At 88 Life Does Look Nebulous and Fuzzy...सध्याचे जीवन हे कमालीचे धूसर आणि अस्पष्ट झाले असून

Will Self, The Guardian, June 21 2013:

"...An unavoidable sequel of the posterity delusion is the death of the writerly self, which depends too much on incoherence and inconsistency to remain pompous for long. And of course, the vast majority of today's mummified immortals are tomorrow's Ozymandiases..."

Maureen Mullakey, 'The Weekly Standard',  December 17 2012:

"Five months before he died, Paul Cézanne attended the unveiling of a bust of Émile Zola, his old soulmate, at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix. Numa Coste, friend to both, addressed the gathering. He reminded the attendees of Zola’s autumnal insistence that “one thinks one has revolutionized the world, and then one finds out, at the end of the road, that one has not revolutionized anything at all.” The elderly painter cried at the words."

Jacob Mikanowski, The Point, 2013:

"...They’re not alone. There’s a whole fraternity of artists like that—writers convinced of their greatness and obsessed with their status. They seem genuinely important in their own time, but the farther away from them you get, the more special pleading they seem to require. The proof is never on the page. It takes work to see why they mattered, why they provoked so much controversy, why they were read or performed at all. Call them the footnote club, or the asterisk brigade. Or think of them as the white dwarves of literature; those cold, distant stars that seem bright at first but then dim by degrees until they seem always on the edge of being swallowed by the night..."

Mr. Govind Talwalkar (गोविंद तळवलकर), the then editor of Marathi newspaper Maharashtra Times (महाराष्ट्र टाइम्स) was,  as mentioned earlier on this blog,  like a Sumo wrestler on middle-class Maharashtra's (not certainly more in the size than 10%  of population of the state)  cultural mat in 1970's.  I too was his fan for a while. I still admire his ability to read a large number of books.  

Later in life,  however,  I always felt he had a limited intellectual capacity but his influence was disproportionately larger than that.

Many people, I felt,  then,  just got out of his way instead of challenging him or, better, made friends with him. Apparently, his job was the second most important job in Maharashtra, next only to the Chief Minister of the state.

Loksatta (लोकसत्ता ) dated November 26 2013 has a report on the speech he made in Mumbai (मुंबई) the previous day by video conference from US.

He is now 88 years old. Therefore when he says  "सध्याचे जीवन हे कमालीचे धूसर आणि अस्पष्ट झाले असून..." (today's life has become extremely nebulous and fuzzy), I agree with him completely. 

Despite all the advances in medical technology, particularly ophthalmology, one probably doesn't have a great eyesight at that age. I don't know about the rest of the world, but the life outside your window does become nebulous and fuzzy.

Then the report says: "सध्याच्या काळात आपले विचार इतरांनी वाचल्याशिवाय जगाला तरणोपायच नाही, असेच प्रत्येकाला वाटत असते, असे सांगत तळवलकर यांनी 'फेसबुक', 'इंटरनेट'ची आपल्या खास शैलीत खिल्ली उडविली." 

(Talwalkar went on to make fun of Facebook and Internet in his unique style,  observing that, in today's times,  every one feels that the world has no hope of survival until they read one's thoughts.)

I don't know about today's Internet users and newspaper editors but I always thought that is what he himself felt- "the world has no hope of survival until they read my thoughts" (आपले विचार इतरांनी वाचल्याशिवाय जगाला तरणोपायच नाही)-  when he wrote those 'fiery' leaders for Maharashtra Times.

Later in the report, the following is attributed to Mr. Talwalkar:

 "एका युगाचा अंत होतो, परंतु दुसऱ्या युगाचा जन्म अद्याप झाल्याचे जाणवत नाही. म्हणून अशा मधल्या अधांतरी काळातच आमच्या पिढीची येरझार सुरू झाली..."

("An age ends but one doesn't feel that the next age has begun and our generation started pacing such a hanging period between (the ages)...")

This is complete baloney. Life just goes on. The past and the future are fundamentally no different than the present. They just are strange.  Civilisations, regimes come and go and some are better than others. History is cyclical not progressive. As John Crowley says: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."

