Monday, February 27, 2023

पांढरा रंग आणि जवळ नदी असती तर...Ibrahim Rauza and The Taj Mahal

१९७४साली ज्यावेळी आमच्या शेजारी सौ शाराक्का जोशी, आमची आई, माझी बहीण आरती, माझा भाऊ अभिमन्यू "भैय्या" आणि मी मिरजेहून विजापूरला गेलो होतो त्यावेळी आम्हाला कमी वेळ होता, पुढे आलमट्टीला मुक्कामाला जायचे होते, अखिल भारतीय रेल्वे संपामुळे (जॉर्ज फर्नांडिस यांच्या नेतृत्वात) बसना अभूतपूर्व गर्दया होत्या, आणि म्हणून आम्ही फक्त गोलघुमट आणि मुलुखमैदान तोफ बघायला निवडली... 
 
फेब्रुवारी २६ २०१९ ला मात्र आमचा गाईड (परशुराम गोडी, बदामी) आंम्हाला प्रथम इब्राहिम रोजा, १६२७ (Ibrahim Rauza) ला घेऊन गेला आणि माझ्यामते विजयपुरातील ते सर्वोत्कृष्ट monument आहे..... 
 
साधेपणा (Spartan), भव्यता, उदात्तता, चिंतन करायला लावणारी स्मशान शांतता, बाहेर प्रखर उन्हाळा असताना येणारी गार वाऱ्याची झुळूक, जगातील एक सर्वोत्तम वास्तुकला हे सगळ अविस्मरणीय आहे...
त्यात राणी ताज सुलताना यांची पण कबर आहे आणि असे म्हणतात की ताजमहाल ला स्फूर्ती इब्राहिम रोजा पासून मिळाली आहे.... 
 
मी दोन्ही ठिकाणी वेळ घालवला आहे आणि माझ्यामते इब्राहिम रोजा ताज महाल पेक्षा श्रेष्ठ आहे.
आमच्या गाईडच्या मते पांढरा रंग आणि जवळ नदी असती तर ते म्हणण सर्वांना पटल असत!
 

 

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Mermaid and Mermaid



On the left: "How to Catch a Mermaid" series of advertisements for Western Fishing Line Company, 1959.

On the right: Peligro Serio"("Serious Danger"), Joaquín Xaudaró, 1932, Joaquín Xaudaró y Echau (1872–1933) was a Spanish cartoonist, illustrator, and caricaturist.
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Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Jane Eyre and Women in India & in the Civilisation of Islam

 

तुम्ही Jane Eyre, १८४७ वाचले किंवा पहिले असेल तर ह्या पोस्ट ची जास्त मजा येणार आहे...
 
त्या पुस्तकाचा आधार Christopher de Bellaigue यांनी त्यांच्या 'The Islamic Enlightenment - The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times', २०१७ सालच्या पुस्तकासाठी घेतला आहे. 
 
त्यांच्या introduction ह्या प्रकरणात ते सुरवातीस लिहतात: 
 
"... And yet, for Jane to see her scheme to its conclusion, she needs the help of certain features of modern England. Without the provincial newspaper, the post office and finally, when it comes to making the journey to Thornfield Hall, a wheeled conveyance trundling along one of the turnpike roads, safe enough for a woman to take on her own, she will be able to do nothing.
Perhaps more important than any of these things, Jane will need society to agree that she is sovereign over her own destiny – an unmarried woman free to climb aboard a post-chaise and go wherever she pleases, at no risk to her reputation.
 
Now I want to take up this picture of Georgian England and put it into a quite different setting. Imagine that the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Brontë’s novel has been transposed to a non-European situation. By the standards of nineteenth-century globalisation this new environment is not very distant – to get there merely involves crossing the Mediterranean. There one meets the close sibling of the Judaeo-Christian world inhabited by Jane, a civilisation built on the third and most recent of the Hebraic monotheisms and influenced by Greek patterns of thought.
 
This is the civilisation of Islam. How would this civilisation have dealt with Jane Eyre and the vistas of personal fulfilment preventing her from closing her eyes at night? Would it approve or wrinkle its nose? Would Islam ‘get’ Jane Eyre?..."
 
