Sindbad, J S Alvarenga and Scurvy in Marathi

Wikipedia: José Salvador Alvarenga is a Salvadoran man who became known after being found on 30 January 2014 in the Marshall Islands, and claimed to have spent 13 months at sea in a fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean.

John Keay, 'The Honourable Company/ A History of the English East India Company', 1993:

"...After frantic preparations Lancaster sailed from Woolwich with four ships in February 1601. The Red Dragon, his flagship, had been bought from the Earl of Cumberland who was at this time the only titled member of the Company. The vessel partook of his Lordship’s ‘quality’. She was of 600 tons, had been built for privateering in the West Indies, and like most subsequent ‘East Indiamen’ was as much warship as cargo carrier with thirty-eight guns plus space, if not accommodation, for 200 men. To maintain her complement at 200 Lancaster, mindful of past disasters, prescribed lemon juice for all ranks. Three spoonfuls per man were administered every morning as they sailed into the scurvy latitudesof the south Atlantic. The dosage seemed to work. During the six months that it took to reach the Cape the men of the Red Dragonremained in rude health..."

Felipe Fernández-Armesto:

"...Magellan's pioneering crossing, made diagonally between Chile and Guam, with the trade winds for most of the way, between 28 November 1520 and 6 March 1521. By the end of the journey the explorers were starving, champing painfully—they claimed—on the leather covers from the yards with jaws weakened by scurvy, drinking putrid water, and eating wormy biscuit "which stank strongly of rats' urine." The voyage exposed the intimidating vastness of a one-way ocean which could be crossed, at terrible hazard and cost, but not recrossed..." 

 ('MILLENNIUM / A History of the Last Thousand Years', 1995)

William H. McNeill, 'PLAGUES AND PEOPLES', 1977/1998:

"...Indeed, even after a British naval surgeon, James Lind, published the results of his carefully controlled experiments that proved the efficacy of fresh lemons and oranges in curing scurvy (1753), the Admiralty did not act. The reason was partly pecuniary: citrus fruit was expensive and scarce and could not be stored for very long. Partly too, the naval authorities believed other cures were suitable, e.g., the sauerkraut Captain James Cook fed his crews in the Pacific. Moreover, when in 1795 the Admiralty did decide on citrus juices as the best preventative for scurvy and prescribed a daily ration for all sailors on shipboard, the result was imperfect..."

 

Once scurvy was a dreaded disease and also a funny thing.

Frances Wilson,  'Jokes of Old', ( review of Simon Dickie's  'Cruelty & Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century'):  
 
"...In fact, anything to do with hunchbacks, club feet, cleft palates, harelips, scurvy, jaundice, rickets, epilepsy, asthma, syphilis, deafness, blindness, squints, missing limbs, long chins or stammers was guaranteed to set the table a-roar..."

On August 5 2013, I wrote a post "Marathi Literature at Sea!...मराठी साहित्यात समुद्राच वास्तव किती सातत्याने दुर्लक्षित केलं आहे."


In February 2014, I read about the latest 'castaway' Mr. Alvarenga.

Not every one is convinced of his story. One of the reasons for skepticism: "it's hard to think how anybody could go more than six or seven months without getting scurvy at least." 

I first read the word scurvy in my primary school  and I took any interest in it because one got full marks if one knew its connection with Vitamin C.

Before I read any European literature or history,  I knew only one sailor: Sindbad,  and I never read about him or his fellow seamen getting any scurvy.

'Sindbad the Sailor and the old man of the sea'  

Artist: Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

(That old man in the Sindbad story scared bejesus out of me much before Narayan Dharap नारायण धारप came along. Does that old man represent scurvy?)

I was never told by our book or teacher that "Between 1500 and 1800, it has been estimated that scurvy killed at least two million sailors.": 25 times the then entire population of Miraj (मिरज)! If I was, I would have sat up and taken notice.

Is there is a word for scurvy in Marathi? (Is there in Tamil or Bengali?) I could not find it in Marathi.

