What If the World Transformed According to Your Metaphors...

G A Kulkarni जी ए कुलकर्णी wrote short stories, only in Marathi. I like a few of them.

One of them is यात्रिक (Pilgrim) included in the collection पिंगळावेळ (Pinglavel)(Popular Prakashan 1977). It's an allegory of Cervantes's Don Quixote.

In the story, the fool tells Don: "...hey, instead of creating changing metaphors on stupid, gross world, if the world changed according to your metaphors what more you want."

"अरे, निर्बुद्ध, जड़ जगाविषयी बदलती रुपके करत राहण्यापेक्षा तुझ्या रुपकांप्रमाणे जर जग बदलत जाऊ लागले तर तुला तरी जास्त काय हवे सांग."

Many dreams and metaphors may sound crazy but they have the power to transform the world.
Margaret Mead has said: "Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have".

Loveable Calvin is as quixotic as you get and maybe, just maybe, the slide will transform accordingly.



(click on the picture to get a larger view)

Artist: Bill Waterson Calvin and Hobbes

Is Earth Still Flat? Ask Aliens In Sicily

On May 11, 2007, FT reviewed a book - Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood.

“…it wasn’t Columbus’s Atlantic expedition which made people realise the world was spherical. Pythagoras and his school are credited as the first to make this observation in the 6th century BC. Aristotle may have thought that the earth was at the centre of the universe but he at least came up with proof that it was curved: the hull of a ship on the horizon sinks out of sight before the mast. So when ”Parallax”, one of the aliases used by snake-oil salesman Samuel Rowbotham, began to propound his flat-earth ideas in the 19th century, he was pushing back the clock by a good two millennia….

Garwood has produced an intriguing chronicle of 150 years of self-delusion, from Parallax in the mid-19th century to the late 20th century’s Charles Johnson, who pushed membership of the International Flat Earth Society of America well into triple figures…

Instead of dishing out the ridicule which these fundamentalists invite, Garwood remains dispassionate and understanding.”

I liked the last part: author remains dispassionate and understanding and doesn’t ridicule.

Times of India on October 29, 2007 reported: Aliens caused bizarre blazes in Sicily three years ago
“Aliens from outer space testing their weapons may have caused a bizarre series of fires in a remote village in Sicily three years ago, an Italian government report says.

The attack, residents reported, led electrical appliances such as fridges, TVs and kettles to suddenly burst into flames. They also claimed to have seen UFOs flying overhead at the time of the fires.

Dozens of experts, including a scientist from the US space agency NASA were sent to investigate the bizarre blaze, in a two-year probe which cost the exchequer a whopping one million pounds.Now, a leaked Italian report has said that aliens were a likely cause of the fires in the remote village of Canneto di Caronia in Sicily. “

When I read this, I started laughing and soon turned angry but then Carl Sagan’s following words doused my fires.

“We are all flawed, and creatures of our time. Is it fair to judge as by the unknown standards of the future? Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations- perhaps for insisting that small children and even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up ignorant.”

Great minds like Newton too were flawed.

While reviewing The Fellowship: The Story of a Revolution By John Gribbin, The Economist said in August 2005:

“. Although scientists devised beautifully neat formulae to explain complicated phenomena, the scientific revolution itself was a messy business.
For a start, some natural philosophers refused to behave like scientists. Newton spent many of his best years working away on theology and alchemy, rather than dutifully laying down the foundations of modern physics. The experiments at the heart of the new philosophical method were often hard to replicate. Boyle's famous air pumps, for example, were always leaking. And by the 18th century, when the revolution really ought to have been over, armillary spheres were still being produced with the Ptolemaic and Copernican heavens side by side, as if the makers had hedged their bets.”

Therefore, we all need to work harder and stay focused to take science to the society.

Until we see them, Martians should firmly remain in delightful cartoons like the one below.

If earth was finally proven to be round, rewards of patience are rich!


