Watch Your Expression While Talking to Pet Donkey!

On October 4, 2007, Asian Age quoted from Maneka Gandhi’s speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the Donkey Sanctuary in India on January 12, 2000.

She said: “…But, I happen to have a special place in my heart for the donkey. Just look how beautiful his eyes are. You can learn many social skills from him. Have you noticed that a donkey is never a loner? Even a child-donkey is able to make many friends. He shares his secrets with his friends. He cries if you separate him from them. When we mistreat him and overload him for hauling dirt and hundreds of other materials, he is only able to complain to his friends. The friends console him and assure him that there are better days ahead.”

It’s very moving like many of her other writings on the subject of animals.

I too find donkeys very interesting. But I don’t comprehend what to make of their habit of taking out their considerable penis and running at full tilt!

Business Line, staid ‘Madrasi’ Indian business newspaper, reported on August 20, 2007: “Killed by an amorous camel”.

“An Australian woman was killed by a pet camel given to her as a 60th birthday present after the animal apparently tried to have sex, police said Sunday.

The woman, whose name was not released, was killed Saturday at her family's sheep and cattle ranch near Mitchell, 350 miles west of the Queensland state capital Brisbane, state police Detective Senior Constable Craig Gregory said.
The 10-month-old male camel — weighing about 330 pounds — knocked the woman to the ground, lay on top of her, then exhibited what police suspect was mating behavior, Gregory said.

"I'd say it's probably been playing, or it may be even a sexual sort of thing," Gregory said, adding the camel almost suffocated the family's pet goat by straddling it on several occasions.

Camel expert Chris Hill said he had no doubt the camel's behavior was sexual.
Hill, who has offered camel rides to tourists for 20 years, said young camels are not aggressive, but can be dangerous if treated as pets without discipline.

The fate of the camel was not known.

The woman was given the camel in March as a birthday present from her husband and daughter. "She had a love of exotic pets," Gregory said.”

Thanks to my neighbourhood at Miraj, I knew all lewd expressions in Marathi and Urdu before I reached IIT, Madras. But one of the first things I learnt there was hump also meant something other than “Arch one's back”!

Now will this camel in the picture understand that 'Hump day' is a synonym for Wednesday?


Artist: Bruce Eric Kaplan The New Yorker October 2007

Highly Competitive Marion Jones is Not an East German or Russian

Some people who read this blog may not even have read about Marion Jones before today. She is the wnner of five medals at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

She was big, very big in US. As big as Sachin Tendulkar in India. She was a sprinting rock star. Delight of her sponsors. Inviting pictures, accentuating her selective anatomy, used to appear in media very frequently all over the world, including India. Like Sania Mirza's do in Indian newspapers today.

Jones, who won three gold and two bronzes medals in Sydney, pleaded guilty in a New York district court on Friday October 5, 2007 to lying to federal investigators when she originally told them she had never used performance-enhancing drugs.

I have seen Americans, including even fair guys like The Simpsons, making fun of East Germansand Russians athletes, alluding to their possible use of performance enhancing drugs.

What goes around comes around.

International sports are under cloud everywhere.

Earlier this year, "cleanliness" of Tour De France was debated hotly. (see cartoon below)

Today’s NYT (October 7, 2007) carries Harold Pinter’s, winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, interview. He says: “The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.”


Artist: Patrick Chappatte http://www.globecartoon.com/

The Most Extreme Mom of South Asia- Mahatma Gandhi

Last night I watched the film "The Most Extreme Mom” on Animal Planet channel. The most extreme of them all is Sea Louse. She makes the ultimate sacrifice for her family.

Her babies kill and eat her.

Marathi speaking poet-saints call Vitthal, a male deity, mother “Vithai”. Vithai makes all kinds of sacrifices for her sons and daughters. Bhakti literature is awash with those stories.

Like Vitthal, Mahatma Gandhi too was mother to South Asians although Indians now call him the father of the nation.

