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."
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
इसवी सन कवायत आणि मर्ढेकरांची कविता ...My Mardhekar's Poetry Journey from 1977
Friday, August 15, 2025
१९४७ चा ओसंडून वाहणारा आशावाद आणि १९५६ चे रात्रभर पाणी शोधायला लावणारे वास्तव ...Dinanath Dalal and Raj Kapoor
१९४७ मधील या मुखपृष्ठातील तेजस्वी, ओसंडून वाहणारा उत्साह जणू "नवा दिवस, नवे जीवन" असा संदेश देतो, पण १९५० च्या दशकातल्या वास्तवाने तो उत्साह किती पटकन कोमेजला हे "जागते रहो" (१९५६) मध्ये तीव्रतेने जाणवते.
जिथे दलाल यांच्या नायिकेच्या भोवती निसर्ग आणि समाजाचा एकोप्याचा उत्सव आहे, तिथे १९५० च्या दशकात शहरांत अनोळखी माणसाविषयी वैर, दारं बंद, मनं बंद अशी अवस्था होते.
१९४७ चं मुखपृष्ठ बघताना असं वाटतं — "आपल्याला फक्त स्वातंत्र्य मिळालं की बाकी सगळं आपोआप सुधारेल."
पण १९५६ मध्ये वास्तव हे सांगतं — "स्वातंत्र्याच्या पुढची लढाई घराघरात, रस्त्यांवर, मनामनांत आहे, आणि ती फार अवघड आहे."
१९४७ च्या ओसंडत्या हंड्यापासून १९५६ च्या नरडं कोरड पडलेल्या, गरीब, बहुदा बिहारी, माणसाची कोलकता येथील एका भद्र लोकांच्या सोसायटीत पाण्याच्या एका घोटासाठी झालेली तडफड , त्याने एका रात्रीत बघितलेले वास्तव म्हणजे केवळ प्रतिमांचा बदल नाही; तो भारतीय शहरी संस्कृतीच्या अपेक्षा आणि वास्तव यांच्यातील अंतराचं जिवंत चित्रण आहे. एकेकाळी धबधब्यासारखी वाहणारी आशा — फक्त नऊ वर्षांत — कोरडी झाली.
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
ह ना आपटेंना काफ्का सारखे वर्ग सोडून जाणे जमले नसते...One Reason Why H N Apte Could Not Be Like Kafka
विलास सारंग म्हणतात मराठीतील आघाडीच्या कादंबरीकारांनी (युरोपियन लेखक आणि बंकीम चंद्र यांचा) वास्तव वाद सोडून काफ्का सारखे लिखाण का केले नाही ?
"…मला कधी वाटतं, १८९० साली हरिभाऊनी जरा विचार केला असता: 'आपण कशाला ब्रिटीश वाङमयाचं शेपूट पकडून राहायचं?' आपलं कथाकथन विकसित करायचं. एवढं काही कठीण नाही. काफ्काच्या 'मॅटॅमॉर्फसिसचं पहिल वाक्य घ्या. 'पंचतंत्रातल्या एखाद्या गोष्टीत ते फिट बसलं असतं. एवढी फँट्सी झाली. उरलेल्या कथेत वास्तववाद आहेच…इ. स. १९०० पासून आजवर पाश्च्यात्यांनी आपल्या वाङमयाकडे ढुंकून बघितलेलं आहे का? त्यांना आपल्या कथासाहित्यात वेगळ, नवीन काही आढळल नाही … "
('लिहित्या लेखकाचं वाचन', 2011)
मला त्याचे काही प्रमाणात उत्तर काफ्का यांच्या नवीन पुस्तकात मिळाले....लेखक आणि पुस्तक Karolina Watroba's "Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka"...
पहिल्यांदा पाहू काफ्का यांचे लेखन वास्तववादी लेखनाहून वेगळे कसे वेगळे कसे?
"... But for many readers, like those reading The Metamorphosis to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic, the feeling of disorientation becomes a crucial part of their experience of the text. These are not reassuring stories that order the chaos of human life into coherent plots which either end well or at least follow an intelligible chain of cause and effect. Instead, Kafka’s tales evoke such traditional narrative structures of understanding, but fill them in with strange, chaotic, disorienting events that are difficult to make sense of, and in this way vindicate the anxiety of real life, which rarely lives up to the coherence of realist literature...."
आता पाहू हरिभाऊ कोणत्या काळात, कुठे लेखन करत होते...
“...One reason why Kafka became Kafka is that he happened to be
born in the margins of the German-speaking world, in the provinces of a
decaying, impotent empire which would disappear from the map during his
lifetime, rather than in the powerful German Empire intent on rivalling
Europe’s most belligerent colonial nations....
…One consequence of this dynamic was that the literary education he received at school tended towards the conservative and the nationalistic. In his written school-leaving exam in German, rather than holding forth about any literary works, Kafka had to describe the advantages of Austria’s geopolitical situation: that was the kind of topic that his school education was supposed to teach him about. But literature was covered in the curriculum too, and here Austrian authors were not exactly absent, but decidedly less emphasised than the greats of the traditional German national canon: Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and Kleist.
