Love In Tokyo was Released in 1966!...Sayonara Sayonara Babies

 In Japan, there was a 25% dip in births in 1966 as shown in the graph below

आचार्य अत्रे यांचा अप्टन सिंक्लेर...Has India Produced Her Own Upton Sinclair?

David Denby, The New Yorker, 2006:

"A hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair, the muckraker and socialist, brought out “The Jungle,” a sensationally grim exposé of the noisome squalors and dangers of the meatpacking industry. Dedicated to “the workingmen of America,” the book became an overnight best-seller. At the White House, Theodore Roosevelt, who had watched soldiers die from eating rotten meat during the Spanish-American War, wrote a three-page appreciation and critique of the novel, and sent it to Sinclair with an invitation to visit him. (Those were the days.) “The Jungle” played a major role in pushing forward the Pure Food and Drug Act, which Roosevelt had long favored, and which was passed in June of 1906, marking a major expansion of federal regulatory power. The book’s influence hit the dinner table as well: after a couple of years, meat consumption declined, and it was widely believed that Sinclair’s book was the cause. By common consent among literary historians, only one American novel, before or since—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—has had so powerful an influence on practical affairs...."

अप्टन सिंक्लेर यांच्या एकाही पुस्तकाचा अनुवाद मराठीत झाला आहे का हे मला माहित नाही. 

मी त्यांचे नाव क्वचितच मराठी लेखनात पाहिले आहे. त्यामुळे आचार्य अत्र्यांचा  १९६३ सालचा "अप्टन सिंक्लेर" हा प्रदीर्घ लेख वाचून आश्चर्य वाटले . (पहा 'आषाढस्य प्रथम दिवसे: 'मराठा' तील अग्रलेख', पृष्ठ ३२६-३३३, १९६९-२०२२).

अत्रे  सिंक्लेर.यांच्या गाजलेल्या जंगल, १९०६  या कांदंबरीचे परीक्षण विस्ताराने करतात. अशा कादंबऱ्या मराठीत  किंवा  भारतीय भारतीय भाषेत निर्माण झाल्या का, असा प्रश्न मला पडला. 

उदाहरणार्थ भोपाळच्या युनियन कार्बाइड किंवा अशा अनेक  कंपन्यांवर जंगल सारखी कांदबरी निर्माण झाली असती तर तिथली भयानक दुर्घटना टळली असती का?  आजही भारतात अनेक केमिकल कंपन्या आहेत....

अत्र्यांच्या लेखातील एक पान पहा :

Eric Schlosser writes in his "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal":

"...The working conditions in these meatpacking plants were brutal. In The Jungle (1906) Upton Sinclair described a litany of horrors: severe back and shoulder injuries, lacerations, amputations, exposure to dangerous chemicals, and memorably, a workplace accident in which a man fell into a vat and got turned into lard. The plant kept running, and the lard was sold to unsuspecting consumers. Human beings, Sinclair argued, had been made "cogs in the great packing machine," easily replaced and entirely disposable. President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an independent investigation of The Jungle's sensational details. The accuracy of the book was confirmed by federal investigators, who found that Chicago's meatpacking workers labored "under conditions that are entirely unnecessary and unpardonable, and which are a constant menace not only to their own health, but to the health of those who use the food products prepared by them."..."

He further says though:

"...Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1981) unfortunately remains the essential starting point for an understanding of America's meatpacking industry today. Nearly a century after the book's publication, many of the descriptive passages still ring true. Sinclair's prescription for reform, however—his call for a centralized, socialized, highly industrialized agriculture—shows how even the best of intentions can lead to disaster...."

 Upton Sinclair by Edward Sorel , The New Yorker, 2006

When there were not so many Superheroes Flying Around....

 Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, who initiated Marvel’s expansion, has said the franchise can return to its former glory by slowing the pace of production. “I’ve always felt that quantity can be actually a negative when it comes to quality. And I think that’s exactly what happened. We lost some focus.” He, and Marvel’s many fans, will be holding out for the heroes.

(The Economist, January 11 2024)

When there were not so many superheroes flying around....

William Steig cover illustration for Valentine's Day, 1964 for The New Yorker

बा. सी. मर्ढेकरांवर समर्थ रामदासांच्या बरोबरीने सर्वात जास्त प्रभाव टाकणारा कलावंत... W H Auden's Face... What Must His Balls Look Like

 बा. सी. मर्ढेकरांवर समर्थ रामदासांच्या बरोबरीने सर्वात जास्त प्रभाव टाकणारा कलावंत... ऑडेन ...

Alan Bennett, LRB, May 1985:

"...There will be other memoirs. There are currently at least three published in America that haven’t yet appeared here. In one of them, Auden: An American Friendship by Charles Miller, the peculiar gouging of his face is put down to ‘a medical condition known as the Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome, which also affected Racine’. The skin seemed to divide up into clints, like the limestone Auden praised, the best remark about that coming, I think, from David Hockney. Auden sat to Hockney, who after tracing those innumerable lines remarked: ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like.’ At this rate, it can only be a matter of time before we are told that too."

