Necessary Looking

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,500+ 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"... श्रीमंत बाळासाहेब पंतप्रतिनिधी : "बहुश्रुतता असल्याशिवाय सुसंस्कृतता नाही"

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."

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Indian Growth Story is Consumption driven

Local stock market pundits often talk about this. Indian growth story is based on local consumption and not based as much on export as say China.

I was brought up in an era of shortages. Shortages of all kinds. Cement, Kerosene, Rice, Sugar, Tires, what-have-you. We were taught frugality. Conspicuous consumption was crime. Leaving food on plate was crime. Eating in restaurant was crime. Too many clothes. And so on........

Now, there is a new spin on all this.

Consume more to help the economy. Consume more to generate jobs.

Therefore, every time anything is robbed in front of us, our only hope is: Not that criminals will be brought to the justice but loot will be spent locally!

Artist : Richard Decker The New Yorker 2 May 1959

If you can't beat them.......

There is this famous Americanism: If you can’t beat them, join them.

We practise it many times. Once we become insiders, we change our colours.

But you may be exasperated if you can do neither.

Artist : Richard Decker The New Yorker 21 December 1957

Crummy Childhood

Graham Greene:

“Everything that can happen to a person, I think, is determined in the first sixteen years of his life”

Therefore, she is right. He got to write about what he knows best. His first sixteen years- crummy childhood!

Artist : Richard Decker The New Yorker

Feeling a draft

Happiness is elusive.

"Happiness eludes the rendezvous we fix, arrives when we least expect it, disappears when we think we have it in hand. In other words, those people who are unhappy about not being happy forget that happiness has a knack for indirection, coming in the middle of the most ordinary day or disappearing at the height of one’s career. It is a matter of luck, almost of grace, a visitor who enters the house unexpectedly and vanishes on tiptoe." ("Another Last Chance to Change Your Life" By PASCAL BRUCKNER, NYT Jan 1 2007)

Poet Jacques Prévert says: "I recognize happiness by the sound it makes when it leaves".

My wife's aunt, a wealthy doctor in US, says what she misses most in US is the draft dry lands of India get on a summer evening. Whenever I have lived outside western Maharashtra- Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Doom Dooma (Assam), Calcutta- I too have missed it dearly.

Coming in the middle of the most ordinary day, bringing along happiness and .............

Artist : Richard Decker Publication: The New Yorker 22 November 1958

The crowd loves a good loser. Does it?

India may or may not progress any further in the world cup after losing to Sri Lanka.

However, frenzy among Indian cricket followers and media before, during and after India's matches is quite scary. All in the name of the nation. Thank our luck there is no actual war being fought with Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka.

I am increasingly thinking that rise of nationalism may be the biggest problem of this century on Indian subcontinent. Ahead of poverty.

I wonder if we can ever solve problems of river water sharing among Indian states in such a charged atmosphere.

Artist: Richard Decker The New Yorker 26 Feb 1955

shouting from the left and the right as if this were real news and real information

I think media is getting a bigger problem by the day. Electronic media is the worst. Print media is close second.

Much celebrated hero-reporter of "Watergate" scandal Carl Bernstein (played by DUSTIN HOFFMAN in "All the President's Men" ) has this to say (Feb 2006) :

"But I think the really important trends in journalism in the last 25 years are basically the dumbing down of media what I called in a cover piece for The New Republic in 1990 the triumph of idiot culture, manufactured controversy, sensationalism, shouting from the left and the right as if this were real news and real information.In this cacophony truth, the best obtainable version of the truth, which is really what reporting is that snapshot at a given moment of where an event and the facts stand when reporting is good that's getting lost in this noise and, as Bob says, in this rush to get stuff out. Who the hell knows what's right and what's right and what's fact and what's context and what's not? And if you -- it's particularly egregious on television with all due respect and on the Internet."

Artist : Garrett Price The New Yorker 15 Dec 1945

Thursday, March 22, 2007

a star to stay our minds on- Chekov

Vijay Padalkar- scholar of Chekov's work and author of much acclaimed Marathi book 'kavadase pakadanaara kalaavant' - tells me:
'
Robert Frost wrote in one of his poems;

"We may choose something like a star/To stay our minds on and be staid"

I have chosen Chekov.'

He is not alone.

Artist : Sidney Harris Publication: The New Yorker 8 April 1985

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Recurring Drone

For last several years, middle class Maharashtrian family functions tend to have following topics for discussion:

1. I or some-one-I-know is going to US to attend to a child birth
2. My or some-one-I-know’s son / daughter is coming to India from US/Europe/ Middle-east/ Far East on a vacation
3. I or some-one-I-know is buying a new car / house / plot of land..
4. Value of my or some-one-I-know’s real estate/ stocks has doubled in last 12 months.
5. Traffic jams / Restaurant food
6. One day Cricket
7. the latest SRK / Amitabh Bachhan starrer / TV sitcom
8. salary of mine or some-one-I-know
9. practice of religion / horoscope, moon signs
10. sloganeering: “with pride I say I am an Indian / Hindu / Marathi / Brahmin / Maratha etc.”

Artist : Bruce Erik Kaplan The Publication: The New yorker 17 Jan 1994

Gold coins don’t make an age golden

D D Kosambi: "Gold coins don’t make an age golden"

Artist : Richard Decker Publication: The New Yorker 27 June 1959

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Where do you suppose Bhau Padhye learned such terrible words?

“SACRED GAMES” of Vikram Chandra has received a lot of praise across the world.

Donald Morrison in his review for FT on Sept 29, 2006 says:

’……… the real star of Sacred Games is Mumbai, described with the fond precision of Joyce’s Dublin - from Colaba to Bandra, gang-ridden Dongri to graceful Marine Drive….

Chandra gets the sounds and smells, as well as Mumbai’s mix of smugness and longing, rural atavism and mobile-phone modernity, filmi (film music) glitz and gangster strut. He also evokes the close links between those last two realms, in an almost painfully hilarious account of Gaitonde’s attempt to produce a Bollywood movie.

For added authenticity, Chandra sprinkles the pages with enough Hindi, Urdu and Marathi to fill a dictionary. It helps to know your blenchods from your maderchods, your lakhs from your crores. He never offers translations - or italics - yet clarity prevails. When one of Gaitonde’s girlfriends says: “Give a boy a ghoda, doesn’t make him smart. Just makes him a chutya with a gun,” you get the picture.’

In Bhau Padhye, Mumbai had her best chronicler of all time.

Marathi speaking people often say- in day to day life they speak Tukaram’s (17th century saint-poet) Marathi. Similarly, a lot of Bambaiyya Hindi / Marathi is deeply influenced by Bhau Padhye’s Marathi. Or is it the other way round?!

Literary stalwarts like Durga Bhagwat दुर्गा भागवत, Vijay Tendulkar, Bhalchandra Nemade and Dilip Chitre have all called Bhau Padhye world-class artist. Quite rightly so.

Unfortunately, Bhau’s royalty income from his entire life’s work would never equal even a fraction of Chandra’s advance (US$ 1 million) for this single book!

Artist: Helen E. Hokinson The New Yorker 9 June 1945