Heroes of The EcoSystem...विजय तेंडुलकरांचे चुकलेच !

"With a stomach of steel that can digest diseased meat and waste, vultures are essential to removing dangerous bacteria from our ecosystems. "

https://www.facebook.com/TEDEducation/videos/197385841637543/

But Unexamined Life Is 45% Cheaper!

John Gray:

“…The idea that examined lives tend to be better on the whole than others seems to me obviously false. The only benefit that philosophy can confer is a certain kind of mental freedom – but this can’t be achieved as long as philosophical inquiry is understood as an attempt to ground or prove anything, and then persuade others of it. The very idea of philosophical inquiry as a project of persuasion seems to me little more than a rationalist version of proselytising religion. ..” 

 Artist:  P C Vey, February 2020

Buying Shoes

“I can very much recommend our shoes for the Charleston, Madam: the right feet are the left feet, and the left feet the right feet.”

Illustration by Vald’Es for LA VIE PARISIENNE, 1920s

Artist: Chon Day (1907-2000), The New Yorker, December 1946

Each to the Other Must Seem Futile and Ridiculous...East Is East

Wade Davis, ‘INTO THE SILENCE: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest ‘, 2011:

“…The British climbers admired the Sherpas, but made little effort to understand their world. Younghusband famously said that there were hundreds of Tibetans living at the base of Everest who could have reached the “summit any year they liked. Yet the fact remains they don’t. They have not even the desire to. They have not spirit.” Beetham believed, too, that there was something fundamentally missing in the Sherpa character. He stated, “It has been said that these men could easily reach the top if they themselves really wished to do so. I do not believe it for one moment … they have acclimatized bodies but lack the right mentality.”

Norton wrote that the Sherpas were “singularly like a childish edition of the British soldier. They have the same high spirit for a tough and dangerous job; the same ready response to quip and jest. As with the British soldier the rough character often comes out strongest when up against it in circumstances where the milder man fails.” From Norton this was high praise. He was not a nuanced man when it came to culture, but he recognized courage and authenticity when he saw it.

Of all the men, it was the good doctor Hingston who came closest to sensing something sublime in the Tibetan way of being. Even as Sandy Irvine and the Sherpas made their way up the corridor of the East Rongbuk for the final assault, Hingston, back at base camp, had a remarkable encounter. He recalled in his journal on the evening of May 28: 

This morning I explored a narrow gorge in which a hermit had taken up his abode. I did not approach his cell too closely; but it appeared to consist of a natural cave partially closed in by a stone wall. He was literally buried in the mountains, surrounded only by cliffs and stones and a frozen torrent, which rushed through the gorge. He has been in his cell for three years and intends to stay there for another two. Once a month food supplies are sent him from the monastery; but beyond this he never sees a human being. It is a genuine and I imagine a miserable hermitage in cold and barren mountains at 17,000 feet. Of course he will earn great merit by it and will be considered an especially saintly lama when he returns to monastic life. No doubt he regards our attempt to climb Mount Everest in much the same light as we look on his incarceration. Each to the other must seem futile and ridiculous; yet each in its own way earns merit, and each is no doubt of equal value, the gain being purely moral and spiritual and of little, if any, practical use.

…”

 Artist: Peter C. Vey. July 2000

The Old Man and The Sea

Artist: Paul Noth, The New Yorker, August 2017

What Is Whistler's Mother Doing?

मला जेम्स व्हीस्लर माहीत झाले द ग गोडसे यांच्या लेखामुळे. ह्या पोस्ट्स पहा : एक, दोन, तीन.

त्या   व्हीस्लर यांचे, १८७१ साली काढलेले हे प्रसिद्ध चित्र पहा.

 Whistler's Mother

courtesy: Wikipedia

काय करत आहेत त्या?

Artist: Garrett Price, The New Yorker,  Sept 3 1955

The Godfather@50

#TheGodfather50

Sonny Corleone, Tom Hagen, and others in the family learn of Brasi's demise by receiving a dead fish wrapped in Brasi's bulletproof vest, indicating he "sleeps with the fishes", meaning that Brasi's corpse was thrown into a body of water by Solozzo's and Tattaglia's men.

