Nil-nil is STILL the score of life

Although I really love, Adam Gopnik's quote:
"The World Cup is a festival of fate -- man accepting his hard circumstances, the near-certainty of his failure. There is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal," he wrote in the New Yorker. "Nil-nil is the score of life. This may be where the difficulty lies for Americans, who still look for Eden out there on the ballfield.", I was happy to see the number of goals Germany were piling on.

I thought, maybe, just maybe, Nil-nil is NOT the score of life.

Alas, the final proved Gopnik right.

Look at Andres Iniesta in the picture below. He sure is feeling on top of the world. After yesterday, he doesn't ever have to touch a football again for fame and fortune. And yet he is hurting over the loss of his departed friend Daniel Jarque.

Nil-nil?



courtesy: AP

Now I have had the misfortune of seeing finals of 1990, 1994, 2006 and now 2010 live.

Richard Williams:"No more all-European finals, thank you very much. The one four years ago that ended with Zinedine Zidane's head-butt and a penalty shoot-out was bad enough. But no one seriously expected a classic in Berlin that day. Last night's match was supposed to be a fascinating contest of stylistic nuances, a collision of rival philosophies featuring some of the finest attacking talents in the modern game. But as we had to wait until deep in extra time for Andrés Iniesta's goal, 84,000 people in the stadium and a reputed 700 million television spectators were left wondering when the football was going to start..." (The Guardian, 12 July 2010)

(For the last night's match, Johan Cruyff, legendary Dutch player, chose to support Spain.
Imagine if Sunil Gavaskar were to support Pakistan against India in next year's cricket worldcup. There will be calls to lynch him!)

The First Great Writer in Hindi was a Marathi?

PAUL GOODMAN: "...For most of its history Islam has been the most relaxed of the three faiths. It neither aches for the coming of a Messiah nor announces that outside the Church there is no salvation. It offers monotheism for all — a kind of Judaism for the masses..." (Spectator, 31 MARCH 2010)

Vinoba Bhave (विनोबा भावे) gives a fascinating account of Saint Namdev (1270-1350?)'s (संत नामदेव) life in his book "Namdevanchi Bhajane" (नामदेवांची भजने), 1946.

(p.s. Please see earlier posts on Namdev here and here.

In this post, I am sharing more information that I have learnt since then.)

Vinoba argues that Namdev spent almost twenty years in Punjab because Islam there was spreading very fast and Namdev wanted to convey to masses how Hinduism too had the same qualities that were attracting followers to Islam...And he succeeded in his mission big time.

Vinoba also argues that Namdev was the first great classical writer in Hindi ('पहिला अभिजात उत्तम लेखक').

Remember, Nanak (1469–1539) came almost two hundred years after Namdev. Guru Arjan Dev (1563–1606) , who followed another hundred years later, edited and compiled bhajans that went into the Guru Granth Sahib.

It means Namdev's bhajans had already lasted for three hundred years thanks to their popularity among masses of Punjab! Today, 660 years later, they are as popular, if not more.

Think about it. Which Maharashtrian celebrity amongst us will be as popular in 2670CE as he/she is today? And then think again of Marathi Bhakti saints!

Was this Handsome Man Evil? Muhammad Ayub Khan

James Lovegrove:“The search for aliens, then, has turned inward. The Other is no longer up there in the stars. He’s our neighbour with the faith-based dress code. She’s the person with the tinted skin and unfamiliar accent. Modern science fiction is putting out the unexceptionable message that we should gladly embrace him or her, if we are to have any kind of future.
Someone else’s Other, after all, is us.”

Many of us in India have been raised to treat Muhammad Ayub Khan, the first military ruler of Pakistan as evil.

Was he?

Please read "Lessons of Murree" by A.G. NOORANI (Frontline, July 2 2010).

Paul Krugman wrote on July 1 2010: "When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people took positions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better. Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions."

Did Indian leadership in early 1960's- read J L Nehru- "take positions based on careful consideration of the options" vis-à-vis border disputes with China and Pakistan? Or "much of what they believed rested on prejudices, not analysis"?

As for me, I was very moved by this picture (dated August 25, 1959) of Mr. Khan and his wife. They make a handsome couple worthy of a role in contemporary Hindi film. Move over Motilal and Meena Kumari!

Shivajirao Bhosale, Chandgi Ram, Abhijit Marathe...

Adam Philips: 'The world without the people who matter to us is not the same world and so not the world at all. Life becomes progressively stranger as we get older - and we become increasingly frantic to keep it familiar, to keep it in order - because people keep changing the world for us by dying out (mourning is better described as orientation, the painful wondering whether it is worth re-placing oneself).'

In 1970's, I atteneded many public lectures of Shivajirao Bhosale (शिवाजीराव भोसले) at Miraj (मिरज). His voice still rings in my ears.