William Dalrymple reviewed few of the books, released to coincide sixtieth anniversary of India’s independence, for FT (Aug 18, 2007).

He says: “…Partition brought on a sectarian Armageddon that left 14.5 million uprooted and more than half a million dead in inter-religious massacres… Gandhi’s ideal of an India of village republics remained the enthusiasm of a minority, along with his spinning wheels, friction baths and saline enemas. But thanks to the way he died, India remained the pluralistic democracy he had always fought for, and the Hindu extremists he so disapproved of were marginalised for the next 40 years.”

And mother, after her death, managed to leave a “clean smell” even for a skeptic like George Orwell, for who the stench of all other political personalities of 20th century was unbearable.

Orwell wrote in January 1949 :”… And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air? ……regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind! “




Artist: Dana Fradon The New Yorker February 17, 1968

Spider Deserves to be Vishnu’s Incarnation

The table where I have kept my PC is a workplace of spiders. They build their webs faster than we remove them. So much so that I have learnt to respect them! Every time I see a spider rushing away, I don’t feel like killing it. I just chase it away.

No wonder Henry David Thoreau was moved to say: “If I were confined to a corner in a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts.”

It’s significant he chose spider and not any other life form.

Reuters on August 31, 2007 reported from Texas, USA:
“…A monstrous network of sheet-like webs covering several acres has been spun over trees in this state park 50 miles (80 kms) east of Dallas, baffling scientists who say it is an almost-unheard-of occurrence in the region.

"The dominant spiders here seem to be long-jawed spiders but this is unusual. Social spiders build communal nests in the tropics but the longjaws are not social," said Mike Quinn, a Texas state insect biologist.

"We still don't have a clear answer for what is going on here," he said as he stood beneath the ghostly canopy of webbing which shrouded a patch of oak and juniper trees.

The eerie scene evoked a B-grade horror movie. Thunder rumbled in the distance as spiders skittered across Quinn's wide-brimmed hat.

He was collecting samples by using a metal rod to thrash branches over a "beat sheet" -- a sheet nailed to criss-crossed pieces off wood into which bugs would fall.”

I was not surprised because I had watched, sometime in 2004-05, on Discovery channel, a film called “The Future Is Wild “. It projects, 100 million years from now, in “Hothouse World”, large spiders will build webs across canyons to farm the last mammals on earth. (Humans would be long gone before that!)

No insect is in the list of Vishnu’s incarnations that include fish, turtle, boar, man-lion, and dwarf. They, I always think, represent evolution. Spider deserves to be the first in the list.



Artist: Robert Kraus The New Yorker July 31, 1965

Civilization Exists by Sun-Eating Weed’s Consent Too

Will Durant has said: “Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice". It isn’t the only consent we need.

Guardian, Georgina Ferry, on September 29, 2007 has reviewed the book: “Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet” by Oliver Morton.

We all are taught photosynthesis is very simple. Carbon dioxide plus water plus energy from the sun equals glucose plus oxygen. It’s not that simple.

Scientists were not satisfied with this cookery-book approach from the earliest years of the 20th century. They finally discovered

“…the number of molecules of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll that it takes to produce one molecule of oxygen in full sunlight is not one, but 2,480. Trapping energy, storing and releasing it is all about transferring electrons along chains of molecules,..”

“…To make use of the energy locked up in our food we need oxygen. For more or less the first half of its life, the Earth had very little oxygen in its atmosphere. By around 2.4bn years ago, oxygen produced by photosynthetic bacteria was beginning to build up in the atmosphere in quantities that could support animal life. In an astonishing evolutionary short cut, some of the first multi-celled organisms then engulfed these green bacteria and incorporated their photosynthetic machinery into their own cells. Result: an explosion of green plants that covered the planet in (relatively) short order…”

“Astrobiologists tend to agree that whatever forms life might take, on Earth or elsewhere, it will always need oxygen. The trick, then, is to develop telescopes that can detect oxygen in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. How many of these there might be, in Morton's view, is "the biggest question that we currently have it in our hands to answer".