Artist: James Stevenson The New Yorker 13 September 1958

Grandma Stories Will Always Go Strong

Business Line reports on September 24, 2007: Grandma stories still going strong:

“In the age of hi-tech movies with brilliant sound effects, constant television, multimedia games and blockbuster book series of the likes of Harry Potter, the 'Ek tha raja, ek thi rani' type of stories of the yore narrated by grandmothers still remain uniformly popular among children across the world.
Fairytales, and tales of adventure of swashbuckling pirates and sailors, legends, myths and folklores predominantly form the substance of tales traditionally used to regale children over centuries remain an eternal favourite among children according to a large number of bards and authors who had gathered in the capital recently.

Hailing from across 18 countries they had come to participate in a storytelling conference organised by the Indian chapter of the International Board of Books for Young People, the Association of Writers and Illustrators for children.”

My son had a rare distinction. Until my mother passed away, he was one of the few in his class whose all four grand parents were alive! Since we stay very close to where my in-laws live, my son gets to spend lots of quality time with his maternal grandparents. How lucky!

We weren’t that lucky. We were estranged from my father’s family until I was 26. I never met my father’s mother, met very briefly my father’s father. My mother’s father passed away when I was only 5. I spent some quality time with my mother’s mother though.

I don’t think I heard too many stories from my grandparents. However, my mother filled the role of all our grandparents when it came to stories. Each dinnertime, for number of years, was a storytime. Panchtantra, Ramayan, Mahabharat, Shivaji (Hirkani was a favourite) dominated prime time.

Her father, for whom fact and fiction were often interchangeable, was a great raconteur! So too was my mother’s elder sister. Listening to Tai-mavashi’s narration of stories of Hindi films like Mehmood’s Sadhu Aur Shaitan (1968) and Bombay to Goa (1972) was a funnier experience than watching those films on big screen.

Listening to mother’s stories was like returning to her womb and falling asleep there.

The experience has been summed up very well by author Shrinivas Vinayak Kulkarni in his story: आम्ही वानरांच्या फौजा (We Monkey Armies, डोह,Mauj Prakashan, 1965).

Author’s grandma is telling him a story as he falls asleep:

तुम्ही अवतरले गोकुळी आम्ही गोपाळांच्या मेळी
तुम्ही होते रामराजा आम्ही वानरांच्या फौजा...

(You incarnated at Gokul, we in cowherd gathering
You were King Ram, we monkey armies)

Not everyone is of course impressed with being a grandma!


Artist: Peter Arno The New Yorker January 30 1960

Miss Drucker, Now Go For The Kill

Times of India on October 26, 2007 reports: Revealing clothes a no-no in office.

“An IT company received complaints from employees who found the dressing style of some employees objectionable and distracting, and hence the need to formulate a policy. Women security personnel are being deployed to check women employees.

Mini-skirts, spaghetti-strap dresses, halter-tops are a strict no-no. Sleevless tops unless draped by a jacket are not acceptable. Irrespective of the choice of attire, clothes with very low necks and backs should not be worn. Skirts that end above the knees, transparent clothing, capris, pyjamas, trousers with cut-offs, low waist jeans are also not acceptable.”

It’s very obvious from above laundry list (!) that the code is largely meant to curb sex appeal of women employees to their young colleagues and not-so-young managers.

This is very simplistic.

In our society, men in power-at home, society and office- kept women, of all castes and colours, down for far too long, the way the Dalits were oppressed. Women like the Dalits now are fighting back. They won't follow men's rule-book for the fight!

Social reformer and sexologist R D Karve’s mission was not just happy family life, emancipation of women, control of population etc but more. R D Karve wanted Indian women to have as much sexual freedom as men did. He wanted them to have as much sensual pleasure as men did.

When one spends most of her waking life at a workplace, she cannot be faulted if she sought few pleasures there.

Daily Mail of UK reported in February 2007: Forget hard work - women would rather flirt their way to the top.

“Forget the sisterhood - the majority of working women would rather have a male boss and flirt their way to the top, according to a survey.

Despite the fact that women often complain of inequality in the workplace, new research reveals that women will don high heels and rely on their feminine charms to get what they want.

Rather than combining strength with fellow female workers, they in fact see other women as the main competition.

As a result three out of five women would rather work directly for a man than a woman while a further 86 per cent would happily flirt with a male colleague if it meant they got their own way.