Although they were informative, I was never hugely impressed by them unlike lectures by Narhar Kurundkar (नरहर कुरुंदकर). In fact, I walked out of one or two of them because of sheer boredom.

However, it's a nice feeling that, not too long ago, thousands in Maharashtra flocked to his lectures on the subjects like Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda among others.

I wonder how many would do so today sacrificing their prime time decadent Marathi TV.

Wrestler Chandgi Ram who passed away on 29 June 2010- like Satpal Singh- became very popular personality in Maharashtra. It was nice to read rich tributes paid to him by his former rival wrestelers of Kolhapur (कोल्हापूर).

Abhijit Marathe (अभिजीत मराठे) my classmate died in Miraj on June 27(?) 2010. I was not in touch with him for a long time but we spent years from June 1969 to March 1975 together at Miraj High School.

His family- easily one of the wealthiest in the region- was 'first family' of Miraj, even ahead of that of family of Miraj's former ruler.

But he wore all this lightly. He was probably the only guy who was addressed using his first name without any corruption. That is always 'Abhijit'. Never 'Abhya' or 'Marathya'. (Unlike me who, to my father's irritation, was always 'Kulkya'.)

He was good in studies and, like many of us, obsessed with cricket. When he joined us playing a Sunday game, putting together a cricket gear was never a problem.

His bunglow had a tennis court and a ping pong table. Marathe's also had a decent book library. I sure read a few books there.

Abhijit could be wickedly funny. I remember he would go to a parrot fortune-teller near our school and enquire if he could tell fortune of Abhijit's penis! (I was with him on one such trip.)

In 1974, when I went back to school after a gap of number of days, our class teacher made me stand up and was enquiring where I was. I was fumbling with an answer because I was lying. Abhijit blurted out: He had plague!

The whole class including me was in splits.

Go well, Abhijit.

What did Crystal Ball Fortune Teller say in 1990?

Recently from Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund company I received a promotional mailer. Its envelope carried this slogan: "Remember what life was like, in India, before 1991?”

So did Sunanda K Datta-Ray.

I just trashed the envelope but Mr. Datta-Ray was stimulated by it to write an essay that can be found here.

"...The world was less glamorous with fewer big scams. Cricket was sport, not speculation. Hinduism was religion, not politics. Recorded telephone operators’ voices didn’t sound as if they belonged to Hindi-speaking young women trying desperately hard to pretend they were Americans trying desperately hard to speak Hindi...

...People wrote letters instead of tweeting. They chatted with each other, not into machines. Indian women wore saris, not The Red Sari. Actresses hadn’t crossed the gender barrier. Bollywood didn’t pretend to be Hollywood. Bollywood stars didn’t rush to Cannes since there were no awards to collect. There are still no awards but they go to spend all that cash and flaunt their wardrobes. “Topless” wasn’t a fashion option. Newspapers served news...

...I wrote in the seventies and eighties that nuclear bombs, missions to the Moon and vehicles in space were for India, not Indians. Now, the expected 8.5 per cent growth is as much for India as for Indians … or for some Indians until Manmohan Singh redeems his promise of a “new deal for rural India” and extends it also to include the neglected urban poor..."


Artist: Steve Breen

Keshavsut's Tutari..err Vuvuzela!

Stanley Crouch: People are uncomfortable in silence because it can breed needless contemplation and may engender a floating into the deeper world of the self.

I am feasting on world-cup football.

A lot of people, including my wife, are bothered by vuvuzelas' angry-honeybees-buzzing noise.

I am little affected by their din.

I in fact seem to enjoy it.

If Keshvasut (केशवसुत) 1866-1905 had watched this worldcup, would he have written his poem 'Tutari' (तुतारी) as 'Vuvuzela' (व्हुव्हुझेला)?

"Get me a vuvuzela
I will blow it with all my strength
That will pierce all skies
with its loud long scream

Get such a vuvuzela to me"

("एक व्हुव्हुझेला द्या मज आणुनि
फुंकिन मी जी स्वप्राणाने
भेदुनि टाकिन सगळी गगनें
दीर्ध जिच्या त्या किंकाळीने
अशी व्हुव्हुझेला द्या मजलागुनी")

Long after the world cup gets lifted to the sky on July 12 2010, a Burdell will continue to play vuvuzela for me.


Artist: Richard Decker, The New Yorker, 6 Feb 1937

Death: You were always a great friend of mine, Warren

A columnist observed on June 19 2010:

"...And the ageing Warren Anderson will eventually die a peaceful death in the Hamptons…. unlike the over twenty thousand Indians who weren’t as lucky when they gasped their last breaths in distant Bhopal twenty six years ago..."