Therefore, when you next pass by an ordinary weed, you may like it or not, just bow a little.


Artist: James Stevenson The New Yorker May 18, 1963

Indo US Nuclear Family Deal!

Rahul Gandhi was made General Secretary of Congress in September 2007 at the age of 37. His father was made one at the age of 39 in February 1983. His grandmother...His great-grandfather, His great-great-grandfather....

Over to America.

Maureen Dowd writes “The Nepotism Tango” (NYT September 30, 2007):”…. 116 million Americans — nearly 40 percent of the nation — “have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House….When asked by Tim Russert at the New Hampshire debate about the d-word, as Poppy Bush calls it, Hillary replied: “I’m running on my own. I’m going to the people on my own.”

Without nepotism, Hillary would be running for the president of Vassar. But then, without nepotism, W. would be pumping gas in Midland — and not out of the ground. ”

The Economist wrote in May 2007:

“…These days, it is tempting to argue that America is becoming a monarchy in the guise of a republic…

Walter Bagehot, a 19th-century editor of The Economist, argued that people like to see a “family on the throne” because it “brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life”. Similarly, American politicos chart the clash of great families and their retainers. Biographers probe the psycho-dynamics of presidents' personal relationships. Did “43” invade Iraq as part of an Oedipal struggle with “41”? Will Hillary take revenge on her philandering husband by outperforming him in the Oval Office? And lowbrow journalists compete with each other to reveal what goes on behind the glittering façade of the White House…

The dynastification of American political life is weakening America's claim to be a democratic beacon...The dynastification of its political life also points to a deeper problem: the fact that America is producing a quasi-hereditary political elite, cocooned in a world of wealth and privilege and utterly divorced from most people's lives… “

Isn’t this true of India too?

“quasi-hereditary political elite, cocooned in a world of wealth and privilege and utterly divorced from most people's lives “.

Other than the spectacular rise of Mayawati nothing has happened in Indian politics, for a long time, that gives me a hope.

For instance, all FIVE major political parties in Maharashtra are nepotic to the core and look & sound the same. Eerily they bring to my mind images from George Orwell’s Animal Farm:

“The pigs and farmers return to their amiable card game, and the other animals creep away from the window. Soon the sounds of a quarrel draw them back to listen. Napoleon and Pilkington have played the ace of spades simultaneously, and each accuses the other of cheating. The animals, watching through the window, realize with a start that, as they look around the room of the farmhouse, they can no longer distinguish which of the cardplayers are pigs and which are human beings.”


Artist: Everett Opie The New Yorker July 23, 1960

Great Sportsperson is all about Courage and Courage is Not a Perfume!

Two chess champions were in the news last week.

Viswanathan Anand became world chess champion on September 29, 2007 and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov-only human never conquered by Anand- decided to run for Russian president on October 1, 2007.

Kasparov’s book “HOW LIFE IMITATES CHESS” was published this year.

The Times Literary Supplement wrote: “…Kasparov is not only the greatest chess player the world has ever seen, he is also the leader of the opposition and the last hope of democracy in Russia. He has been brave enough to defy the man he refers to contemptuously as “a mere lieutenant-colonel in the KGB” with nothing more than his wits to live by. So the game Kasparov is now playing with President Putin is for his life…

He explains that his decision to retire from professional chess in 2005 – still the highest-rated player after two decades – was “largely based on what I saw as the need to join the resistance to the catastrophic expansion of authoritarian state power in my home country”…

Yet this coded manifesto of a book is only the latest sign that his courage at the chessboard has not deserted him in the political arena.”

I gave up playing cricket very early in life because I kept taking my eyes off fast, moving, red, hardball. Therefore, I admire those cricketers most who show fearless attitude on and some times off the sporting arena.