 

The Literary Art, should be Sublimely Difficult—a Current From Beyond that Burns Out the Wire...The Great Gatsby@100

John Updike, ‘This Side of Coherence’, “More Matter: Essays and Criticism”, 1999: 

“…If Hemingway was the master of danger abroad, purposefully experienced in foreign wars and Spanish bullfights and African safaris,Fitzgerald flattered our national consciousness with a sense of domestic danger, of the failure and rebuke that haunt every aspiration, of youthful overreaching swiftly followed by adult collapse, of a native romanticism courting the vengeance of blind destiny—a pattern illustrated in his one well-designed novel, The Great Gatsby….

…The early death of a writer, besides shortening by a few unwritten volumes the shelves of books that weigh on our consciences, confirms our instinct that art, especially the literary art, should be sublimely difficult—a current from beyond that burns out the wire….”

Jeffrey Meyers , WSJ, April 4 2025:

“…“The Great Gatsby” brilliantly expresses major themes of American literature: the idealism and morality of the country’s Midwest (where most of the characters originate and where Nick returns at the end of the novel) in contrast to the disillusionment and corruption of the East (where the novel takes place); the frontier myth of the self-made man. It also portrays the attempt to escape the materialistic present and recapture the innocent past; the predatory power of rich and beautiful women; the limited possibilities of love in the modern world; the heightened sensitivity to the promises of life; the doomed attempt to sustain illusions and recapture the American dream.”

 

 

Gatsby generated by ChatGPT for me

"Here it is—your stylized Great Gatsby moment, captured like a dreamy oil painting. Gatsby stands poised in the golden glow of his mansion, surrounded by the shimmer and swirl of a 1920s party, with Daisy nearby, both of them caught in that fragile moment between longing and illusion."

कालपहाड तोफ आणि बाबुराव अर्नाळकरांचा काळापहाड...Baburao Arnalkar and Kalapahad of Peshwa Period

मराठा सैन्याच्या असीरगड किल्ल्यातील १७७० सालच्या तोफा 

 ह्यातील एका तोफेचे नाव पहा: कालपहाड , 

मला बाबुराव अर्नाळकरांच्या काळापहाड ची आठवण झाली ... 

आणि सध्या उपलब्ध असलेल्या पुस्तकाचे मुखपृष्ठ पाहून तर खूपच करमणूक झाली... 

 

अपयशांचे संग्रहालय ...The Failure Museum

Julian Baggini on Bertrand Russell: 

"If we look to the full completion of goals and ambitions as the mark of success, Russell’s life was a heroic failure. But if achievement means living a life according to your passions and values, Russell’s life was a glorious success.

Howard Jacobson:  

"...But you have to see failure as an opportunity. I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success. That might be an inflated way of putting it, but failures are nothing if not grandiose. If the world doesn't value us, we won't value the world. We seek solace in books, in solitary and sometimes fantastical thinking, in doing with words what boys who please their fathers do with balls. We look down on what our fellows like, and make a point of liking what our fellows don't. We become special by virtue of not being special enough. I doubt many writers were made any other way..."

Will Self:

"...No, this is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this – nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously "creative". On the contrary, it often occurs to me that since what successes I do manage are both experienced and felt entirely in solitude, there must be many others who are the same as me: people for whom life is a process to be experienced, not an object to be coveted. There may be, as Bob Dylan says, no success like failure, but far from failure being no success at all, in its very visceral intensity, it is perhaps the only success there is..."

 In WSJ dated July 19 2024, I saw an article titled "This Silicon Valley Investor Is Building a Shrine to Failure":

 "As a venture capitalist based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Sean Jacobsohn is in the business of hunting for success. And he recently did something that would have sounded completely nuts almost anywhere else on the planet.

He decided to build his own personal monument to failure...

...Jacobsohn believes there is a lesson to be drawn from every regrettable object in his collection. As he built the Failure Museum, he began to think more about the causes of business failures, and he developed his own framework to understand why most startups go belly-up. He calls his theory the Six Forces of Failure.

The list: bad product-market fit, shaky finances, ignoring customer feedback, tough competition, poor timing and people—pushover boards, ineffective management, founders who are frauds.

His main takeaway is that failure is an integral, too easily ignored element of success. Anyone who wants to get something right should be aware of the many ways that it could go really, really wrong.

In the tech capital of the world, someone who hasn’t failed probably hasn’t been very successful. As it happens, there is no place more appropriate for a shrine to failure than Silicon Valley, which not only accepts but almost encourages it. When he looks at startup founders who have never tasted failure, Jacobsohn sees entrepreneurs who have never taken meaningful risks..."

 Mattel doll Allan, NOT Barbie or Ken