ह्या छोटाश्या अवतरणात अनेक गोष्टी आपल्या आहेत पण सर्वात महत्वाचे म्हणजे स्त्रियांची परिस्थिती. 
 
ह्याच गोष्टी १९व्या शतकातील भारताबद्दल सुद्धा तुलनात्मक रित्या लिहता येतील. पण इथे खोलवर जाणवते ज्या स्त्री आणि पुरुष समाजसुधारकांनी ह्या बाबत कार्य केले त्यांचे महत्व. 
 
१८व्या- १९व्या शतकाती कोणत्या जातीतील स्त्रिया हे सुद्धा मला कमी महत्वाचे वाटते*....स्त्री शिकली (अनके स्त्रिया शिकल्या), घराबाहेर पडली, गाव सोडून नोकरी पकडली, चारित्र्याला डाग न लागता प्रेम केले ... ह्या सगळ्या गोष्टी मला अतिशय महत्वाच्या वाटतात... 
 
एक खाजगी गोष्ट नमूद करतो- २३ वर्षांची माझी आई, STC -CPED पुण्यात शिकलेली, लग्न आणि एक नुकतेच मूल झालेली, बस मध्ये बसून, मुलाबरोबर एकटी, मिरजेला, १९६०च्या सुमारास, कन्याशाळेत नोकरीला गेली होती.. तिला मिरजेचा अनुभव (नोकरीतला चांगला होता) इतका सुखकारक नव्हता, पण तरी हे जगातील बहुतेक देशांपेक्षा चांगले होते हे कबुल केलेच पाहिजे
 
* Keshav Meshram केशव मेश्राम, a prominent Dalit and ex-president Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, has written about qualities of Shripad Krishna Kolhatkar’s literary work as well as his vision. Meshram quotes what Kolhatkar said after reading H N Apte ह ना आपटे’s “Pan Lakshat Kon Gheto पण लक्षात कोण घेतो”: ”If Mr. Apte could tell the story of misery of backward caste people (Dalits) the way he has told of (Brahmin) women, such a novel would be second in revolutionary qualities only to ’Uncle Tom’s Cabin’”. (“Shabdavrat" शब्दव्रत, by Keshav Meshram).
 

 

Saturday, February 18, 2023

टाइम ट्रॅव्हलर जातो जिवानिशी, टी-रेक्सची बाळ म्हणतात वातड

James Gleick:
“A pregnant moment in intellectual history occurs when H.G. Wells’s Time Traveller (“for so it will be convenient to speak of him”) gathers his friends around the drawing room fire to explain that everything they know about time is wrong. This after-dinner conversation marked something of a watershed, more telling than young Wells, who had never even published a book before The Time Machine, imagined just before the turn of the twentieth century.
What is time? Nothing but a fourth dimension, after length, breadth, and thickness. “Through a natural infirmity of the flesh,” the cheerful host explains, “we incline to overlook this fact.” The geometry taught in school needs revision. “Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked…. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”
“The world remains, always, a bundle of processes evolving in time,” says Smolin.
Logic and mathematics capture aspects of nature, but never the whole of nature. There are aspects of the real universe that will never be representable in mathematics. One of them is that in the real world it is always some particular moment.
In a coda he ruminates briefly on the problem of consciousness—“the really hard problem.” He doesn’t propose any answers, but I’m glad to see physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists continuing to wrestle with it, rather than leaving it to neurologists. Whatever consciousness will turn out to be, it’s not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the four-dimensional spacetime continuum. It is a dynamical system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, able also to create anticipation for the future.”

 Artist: Kim Warp, The New Yorker, 2018

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Monday, February 13, 2023

Friday, February 10, 2023

मृत्यू ला उतारा एकाच गोष्टीचा : विनोदाचा....Ram Patwardhan, Shyam Joshi, Abhimanyu Kulkarni

 

मौजेच्या कै राम पटवर्धनांनी माझ्या भावाला (अभिमन्यु कुलकर्णी) त्याच्या करिअर च्या सुरवातीला सांगितल की मृत्यू या विषयावर व्यंगचित्र काढू नका... (मला तो सल्ला बिलकुल पटला नव्हता आणि आज त्या विषयावर अनेक उत्तम कार्टून्स पाहून मी बरोबर होतो असे वाटते, मृत्यू ला उतारा एकाच गोष्टीचा : विनोदाचा).... 
 