As images fade, shadows lengthen, and the threat of being swallowed by the night looms, for an Ozymandias,  shedding tears is more honorable option than talking about the present he can't comprehend.

 Artist: Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker, 26 April 1958

Banks in India's Gilded Age

Jayant Sinha and Ashutosh Varshney, Financial Times, January 6 2011:

"...Both in its rot and heady dynamism, India is beginning to resemble America’s Gilded Age (1865-1900). Ending with Theodore Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency in 1901, the Gilded Age transformed an agrarian US into an economic and industrial giant. Yet Roosevelt’s assessment was gloomy: “The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men; their greed and ignorance, and the way in which they have unduly prospered...these facts, and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition.”..."'



Samuel Brittan, Financial Times, June 5 2012:

"...In general terms it is difficult to go beyond Adam Smith. Few of us like competition; and the tendency to form closely knit groups to keep outsiders at bay is probably as old as the human race. For pre-capitalist examples one has only to think of the medieval guilds, whether of craftsmen or Master Singers. More subtle are the practices of bankers, as they come disguised as services for customers. In summary, success has depended more on whom you know than what you know. Hence the catchphrase “crony capitalism”..."

Jackson Lears, 'Something For Nothing/ Luck in America', 2003:

"In an laissez-faire economy, riddled by graft and scandal, robber barons and knights of the green baize were not always easy to tell apart."


Ajit Dayal, 'Why our bankers are like Gabbar Singh', June 20 2013:

"...Banking was a boring business.

But a lot has changed since Gabbar Singh took over. Now the banks are built to take risks and shed all fear of a serious reprimand. If "naming and shaming" had any relevance to the society we live in, most Indian industrialists (and many in the financial services industry) would be fakirs by now wandering aimlessly across the Indo-Gangetic plain in search of the mystical. Instead, they are surrounded by the material with some CSR to sprinkle around.

Which gets back to the other famous Gabbar quote: "Jo dar gaya, so mar gaya".

With no dar in the system, the mad expansion of bank branches will continue.

The mar will be for us."

 
I miss R K Laxman. He would have done real justice to the following news. 

"Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor K C Chakrabarty said banks had written off Rs 1 lakh crore in the past 13 years and criticised the lenders because as much as 95 per cent of these write-offs were for large borrowers.

“During the past 13 years what we see is that the banking system as a whole has written off more than Rs 1 lakh crore in advances,” Chakrabarty, the senior-most of the deputy governors  at RBI, said.
He said over 95 per cent of such write-offs have been observed in the case of big accounts and expressed anguish that public discourse focuses only on the government’s agricultural  debt waiver scheme of 2008. 

“We only talk about the debt waiver of the agricultural borrowers, we don't say big players and of this (Rs 1 lakh crore) 95 per cent are all big borrowers and it has been written off,” he said.

The government had announced a waiver of over Rs 60,000 crore in advances to the farm sector as a one-time measure in the Budget of 2008 following stress in the rural sector..."

(Business Standard, November 19 2013)

Laxman would have shown a marginal farmer with attendant goat, chicken and cow facing a 'fat cat' (like the one in the late Mr. Steig's picture below) and signed off with a killer caption summarizing the state of India's banking.



Artist: William Steig, The New Yorker, 2 July 1960
 
Here is a cartoon by Mr. Laxman similar to the one being imagined by me. It has a marginal farmer, his goat, a government minister and his secretary, complete with their chopper.

The caption given by the artist is:

"No, Sir, this is neither a flood hit nor a drought hit area. We are only hit by bad government!"

P Devarajan wrote in Business Line on October 15 2006:

“...For bankers in India, hopping from one air-conditioned room to another, funding the poor is a chore. Not an act of passionate conviction. “

Based on all of the above, my caption is:

"No, Sir,  I feel bad because I hear that my waived loan of Rs. ten thousand has resulted in bankrupting my bank."
 

In Search of Lost Food...उदाहरणार्थ अठरा धान्यांचे कडबोळे

Patrick McGuinness, The Telegraph, November 19 2013:

"...Past, present and future are not checkpoints, but porous membranes where one tense washes into another.
Time is ruthless and deadly, living is all loss, and the paradox of memory is that it gives you back what you had on condition that you know it has been lost. To regain it, you need to know it has gone; to remake the world, you need first to understand that it has ended. HG Wells had published The Time Machine in 1895. Proust showed that we are the Time Machines, though we are rarely at the controls..."