But let us stop and consider what sort of nation this canon in fact represented. Lessing grew up at the edge of Lusatia, a region which today is split between Germany and Poland and has long been inhabited by Sorbs, a Slavic ethnic group with its own distinctive linguistic and cultural identity. He wrote his famous aesthetic treatise Laocoön while working in Breslau – now Wrocław in Poland, but over the centuries variously under Polish, Czech, Habsburg, Prussian and German rule. Kleist was born and studied in Frankfurt an der Oder, a city whose eastern part became part of Poland after 1945, the river in its name now serving as the national border. Like Lessing and Kleist, Goethe and Schiller wrote their works decades before the unification of Germany in 1871, which simply did not exist as a nation state for most of European history, even if national sentiments were present in some form in the writing of these authors. Strategically selected and appropriately interpreted works of these men were later used to construct a canon that was meant to carefully delineate and police the boundaries between the German nation and its ‘Others’, such as Jews and Slavs, even – or especially – in the face of their close proximity.
No wonder that Kafka found it difficult to embrace the label of an ‘urdeutsch’ writer, as seen in his letter to Bauer. The focus of his German lessons at school was also on poetry and drama, not prose, which had long been seen as an inferior literary mode – but that was precisely the form that he adopted as his. This disconnect between German literature as it was taught to him and as he practised it himself continued at university. Kafka attended lectures by August Sauer, who struck chauvinistic tones in an attempt to assert the superiority of German literature and culture over its Czech, or more generically ‘Slavic’ counterpart. Kafka could not stand it and stopped attending the lectures…”
ज्यावेळी भारतीय स्वातंत्र्याची चळवळ लोकमान्य टिळक यांच्या सारख्या लेखक-नेत्या मुळे चांगलीच तापली होती , तत्कालीन भारतीय साहित्य भारताची पारंपारिक महानता सांगत होते, भारतीय माणसाला वीरश्री देत होते, बंडखोरी करायला सांगत होते, क्रांतिकारी करत होते... ते माणसाला एका रात्रीत किडा कसले करणार...
ह ना आपटेंना काफ्का सारखे वर्ग सोडून जाणे जमले नसते !
Sunday, August 10, 2025
H H Asquith, Edwin Montagu of India and Venetia Stanley ...Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions
David Hume: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions."
Robert Harris , author of 'Precipice' , 2024 to NYT Jan 2025:
"...H.H. Asquith, the prime minister, wrote 560 letters to Venetia, most of them in 1914 and 1915: She kept them all. I calculate she must have written him at least 300 in reply: He destroyed the lot. What a novelist can do and a historian can’t is invent. The moment I started to imagine what she might have written back to him, she started to come alive in my mind — clever, funny, unconventional...Her granddaughter let me see the letters she had written to other people. That helped to give me her voice. And from the letters he wrote to her, I could deduce the kinds of things she had said. I think she wrote quite passionately to him. It was a love affair completely unlike any other, between the leader of what was still, arguably, the most powerful country in the world, and a clever young woman less than half his age..."
Herbert Henry Asquith came to power as the Prime Minister of UK in May 1908.
Herbert Asquith (seated left) with Lord and Lady Allenby.
Carrier-pigeon paranoia was part of the German spy scare that gripped Britain during the First World War
Edwin Montagu served under Asquith as Under-Secretary of State for India from 1910-1914. He was primarily responsible for the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms which led to the Government of India Act 1919, committing the British to the eventual evolution of India towards dominion status.
But interestingly when married Asquith, 60, his daughter and her close friend Venetia Stanley, 25 and Montagu, 33 were on a holiday in Italy in 1912, PM and his Under-Secretary of State for India fell in love with Venetia!
Robert Harris writes about the book "Letters to Venetia Stanley" By H.H. Asquith, edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock (1982) in WSJ December 14 2024:
"In August 1948, Judy Montagu, the daughter of a recently deceased English aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, was sorting through her mother’s effects when she came across more than 500 letters written by the then-prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, mostly in 1914-15. He was in his sixties; Stanley was in her twenties. The letters were not only startlingly passionate (“My darling… . Have I told you how much I love you? No? Just multiply the stars by the sands”). They were packed with secret information: intelligence estimates, statistics on armaments production, operational plans on the Western Front, detailed accounts of cabinet meetings. Interspersed among Asquith’s notes to Stanley were letters from Winston Churchill, Herbert Kitchener (the secretary of state for war), Queen Mary, John French (the commander of the British army in France), and decrypted ambassadorial telegrams, all of which Asquith had sent through the ordinary post. Often, he wrote to Stanley three times a day. It is the most startling political archive to come to light in the past 100 years. He was distraught when Stanley ended their affair in May 1915 (“This breaks my heart”). Less than a week later, Asquith dissolved his government—the last Liberal administration in British history."
Also see Simon Heffer's 'The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914'.
Venetia Stanley, who married Montagu, in 1914