Few Indian names from the hall of courage:

Mohinder Jimmy Amarnath (easily most courageous of them all), Sunil Gavaskar, Anshuman Gaikwad, and Rahul Dravid. They wouldn’t flinch from playing a fastball with their body if they thought otherwise they would nick it with their bat.

Vivian Richards on courage:
“'My first captain (Brian Close) was an inspiration to me. I knew all about him from the 1963 series. How he kept walking down the pitch to Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith in the Lord's Test. Several times Wes had to stop in his run-up to check out what was happening.

'I think I was pretty tough as a youngster. But Closey was tougher still. He reinforced the message that you yield to no one. …..I learnt so much from him - not necessarily about technique but about attitude.

'Man, he was brave. I remember playing against Gloucestershire and Closey was fielding at silly point. Mike Procter leant back and cracked a square cut. The ball hit Closey on the head and ballooned towards Dennis Breakwell. But Dennis watched the man rather than the ball and joined the rush to see if the captain was OK. When he came to Close's first words were "Did we get him?" He was none too pleased to hear that Dennis had failed to complete the catch.

'I was fielding at short leg when Close was playing for England in 1976 at the age of 46…..'Anyway, at Old Trafford, Close got hit in the chest by Wayne Daniel and sank to the floor. OK, I was playing for my country, but this was my skipper on the ground and in pain. So I went up to him. "Are you OK, skipper?" Closey eventually gathered himself together and bellowed "Fuck off." What a man.”



Artist: Helen E. Hokinson The New Yorker May 30, 1942

Morning’s at Seven, K L Saigal is on the Air and All's Right with the World! Vividh Bharati at Fifty

They say all good things come to an end.

But few of them don’t. Vividh Bharati, for example. It completes 50 years today October 3, 2007.

During my school days at Miraj, 1965-75, Radio Ceylon (I haven’t forgot even a jingle “hey, hey Binaca Green, Binaca Green hey hey..”) occupied haloed place in our lives because we couldn’t quite tune to short-wave Vividh Bharati every day. Signal wasn’t reliable. Except on Sunday afternoons, when a guest star hosted the program Vishesh Jaymala, waves complied.

Radio Australia and BBC were more reliable. (btw- There hasn’t been anything more thrilling, yes including T20 WC, on either TV/radio, than 1975-76 Australia-West Indies test cricket series, heard on RA. India-West Indies 1974-75 was better in cricketing terms but was not as well commentated on and photographed-courtesy Patrick Eagar).

Although Vividh Bharati gives me Browningian reassurance of ‘All's right with the world!’ with K L Saigal number in the morning, the program I best like is Chhayageet at 10 PM.

It calms my nerves and creates hope for the next day. I have this habit of recording favourite but unpossessed song on a tape but when I am listening to Chhayageet, I don’t do it. I just let that moment of bliss prevail. Greed can wait.

10 PM in Pune is a time when noise outside is low, hot summer day is giving in to persistent cool breeze, birds & dogs are quiet, rain is not lashing very hard, cold winter night is still away, all of us have shut up and Vividh Bharati is on a song. Trance is never too far.


Artist: Robert J. Day The New Yorker September 20, 1947

I Should Learn to Look at an Empty Sky unless……..

Something you read makes you introspect very deeply. You know it’s going to happen long after you are gone but the feeling still doesn’t leave you.

I got that feeling when I read DENNIS OVERBYE’s essay “The Universe, Expanding Beyond All Understanding” (NYT June 5, 2007)

“When Albert Einstein was starting out on his cosmological quest 100 years ago, the universe was apparently a pretty simple and static place. Common wisdom had it that all creation consisted of an island of stars and nebulae known as the Milky Way surrounded by infinite darkness.

We like to think we’re smarter than that now. We know space is sprinkled from now to forever with galaxies rushing away from one another under the impetus of the Big Bang.

Bask in your knowledge while you can. Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.

If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.