सुदैवाने कै श्याम जोशींना असा सल्ला कोणी दिला नाही वा त्यांनी तो मानला नाही... आणि मृत्यु या विषयावर काही अप्रतिम , खोल , हलवून टाकणारी चित्रे काढली...(माझ्या भावाने सुद्धा, मला फार आवडणारी, अतिशय डार्क व्यंगचित्रे काढली आहेत.)
 
सौजन्य : श्याम जीशी यांच्या कार्याचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स
 


 

Monday, February 06, 2023

स्मित करणारी अपूर्वाई....Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

पूर्व आणि पश्चिमेतील मध्ययुगीन कालातील स्त्रीयां मध्ये फरक काय? याचे एकाच शब्दात उत्तर द्यायचे असेल तर मी म्हणेन Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (१७५५-१८४२) सारखी स्त्री चित्रकार पूर्वेमध्ये नसणे आणि फ्रान्स मध्ये असणे ....

स्वतः चे पोर्ट्रेट 
जोनाथन जोन्स या चित्राबद्दल लिहतात :
"Modelling herself after a portrait by Rubens that is also in the National Gallery, this artist, whose friendship with Marie Antoinette later forced her to flee France, gives herself all the conventional attributes of 18th-century beauty – but she’s holding the palette, she’s in control."

पण या मोठ्या कलावंत बाईं जरी फ्रेंच राज्यक्रांतीमुळे देशधडीला लागल्या असल्या तरी त्यांच्याकडे दुसऱ्या एका क्रांतीचे श्रेय जाते असा दावा करण्यात आला आहे. 

Kathryn Hughes , review of ‘The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris’ by Colin Jones , 2014 for The Guardian, October 2014:
“ In the autumn of 1787, gallery-going Parisians didn't know where to look. On the walls of the Louvre hung a self-portrait by the eminent artist Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun. In some ways the painting was deeply conventional. Mme Vigée Le Brun was dandling her infant daughter on her knee in a gesture that managed to invoke both the Virgin Mary and the new bourgeois ideal of "natural" motherhood. The problem was her mouth. It was smiling. Not just an enigmatic Mona Lisa smirk, but a proper one which showed her teeth. Was Vigée Le Brun mad, a slut or some kind of wild revolutionary? The only thing to do was rush past, and pretend you hadn't seen.
In this compelling Cheshire cat of a book, Colin Jones charts the moment in the mid-18th century when Paris learned to smile. Until that point, the court, tucked away at Versailles, had insisted that everyone kept a straight face. This was partly because France's most privileged mouths had been spoiled by too much sugar, and no one wanted their black stumps flashed to infinity in the Hall of Mirrors. But it was also because smiling in general risked making you look either plebeian or insane....”


Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie, 1786
Courtesy: Wikipedia
 

जो अमेरिकेत गेल्यावर माझ्या सारखा भारतीयाला दुकानात , बाहेर 'कारण नसताना' तिऱ्हाईताकडे बघून स्मित करणारी माणसे बघून जो धक्का बसतो त्याची सुरवात कदाचित तेंव्हा झाली...

"... Her father was a painter; she showed much early promise and made the right connections (her husband being an art dealer); by 23 she had painted her first picture of Marie Antoinette, for whom she became the portraitist of choice. She was very accomplished, excellent at flesh and all the varieties of material that covered it: the muslin and lace, the satins and silks, the straw hats and the flowers that lodged in them; she was good at and with children. She was also very professional, knowing how to disguise physical fault and accentuate any hint of beauty; she knew the most winning relationship between parted lips and visible teeth. She pleased her sitters; her sitters pleased her. She was expert at a kind of formal informality...."  (italics mine)


Isabella Teotochi Marini, May-June 1792