 

Artist: Lars Kenseth, The New Yorker, October 2018

चिरंजीवि, पण कोणासाठी?...What Do Immortals Say?

अश्वत्थामा बलिर्व्यासो हनुमांश्च विभीषणः। कृपः परशुरामश्च सप्तैते चिरंजीविनः॥ 

Artist: Hartley Lin, The New Yorker, January 2020

अढळ ध्रुवाचा ढळला तारा....Dhruvapada, Is it?

बा सी मर्ढेकर:
"… अढळ ध्रुवाचा ढळला तारा
सप्तर्षींचा चुकला प्रश्न;
..."

Sean Carroll, ‘The Big Picture. On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself’, 2016:

“…A friend of mine, a neuroscientist and biologist, can make individual cells young again. Scientists have developed techniques for taking stem cells in the adult human body, which have aged and taken on some more mature characteristics, and reverse-aging them until they are just like newborn stem cells.

There is a long road from cells to complete organisms. So I asked her, half-jokingly, whether we would someday be able to reverse-age human beings, and potentially keep them young forever.

“You and I are going to die someday,” she mused. “But if either of us has grandchildren, I wouldn’t be so sure.”

That’s thinking like a biologist. As a physicist, I know it doesn’t violate any laws of nature to imagine living beings lasting for millions or even billions of years, so I have no objection there. But eventually all of the stars will have exhausted their nuclear fuel, their cold remnants will fall into black holes, and those black holes will gradually evaporate into a thin gruel of elementary particles in a dark and empty universe. We won’t really live forever, no matter how clever biologists get to be…”

Wikipedia informs:

"...Pleased by his (Dhruva's) tapasya and by his stuti, Vishnu granted his wish and further decreed that the lad would attain Dhruvapada - the state where he would become a celestial body which would not even be touched by the Maha Pralaya, or the final cataclysm..."

courtesy: Amar Chitra Katha

Biman Nath, Frontline:

"...because of the precession of the earth’s axis, the positions of stars in relation to the earth slowly change with time. Since the axis points towards different spots at different times, what is North Star today would not remain so after thousands of years. In fact, after 14,000 years, the star Vega (Abhijit) that shines almost overhead on summer nights now will become the ‘north star’..."

Bombay to Goa@50

 #BombayToGoa50

बॉम्बे टू गोवा या सिनेमाला आज मार्च ३ २०२२ रोजी ५० वर्षे पूर्ण होत आहेत. 

हा सिनेमा मी अनेक वेळा पहिला आहे आणि प्रत्येकवेळी प्रचंड हसलो आहे पण ह्या सिनेमामुळे मला माझी ताईमावशी आठवते. सिनेमाचा कित्येक भाग ती करून दाखवत असे - विशेषतः ललिता पवार यांचा....आणि सिनेमापेक्षा जास्त करमणूक ते बघण्याने होत असे. 

 

Shakespeare, His Sonnets, and American Immigration Officers

Bertrand Russell: The Harm That Good Men Do，1926:

“...It is difficult to think of any instance of a poet who was 'good' at the times when he was writing good poetry. Dante was deported for subversive propaganda; Shakespeare, to judge by the Sonnets, would not have been allowed by American immigration officers to land in New York. It is of the essence of a 'good' man that he supports the Government; therefore, Milton was good during the reign of Cromwell, and bad before and after; but it was before and after that he wrote his poetry - in fact most of it was written after he had narrowly escaped hanging as a Bolshevik. Donne was virtuous after he became Dean of St Paul's, but all his poems were written before that time, and on account of them his appointment caused a scandal. Swinburne was wicked in his youth, when he wrote Songs Before Sunrise in praise of those who fought for freedom; he was virtuous in his old age, when he wrote savage attacks on the Boers for defending their liberty against wanton aggression. It is needless to multiply examples; enough has been said to suggest that the standards of virtue now prevalent are incompatible with the production of good poetry....”

  

“Oh. Wow. Another sonnet.”

Artist: Trevor Spaulding, The New Yorker, October 2015

“Oh. Wow. Another sonnet. Now, say goodbye to your H1B visa application."