Unable to see any galaxies flying away, those astronomers will not know the universe is expanding and will think instead that they are back in the static island universe of Einstein.

It is hard to count all the ways in which this is sad. Forget the implied mortality of our species and everything it has or has not accomplished. If you are of a certain science fiction age, like me, you might have grown up with a vague notion of the evolution of the universe as a form of growing self-awareness: the universe coming to know itself, getting smarter and smarter, culminating in some grand understanding, commanding the power to engineer galaxies and redesign local spacetime.

Instead, we have the prospect of a million separate Sisyphean efforts with one species after another pushing the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down and be forgotten.

Worse, it makes you wonder just how smug we should feel about our own knowledge.”

It brought to my mind W H Auden’s poem “The More Loving One” (1957)

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.


Artist: Unknown The New Yorker February 19, 1927

Did Natives Create The Bountiful Art You See In Maharashtra?

 

 Richard Stoneman, 'The Greek Experience of India: from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks', 2019: "...to my eye the paintings at Ajanta could have been made by a Greek (Macedonian) observing intently the Indian life around him. At present it seems impossible to do more than speculate, but the fact that wall-painting in India begins at a time when Greeks were dominant in the north-west of the country, and among Buddhists, with whom Greeks seem to have close relations, does suggest more than coincidence with regard to the origin of this Indian art."

Frontline has started publishing 25-part series on Indian art.starting with the issue Aug. 11-24, 2007 “Eternal India”.

The latest article is “Grandeur in caves”. Article covers “vast rock-cut temples and viharas dot the hills of western and eastern India”.

“Does Maharashtra have its Own Distinct Culture?” was the title of an essay by Prof S M Mate in 1954. A debate raged on the subject, joined by number of experts like sculptor V P Karmarkar, K Narayan Kale, Irawati Karve, H.D Sankaliya. One offshoot of the debate was if locals created the art you see all around in Maharashtra.

I haven’t heard of such a debate elsewhere in India except perhaps in Assam. People elsewhere presume locals created the art. Maharashtra and Marathi have perhaps been more melting pots than others and hence the debate.

The then Maharashtra often used to have such raging debates. What fun! See an earlier entry on the related subject of literary feuds here.

This blog keeps returning to the one and only D G Godse द ग गोडसे. See previous entries on Godse here.

1.Taj Mahal and Raigad
2.Thomas Daniell’s ‘Fraud’ Painting of Peshwa Court,
3.Ashtavinayak

Godse joined the battle with his essay-‘Shilpi Maharashtra’- first published in ‘Chhand’ (May-June 1955), now included in his book “Samande Talash” (Shreevidya Prakashan 1981).

Godse’s verdict- Yes, natives largely created the art you see in Maharashtra. He aks “why 90% of all Indian carvings are in Maharashtra?” and explains this abundance ”…. this is not just because of the ruling dynasties of Maharashtra –Shalivahan, Vakatak, Chalukya, Rashtrakut-but also because of patronage of art by ordinary people”.

Frontline says: “IN western India, the 2nd century B.C. ushered in one of the greatest periods of the art of India and the entire art of Buddhism. Over a period of about 1,000 years, more than 1,200 caves were hewn out of the mountains of the Western Ghats, not very far from the coast of present-day Maharashtra. They were profusely sculpted and painted in the Buddhist traditions. Leaving behind the cares and confusions of the material world, the devotee came to these splendid havens of contemplation…”

My parents shifted residence to Nashik in late 80’s. The best place I found at Nashik was what locals call “Pandav Leni” sculpted in 2nd century during Satavahanas (see picture below). Once I went up there, I never felt like coming down. I imagined how it must be almost two millennia ago. People,looking just like me, taking in breeze, contemplating both every day issues and life-after.



Pandav Leni / NASHIK CAVES, 2ND century A.D.

And I haven’t seen more vivacious and sexier woman than this 2nd century beauty!



MITHUNAS, CAVE 3, Kanheri, 2nd century A.D.