sex.

I really enjoyed the scenes between Ira and Deepa.

Especially the ones where while sleeping in the same bed of Deepa, Ira puts her leg around Deepa's body and they keep gossiping well into the night. No sex is shown or hinted at. At the beginning at the scene it's Deepa who says that Ira is giving Deepa her husband's place!

Or when Ira bids goodbye to Deepa at the station, whispering how their nights together would be missed.

I found it all very beautiful and moving.