The survey, commissioned by magazine Harper's Bazaar, questioned 500 professional women with top jobs in finance, newspapers and healthcare about their attitudes to their office environments.

It found that while women continue to reach high-powered positions in the workplace, they are still prone to indulging in what could be described as typically female behaviour.

Crying in the loos was a common confession with 85 per cent of women admitting that they had locked themselves in the office toilet for a quick weep.

Despite striving for equality at work a third of women admitted to pretending to be less intelligent than they actually are to flatter a male ego and get ahead.

Seven out of ten women said that simply by wearing a pair of high heels to work they automatically felt more powerful and confident in their ability to deal with the working day.

Although only 58 per cent of women thought there was gender equality in the office, one in 25 admitted to selling out a female colleague for their own career gains.
Nearly 70 per cent confessed that they would secretly revel in seeing another colleague fail while one in five have taken the credit for someone else's work.

According to the research there is conflict between mothers and childless women in the workplace.

More than half of women thought that women with children held more power in the office to the disadvantage of those without. “


Artist: Robert Weber The New Yorker April 6, 1963

Anju, Relax. Oceans May Be Rising But Don’t Start Packing Yet!

While talking to Newsweek (October 29, 2007), Rajendra Pachauri head of Nobel Prize winning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says:

”… The 20th century sea level rise was about 17 centimeters. Our predictions for the end of this century are 18 to 59 centimeters. So even if we end up somewhere in the middle, we have a pretty serious crisis on our hands….

If you want to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases at the level that will limit temperature increases to 2 degrees to 2.4 degrees centigrade, the cost to the global economy in 2030 will be less than 3 percent….”

The Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg says (Prospect Magazine UK November 2007) :

”… the IPCC’s estimates show that oceans will rise between 18-59cm, and that the most likely scenario is around 30cm. That’s similar to what the planet experienced in the last 150 years and it (rather obviously) coped….

Rising temperatures will mean more heat waves, but the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. By 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year. Yet at the same time, 1.8m fewer people will die from cold. In this respect, global warming will save lives...

If we eradicated malaria, we would not only do immediate good, but leave these nations more productive—estimates suggest they would be twice as rich by 2100—with more resilience and capacity to respond to climate change. Instead of saving one person from malaria through climate change policies, the same amount of money spent on malaria could save 36,000 people. This isn’t just an academic discussion—it's about helping real people now and in the future.”

Personally speaking cold bothers me a lot more than heat.

Last word in this debate is not spoken yet. Therefore, Anju relax,let us not start packing yet!


Artist: Robert J. Day The New Yorker 4 April 1959

Bhagat Singh Lives In Many Hearts, Lenin Just A Collectible

South Asia is celebrating Bhagat Singh’s 100th birth anniversary.

Supreme sacrifice of young Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev for a larger cause has motivated millions in the past and will continue to do so.

T S Shejwalkar has described in his essay of October 1930 what Motilal Nehru (more charismatic personality than his son) felt on meeting Bhagat Singh:”For the first time in my life, I met someone greater than me.”

Bhagat Singh was just 23 when hanged.

I have always been impressed with not just Bhagat Singh’s rugged good looks- wearing Western hat or prisoner’s chains- but his intellect. Man was an atheist and remained so till the end. He didn’t believe in rebirth. He must be one of the first famous people in India to talk about Charles Darwin’s work. Just for the appreciation of readers, he established a library of 175 books at Agra, where the Assembly bomb plan was finalised. As a revolutionary thinker, he encouraged the reading habit among his comrades and also debates on topical social and political issues.

His family was very eclectic and was open to diverse influences. It truly believed in a composite India and also practised it in the family.

He once said: “Up to that period (1925) I was a romantic revolutionary… That was a turning point in my revolutionary career;

“Study” was the cry that reverberated in the corridors of my mind. Study to enable yourself to face the arguments advanced by opposition. Study to arm yourself with arguments in favour of your cult. I began to study.

My previous faith and convictions underwent a remarkable modification. The romance of violent methods alone, which was so prominent amongst our predecessors, was replaced by serious ideas. No more mysticism, no more blind faith. Realism became our cult. Use of force justifiable when restored to as a matter of terrible necessity: non-violence as policy indispensable for all mass movements. So much about methods.

