अश्वमेध...Yudhisthira, Nietzsche and Schrödinger

Sue Prideaux :

“…It is not clear what exactly happened on the morning of 3 January 1889. The story is they saw him as usual leaving Davide Fino’s corner house on the Piazza Carlo Alberto. They were used to the sad and solitary figure wrapped in thought, often on his way to the bookshop, where he was known to sit for hours with the book pressed very close to his face, reading but never making a purchase. The piazza was full of tired old horses drooping between the traces of carts and cabs waiting for fares: miserable jut-ribbed nags being tormented into some semblance of work by their masters. On seeing a cabbie mercilessly beating his horse, Nietzsche broke down. Overwhelmed by compassion, sobbing at the sight of it, he threw his arms protectively around the horse’s neck, and collapsed. Or so they said. Crises are so quickly come and gone. Eyewitnesses see so many different truths….”

(‘THE CAVE MINOTAUR ·’, “I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche”, 2018)

Benjamín Labatut :

“…The streets of Vienna filled with mutilated soldiers who had brought back with them the spectres of the battlefield; their nerves, damaged by gas in the trenches, twisted their faces into ghoulish grimaces, spasms shook their muscles, rattling the medals that hung from their tattered uniforms and making them chime like the bells in a leper colony. Control of the population was left in the hands of an army whose soldiers were as weak and famished as those they were meant to govern; fat white maggots infested their rations of meat, less than a hundred grams per person per day. When the troops distributed what little foodstuffs arrived in their country from Germany, total chaos ensued: during one of the disturbances, Schrödinger watched the mob knock a policeman from his horse. In five minutes, the beast was dismembered by a hundred women, who flocked around the cadaver to tear away the very last strips of its flesh….”

(“When We Cease to Understand the World”, 2020)

Ashwamedha yagna of Yudhisthira By Mughal artist - From Birla Razmnama (courtesy: Wikipedia)

हंबरडा फोडी आर्त महात्मा जेव्हां...What Happened in Chauri Chaura on February 4, 1922 and in 1947-48?

भा रा तांबे :

"वाटले नाथ हो! तुम्ही उतरला खाली 

दे असहकरिता हाक तुम्हा ज्या काळी  ।।धृ ।।

हंबरडा फोडी आर्त महात्मा जेव्हां 

त्या यज्ञे द्रवुनी गमे धावला देवा!

फोडिली आर्त किंकाळी ।।१।।

गरिबास्तव धरली तुम्ही कांबळी काठी 

गुरगुरला होउनि पशुहि संकटापाठीं 

ती वेळ वाटली आली ।।२।।"

(माधव जूलियन यांच्या पत्नी श्री लीलाबाई पटवर्धन लिखित 'आमची अकरा वर्षे', १९४५ ह्या पुस्तकाच्या १९९४ सालच्या दुसऱ्या आवृत्तीच्या प्रस्तावनेंत गोपीनाथ तळवलकरांनी ही कविता चौरीचौराला १९२२ सालच्या घटनेबद्दल लिहली आहे असा उल्लेख केला आहे.)

Joseph Lelyveld, 'Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India', 2011:

"...What happened in Chauri Chaura on February 5, 1922, fulfilled his worst fears. An angry crowd of roughly two thousand surrounded a small rural police station after having been fired on by a police detachment, which had then withdrawn and taken cover inside the building. The frustrated crowd, now a mob, soon set it ablaze. Driven out, policemen were hacked to death or thrown back into the flames; in all, twenty-two of them had been slaughtered with their assailants, so it was later said, shouting noncooperation catch-cries, including “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai”—“Glory to Mahatma Gandhi.”