Isaiah Berlin quoted by Dileep Padgaonkar in The Times of India, October 28 2013:

"...“Indians want to be treated as a new exotic culture, whose poets are the best in the world, whose novelists outshine Proust” he tells a correspondent, whereas, in fact, they are “half-baked and exhausting”: there is “no intellectual bite, no firmness, no toughness at all”. And he concludes on this note: “If real social justice and rationalisation ever come to India it will be through some spellbinder whom people won’t bother to resist and under whose spell they will enjoy falling.”..."

Whatever else you take from the quotes above, Marcel Proust is a literary benchmark and year 2013 is 100th anniversary of arguably one of the greatest (and the longest?) novels of all time: Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time'.  


It is in seven volumes, running 4215 pages! I own one volume and haven't read even a page from it.

(The earlier English translation of the book was titled  'Remembrance of Things Past' )

Artist: Edward Frascino, The New Yorker, 1 April 1972 

(Here is an example, dated October 18 2007, from this blog, of a cartoonist targeting Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' for its length, 1225 pages.)

Proust is little known to Marathi speaking world, including me. I haven't read him either in French or English. I don't think he is available in Marathi.

And I don't know if I will ever know him too but when I can't read a book I try to read about it. 

I liked what Ian Jack had to say in 'The Guardian' in November 2013: "What of all the vanished foods we can never taste again?":

"Marcel Proust's narrator took a little piece of sponge cake and dipped it into a spoonful of tea. "No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me," Proust wrote in Swann's Way, as translated by CK Scott Moncrieff. The extraordinary thing was an involuntary memory. We know how the story goes, though Proust takes his time in telling it. Many sentences follow, and then: "The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane." Out of this sensation comes the "vast structure of recollection" that taste and smell alone can provide "when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered … "
But what if the tastes and smells of the previous age no longer existed?..."

There are quite a few food items (almost) no longer available to a typical Marathi middle class person.

Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar's (1871-1934 श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर)  book 'Sudamyache Pohe'  (सुदाम्याचे पोहे) - for me one of the greatest prose in Marathi- was first published in 1910. 

It has a wonderfully funny essay : 'Pandutatyanchi Nirjali Ekadashi' (पांडुतात्यांची निर्जळी एकादशी)- 'Pandutatya's water-less fasting day'.

It makes merciless fun of what all some Marathi speaking middle-class (most of them Brahmins) people ate (and still do) on the fasting day in the name of religion. 

courtesy: 'सुदाम्याचे  निवडलेले पोहे' (abridged 'sudamyache pohe'), Varada Prakashan (वरदा प्रकाशन)

After reading the essay, I realised that quite a few fit-for-fasting delicacies listed there- captured in the quotation above-  have never been tasted, or even seen,  by me and probably never will be.
  
The title of the book, at the time of its first publication, was "Arthat Athara Dhanyanche Kadbole"  (अर्थात अठरा धान्यांचे कडबोळे).  I loosely translate it as "meaning pretzel / cracker made from eighteen grains"....Have I tasted or seen such a snack ever? NO!

[The third edition, published in 1923, and later editions of the book came with the subtitle of 'Arthat Sahitya Battishi' (अर्थात साहित्य बत्तिशी)]

                                                          Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar

courtesy: 'Bahurupi' (बहुरूपी), 1957 by Chintaman Ganesh Kolhatkar (चिंतामण गणेश कोल्हटकर)

In 60 Years: Fahrenheit 451 to Fahrenheit 1600!

Wikipedia describes 'Fahrenheit 451', 1953 by Ray Bradbury as a dystopian novel that " presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found."

451 Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper self-ignites and hence the title of the book.
 

 courtesy: Wikipedia


Today if we have to burn all the books, you have to also burn e-books and e-readers. "Firemen" need higher temperature than 451 F to burn them. That temperature supposedly is 1600 F !

Artist: Harry Bliss

 please visit  www.harrybliss.com  for more such pictures