The most important thing was the clear conception of ideal for which we were to fight. As there were no important activities in the field of action, I got ample opportunity to study various ideals of world revolution. I studied Bakunin, the anarchist leader, something of Marx, the father of communism and much of Lenin, Trotsky and others – the men who had successfully carried out a revolution in their country.”

Bhagat Singh trusted Lenin and his revolution in Russia without realizing horrors of Russian revolution. George Orwell was to write “Animal Farm” only in 1945.

Brad DeLong:”Lenin was a really evil man. His followers and supporters slaughtered more than ten million of their fellow humans… for Communists, Lenin and Guevara are truly heroic. Standing as they did on the shoulders of the great Karl Marx, they saw deeply into the present and far into the future. They ran great personal risks and stood bravely against their adversaries as they struggled to bring about the revolutionary liberation of humanity.... we cannot view Lenin and Guevara as truly heroic, any more than we can view Hitler and Mussolini as truly heroic…”

In retrospect, I feel Bhagat Singh didn’t need Lenin. His native idealism, his ideas, his leadership qualities and his youthful good looks were more than enough to power his dreams.

Like in the picture below Lenin is being assigned to the dustbin of history while Bhagat Singh continues to rule many young hearts in India.


Artist: Eldon Dedini The New Yorker 27 Nov 1989

Dalits & Slaves as Stock Options in Our Celebrated and Mythologized History

Two of the sorriest chapters in human history are the practices of slavery and caste.

20th century Maharashtra produced some good books on the suffering of Dalits. But more needs to be researched and told. People need to know what it was to be a Dalit even in 19th century India.

Markus Rediker has written a book “The Slave Ship” reviewed by Adam Hochschild, author of “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves”.

.” Most spasms of cruelty in history we know about largely through the testimony of victims. It is thanks to acts of witness by survivors like Primo Levi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, that we can begin to picture what life was like in Auschwitz and the gulag. There is no great trove of memoirs by retired concentration camp guards.

By contrast, a much more prolonged bout of suffering, the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic, on which more than 12 million Africans were embarked for the Americas over more than three centuries, we know about almost entirely from the perpetrators. There are few accounts of this voyage by slaves…

Like executives today, British slave merchants pressed their government for deregulation, and finally it obliged, canceling the Royal African Company’s guaranteed monopoly.

Just as corporate officers now get stock options, slave-ship officers received the extra compensation of a few “privilege” slaves they were permitted to buy, transport and sell for their own profit. Sometimes there were executive bonuses tied directly to performance, based on the number of slaves delivered.

And finally, those who succeeded in the business could seamlessly make the transition to politics, the way tycoons still do: former slave-ship captains sat in both the British House of Commons and the United States Senate (James D’Wolf of Rhode Island).

This complex tissue of normality makes one wonder what aspects of our own everyday business-as-usual people will, a century or two from now, be considered as horrendous as we think the slave trade was…

Humanly, the slave ship was the locus of unbelievable cruelty. To punish rebels, captains resorted to thumbscrews, red-hot pokers, strangling, the severing of limbs and more. Like the post of concentration-camp commandant, the job bred violence…

Violence cascaded downward from captain and officers to sailors to the enslaved. The slaves got the worst of it…”

In his own books, Adam Hochschild says:

"So rapidly were slaves worked to death, above all on the brutal sugar plantations of the Caribbean, that between 1660 and 1807, ships brought well over three times as many Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans. And, of course, it was not just to British territories that slaves were sent. From Senegal to Virginia, Sierra Leone to Charleston, the Niger delta to Cuba, Angola to Brazil, and on dozens upon dozens of crisscrossing paths taken by thousands of vessels, the Atlantic was a vast conveyor belt to early death in the fields of an immense swath of plantations that stretched from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro and beyond…

The world we live in -- its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence -- is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.”

John Hawkyns has said:”…slavery did change the world. Millions of people were deracinated. Whole economies and empires were birthed and borne on the backs of kidnapped Africans. The development of the African continent itself was irreparably arrested as a result of the stolen legacies of its strongest people. So we are still dealing with the dreadful aftermath even today.”