I am not sure of that.

How little we know what happens while one is dying.

James Thurber: Even a well-ordered life can not lead anybody safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the skies...

And we are not even sure if Mr. Anderson's life is 'well-ordered'.

About justice and fair play...


Brad DeLong- “Call those political leaders whose followers and supporters have slaughtered more than ten million of their fellow humans "members of the Ten-Million Club.”… The twentieth century has seen perhaps five people join the Ten Million Club: Adolf Hitler, Chiang Kaishek, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao have credentials that may well make them the charter members of the Thirty Million Club as well–perhaps the Fifty Million Club."

What kind of death these gentlemen got?



Artist: Herbert Block (1909-2001), Washington Post

Shame on me and the media I follow: Passing of Manohar Malgonkar

Manohar Malgonkar died on June 14 2010 and I came to know about it only today June 20 2010.

Shame on me and the media I follow.

I lapped up everything he wrote for The Statesman and Deccan Herald. I vividly remember his essay describing his visit to the Badami cave temples.

Like Khushwant Singh, he was one of the finest Indian writer of English prose after 1950's.

Every time I travelled from Miraj to Bangalore by a train, I knew he was not very far until train reached Hubli.

Now any where I go he will never be too far.

Lord Irwin: And now, Ms. Gauhar Jaan, I wonder if I could take a small liberty?

Gauhar Jaan (1873-1930) was a legendary singer. Probably as big as what K L Saigal was and Lata Mangeshkar today is.

Frontline June 5-18 2010 has a review of a book on her: "My Name is Gauhar Jaan!" - The Life and Times of a Musician by Vikram Sampath.

In school hisory books one comes across Lord Irwin who was Viceroy of India from 1926 to 1931.

Wikipedia informs: "Irwin's rule was marked by a period of great political turmoil. The exclusion of Indians from the Simon Commission examining the country's readiness for self-government provoked serious violence..."

Looks like among all this he found time to violate Ms. Jaan.

"...Lord Irwin, visiting Rampur, was lavishly entertained, and a part of it was a concert by Gauhar Jaan. She sang gloriously. She, however, made one inadvertent mistake. Dressed in a saree with her customary elegance, she pinned all the medals she had received from bigwigs during her illustrious career on her chest. After the concert, against all norms of civilised etiquette, Lord Irwin reached out to examine the medals. Nawab Hamid Ali was incensed. He told Gauhar later, “So you did manage to get a white man to touch your breast, didn't you?” She, due to a silly, unthinking act on her part, found herself suddenly out of favour with the nawab. Most humiliating of all was the discovery that the precious diamonds she had got as gifts from him were actually cheap imitations..."


Artist: Peter Arno, The New Yorker, March 29, 1947

N G Kalelkar, It was Marriage at Cana, not The Last Supper

I like essays of N G Kalelkar 1909-1989 (ना गो कालेलकर) whose Marathi book 'Bhasha: Itihas ani Bhoogol' (भाषा: इतिहास आणि भूगोल) won Sahitya Akademi award in 1967.

Year 2009-10 is the 100th birth anniversary year of Kalelkar. The June 2010 issue of Lalit (ललित) has an essay on him by Prof. Vidyagauri Tilak (विद्यागौरी टिळक) to mark the occasion.

It is said that the main character- played memorably by Satish Dubhashi (सतीश दुभाषी)- of P L Deshpande's (पु ल देशपांडे) popular play 'Ti Fulrani' (ती फुलराणी) was inspired by Kalelkar.

Sunita Deshpande (सुनीता देशपांडे), P L Deshpande's wife, has written an unusually frank- for inbred Marathi literary culture of second half of 20th century- essay on Kalelkar, throwing light on many aspects of his personal life. (After reading the essay, Kalelkar became more interesting for me.)

In one of the most impressive passages from Kalelkar's book '"bhasha ani sanskriti" (भाषा आणि संस्कृती) he says:

When a class containing Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) was asked to write an essay on the subject of the Last Supper, Byron wrote just one line- 'The water saw its Lord and blushed'...Water in Latin is feminine...etc. etc. (page 47, edition December 1982)

This moved me so much when I first read it almost 25 years ago that I memorised it and kept quoting it in my conversations.

There are a couple of problems with this.

First, it was not the Last Supper but Marriage at Cana.

And second it was not Lord Byron- then a third grade boy- who first said this.

In fact it was Richard Crashaw (c.1613-1649) who wrote:

'The conscious water saw its God, and blushed' (original in Latin: Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit)

Read an earlier related post here

I feel Kalelkar should have attributed this to Crashaw. But did he know that it was Crashaw who first wrote it?

A lot of stuff written in Marathi has gone unchallenged.


Artist: Paolo Veronese, c 1562-63