 Google Translate interprets it as "क्षुद्र, नीच, गचाळ, जीवनसत्वाच्या अभावाने उद्‍भवणारा एक प्रकारचा रक्तरोग"...hardly helps


One possible reason for  English scurvy to remain Marathi scurvy- just like plague, flu, HIV/AIDS etc but unlike smallpox, cholera, syphilis, scabies, jaundice etc- is because we came to know of it via Europeans. 

We were never at sea for that long! 

Artist: Warren Miller, The New Yorker, 6 September 1969

Whoever he is, he is not Marathi (मराठी)!

Bob Marley (and Anju) In The Heart of Aniruddha

Today February 6 2014 is 69th Birth Anniversary of Bob Marley (It also is my wife's birthday)

Baz Dreisinger,  review of 'Bob Marley:The Untold Story' by Chris Salewicz, 2011:

"Four hundred pages into this biography, I ultimately found myself staring at the singer’s photo on the cover and wondering who Bob Marley truly was. Neither minutiae nor set lists nor copies of expense reports — nor Salewicz’s pat claims about Marley’s mixed-race identity leaving him “alienated and ostracized” as a boy, nor Rita Marley’s assertion that “Bob had a lot of hurt” — ultimately provide a portrait of the artist as a human being. But that, in the end, has its benefits: it keeps Marley ever elusive, allowing for one more book, one more film, one more story that’s never been told." 

Noel George Williams/ Bob Marley:
 
"Buffalo soldier, dreadlock rasta:
There was a buffalo soldier in the heart of america,
Stolen from africa, brought to america,
Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival..."
 

Artist: Jean Philippe Talamon

Courtesy: Bob Marley Facebook Cover Art Contest

Difficult Art of Parody: Two Poets and Five Visual Artists...विडंबन

Today February 3 2014 is 87th Birthday of Vasant Sarwate, the greatest cartoonist India has produced

Eric Ormsby, review of "The Oxford Book of Parodies" by John Gross : 

"Parody is a form of impersonation, obviously, but also collaboration. What makes it so pleasurable, as Mr. Gross's anthology shows on every page, is not just the accuracy of the performance, though that's certainly essential. In the funniest parodies, there is the faint but unmistakable sense of giddy collusion; and in such improbable duets the parodist can't always be distinguished from the parodied."

 
Other than the late  Pralhad Keshav Atre's (प्रल्हाद केशव अत्रे) 1898-1969 "Jhenduchi Phule" (झेंडूची फुले)  and some of Vasant Sarwate's (वसंत सरवटे) drawings. there has been little of highest quality in Marathi that caricatures the famous art work.

(Sarwate has parodied not just great visual artists but Marathi prose writers. His latter work is one of the best I have seen by any artist in the world. More on this, some other time.)

'Jhenduchi Phule' caricatures some of the, then, most popular Marathi poems of established writers. And, for my taste, many of Atre's poems are better than the original ones!

For example, the following poem lampoons Keshavsut's 1866-1905 (केशवसुत)  poem "Aamhi Kon" (आम्ही कोण):

"'आम्ही कोण?' म्हणून काय पुसता दांताड वेंगाडुनी?

'फोटो' मासिक पुस्तकात न तुम्ही का आमुचा पाहिला?
किंवा 'गुच्छ' 'तरंग' 'अंजलि' कसा अद्यापि न वाचला?
चाले ज्यावरति अखंड स्तुतिचा वर्षाव पत्रांतुनी?

ते आम्ही-परवाङ्मयातिल करू चोरुन भाषांतरे,
ते आम्ही-न कुणास देउ अगदी याचा सुगावा परी!
डोळ्यांदेखत घालुनी दरवडा आम्ही कुबेराघरी!
त्याचे वाग्धन वापरून लपवू ही आमुची लक्तरे!

काव्याची भरगच्च घेउनि सदा काखोटिला पोतडी,
दावू गाउनि आमुच्याच कविता आम्हीच रस्त्यामधे,
दोस्तांचे घट बैसवून करु या आम्ही तयांचा 'उदे'
दुष्मानावर एकजात तुटुनी की लोंबवू चामडी!