By Gandhi’s standards, which derived from the Hindu value of ahimsa, or nonviolence, Chauri Chaura stood out as an abysmal, even frightening defeat. In his eyes, it showed that the country at large and the national movement in particular had never truly grasped the values of satyagraha. So, with more than fifteen thousand followers already in jail, he abruptly called a halt to civil disobedience, suspending it for more than ten months, until the end of 1922. It was only because he insisted on suspending the campaign that Congress leaders who’d not yet gone to jail went along with his decision. “I got the votes because I was Gandhi and not because people were convinced,” he wrote with the self-lacerating candor he could be relied on to display in his lowest moments. As “penance” for the fact that “murders were committed in my name,” he then fasted for five days.

Among those who expressed disappointment over the retreat were some, both Muslim and Hindu, who well understood that Gandhi was responding to what he deemed a moral imperative. If only they had a less exemplary, less principled leader, they seemed to say. “Our defeat is in proportion to the greatness of our leader” was the way Lajpat Rai, a Hindu and former Congress president, wryly put it. “To me,” said Maulana Abdul Bari, the leading Muslim in the North Indian center of Lucknow, “Gandhi is like a paralytic whose limbs are not in his control but whose mind is still active.” Neither statement was without a tinge of admiration, but each was more disillusioned than admiring. Gandhi had offered them satyagraha as a weapon; now, as the “expert in the satyagraha business,” he was yanking it back.

With his usual industriousness, Gandhi churned out a series of letters and articles explaining his stand to key followers and the nation at large, promising that the suspension would not be permanent, that civil disobedience would eventually be resumed and swaraj achieved, if not in a year. The clearest statement of his position turned into a prophecy. No one, Gandhi included, could have realized that what he had to say in 1922 would accurately depict the circumstances of India’s independence, still a quarter of a century in the future, or his own ambivalent reaction to its achievement. “I personally can never be a party to a movement half-violent and half non-violent,” he said, “even though it may result in the attainment of so-called swaraj, for it will not be real swaraj as I have conceived it.”..."

  courtesy: The Hindu

एकशिंग्या सिंधू संस्कृतीमधील बागेत....James Thurber, Satyajit Ray and The Indus Valley Civilisation

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Modesty of History”:

“A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.” 

जेम्स थर्बर या महान कलावंताने 'The Unicorn in the Garden' या नावाची गोष्ट द न्यू यॉर्कर मध्ये १९३९ मध्ये प्रसिद्ध केली. त्याची नंतर ऍनिमेशन फिल्म झाली: १९५३.

युनिकॉर्न हे नाव सिंधू संस्कृतीशी निगडीत आहे...

“...A puzzling, one-horned animal is very frequently depicted on the seals (over 60 per cent of the Mohenjo-daro seals and around 46 per cent of the Harappan), and is also modelled in several one-horned terracotta figurines (from Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Chanhu-daro). It is generally termed a ‘unicorn’, a creature legendarily associated with India by ancient Greek writers; its zoological identity, if it actually existed, is much debated....” (Andrew Robinson , ‘The Indus: lost civilizations’, 2015)

शिवाय सत्यजित रे यांचा ह्या सगळ्याशी संबंध असा:

 “...About the aesthetic quality of the Indus seals there is virtual unanimity. Wheeler’s admiration has already been mentioned. Marshall considered the best seals to be ‘distinguished by a breadth of treatment and a feeling for line and plastic form that has rarely been surpassed in glyptic art’. Piggott – no admirer of Indus aesthetics, as we know – nonetheless conceded that the seals were ‘frequently carved with a brilliant sureness of touch’. Independent India’s great artist Satyajit Ray – a graphic designer and illustrator who became a writer and celebrated film director – was so enchanted by the seals that he wrote a short story inspired by the ‘unicorn’. Speaking for myself, I first became interested in the Indus civilization after seeing its seals...” (ibid)

(Ray’s  ‘Ek Shringo Abhijan’, adventure of Professor Shonku:

“Shonku goes to Tibet, to find out about a Unicorn which is reported to be seen there. In the adventure, Shonku discovers a place where everybody's dreams come true... a Utopia.”)

(बहुदा) पत्नी, उठवले गेल्याबद्दल प्रचंड चिडलेली : "एकशिंग्या हा पौराणिक (mythical) प्राणी आहे"