If you look at our celebrated and mythologized history from the eyes of slaves and Dalits, the Pharaoh was nice only if he built small Pyramid because it meant little less flogging and torture!


Artist: James Stevenson The New Yorker 29 June 1963

Can’t Write, Act, Draw, Play, Sing? You Haven’t Suffered Enough!

Times of India reported on October 23, 2007:
“Veteran film director Francis Ford Coppola has launched a blistering attack on three of the great actors he has directed.

The five-time Oscar winner took a surprise hit at Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson, saying he has become disappointed with them as they have grown older and richer.”

Coppola doesn’t feel that this has to do with their age: “You know, even in those days, after The Godfather, I didn't feel that those actors were ready to say, 'Let's do something else really ambitious.”

I am on the side of Coppola. Great art is often created out of hunger, suffering and insecurity.

Actor Dr. Shreeram Lagoo डाँ. श्रीराम लागू often defends his own crappy work in Hindi cinema saying he did it for money. I am not sure how much money he needed and for how long but in the process Marathi stage lost a promising artist who could have done some great and not just good work. Also, because of hamming he did in cinema, he surely lost a lot of his sensitivity as an actor.

Artist: Sam Cobean The New Yorker 17 Jan 1948

Mona Lisa Once Had Eyebrows But No Smile!

On October 23, 2007, newspapers world over printed Mona Lisa story very prominently.

Times of India: “Ultra-deatiled scans show Mona Lisa has eyebrows”.

Asian Age: “Scan shows Mona Lisa has lashes, eyebrows”.

Sure, but did she have a smile to begin with?


Artist: Charles Addams The New Yorker 12 April 1952

Pean to Potato

Business Line October 22, 2007 has published an AFP story on potato “Diplomatic tool, humbler of leaders, unifier of nations”

To begin with,personal disclaimer:
Potato not just sustains lives of my son and I but gives us ultimate gastronomic pleasure. My wife though could get by without it.

I often think a writer like Dnyaneshwar (along with Tukaram, the best Marathi produced) was handicapped not because of absence of 21st century toys and gadgets in his 13th century but he didn’t know potato (introduced in India in late 16th / early 17th century), chilli (introduced in India in late 15th century) and dinosaurs (discovered in 19th century).

Imagine how more powerful metaphors and imagery Dnyaneshwar would have created if he knew potato, chilli and T-rex!

AFP story says: “Few vegetables can claim to have shaped nations, sent the economy of a country tumbling, or played a starring role in diplomatic spats. But the humble potato can….

The impact of the humble tuber stretches back centuries. The population of Ireland was cut in half in the mid 1800s after the potato crop failed and a four-year famine ensued. The then agriculture-based Irish economy crumbled and the population plummeted from eight million to four million, through deaths from hunger and emigration.
It only surpassed the four million mark in the 1990s, when Ireland entered an economic boom.The massive wave of emigration from Ireland, sparked by the potato famine, shaped politics and history not only locally but also in the United States, the destination for the vast majority of those who left…”

In 1997, Tony Blair, British Prime Minister, apologized to Ireland for the famine which caused 1 million deaths. Many Irish people believe that Britain, which controlled the land, was more than negligent -- that it in fact worsened the problem by allowing the profitable export of grain and cattle from Ireland even as the poor starved.

(Btw- I wonder if Britain ever apologized to India for the Bengal famine of 1943 that occurred in British administered Bengal. It is estimated that 1.5-3 million people died from starvation and malnutrition during the period.)

And finally, what does potato on the plate have to do with the one on couch?

“British potato farmers have marched on the houses of parliament in London to demand that the term "couch potato" be removed from the dictionary. They argued the expression - which is derived from the slang word for a television, "tube", which gave rise to "tubers" for those who spent hours hunkered down on the sofa gazing at it - gave the impression that potatoes are bad for the health and, therefore, bad for their business.”


‘You want us to go up the hill to fetch a pail of water? Not now we’re watching TV.’

The Spectator September 8, 2007