आम्हाला वगळा-गतप्रभ झणी होतील साप्ताहिके!
आम्हाला वगळा-खलास सगळी होतील ना मासिके!

केशवसुत, क्षमा करा."

Kshavsut's original poem is here:

"आम्ही कोण म्हणूनि काय पुससी? आम्ही असू लाडके-
देवाचे दिधले असे जग तये आम्हांस खेळावया;
विश्वी या प्रतिभाबले विचरतो चोहीकडे लीलया,
दिक्कालांतुनि आरपार अमुची दृष्टी पहाया शके

सारेही बडिवार येथिल पहा! आम्हांपुढे ते फिके;
पाणिस्पर्शच आमुचा शकतसे वस्तूंप्रती द्यावया -
सौंदर्यातिशया, अशी वसतसे जादू करांमाजि या;
फोले पाखडिता तुम्ही, निवडितो ते सत्त्व आम्ही निके!

शून्यामाजि वसाहती वसविल्या कोणी सुरांच्या बरे?
पृथ्वीला सुरलोक साम्य झटती आणावया कोण ते?
ते आम्हीच, सुधा कृतींमधुनिया ज्यांच्या सदा पाझरे;
ते आम्हीच शरण्य, मंगल तुम्हां ज्यांपासुनी लाभते!

आम्हांला वगळा - गतप्रभ झणी होतील तारांगणे;
आम्हांला वगळा - विकेल कवडीमोलावरी हे जिणे!"

For me, P K Atre was as talented as Keshavsut.


Here is as example of Sarwate lampooning Rodin.

Artist: Vasant Sarwate

Artist: Anatol Kovarsky, The New Yorker  

(Mr. Kovarsky is 94 years old and still drawing!)

Artist: Peter Duggan,  The Guardian, May 2 2012

Artist: Auguste Rodin , 1902

courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

p.s. on February 5 2014

"The Thinker", 1913

Artist: Franz Kafka
 

Maximilian Schell

Maximilian Schell  died on February 1 2014.

Only last month I watched, one more time, Stanley Kramer's 'Judgement at Nuremberg', 1961

This year, as we observe 100th anniversary of the start of the World War I, the film now adds even more poignancy.

There are many moments I love from the film. One of them takes place towards the end.


"Hans Rolfe (played by Schell): I'll make you a wager...

Judge Dan Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy): I don't make wagers.

Hans Rolfe: [chuckles] A gentleman's wager... in five years, the men you sentenced to life imprisonment will be free.

Judge Dan Haywood: Herr Rolfe, I have admired your work in the court for many months. You are particularly brilliant in your use of logic...

[Rolfe nods with an appreciative smile]

Judge Dan Haywood: -so, what you suggest may very well happen. It is logical, in view of the times in which we live. But to be logical is not to be right, and nothing on God's earth could ever make it right!"

courtesy: the distributor of the film, United Artists or the publisher of the film

Horse is Always the Foreigner in India: the Chinese Year of the Horse

January 31 2014 Friday marks the Chinese Year of the Horse, which stands for strength, loyalty, boldness and vigour.

Wendy Doniger, 'The Hindus / An Alternative History', 2009

"...It is therefore part of the very structure of history that India has always had to import horses, which became prized animals, used only in elite royal or military circles. And so the horse is always the foreigner in India, the invader and conqueror, and the history of the horse in India is the history of those who came to India and took power. There is still a Hindi saying that might be translated, “Stay away from the fore of an officer and the aft of a horse” or “Don’t get in front of an officer or behind a horse.” It dates from a time when petty officials, especially police, revenue collectors, and record keepers, were mounted and everyone else was not. These horsemen were high-handed (“ . . . on your high horse”) and cruel, people whom it was as wise to avoid as it was to keep out of the range of those back hooves.

The horse stands as the symbol of the power and aristocracy of the Kshatriyas, the royal warrior class; the horse is the key to major disputes, from the wager about the color of a horse’s tail made by the mother of snakes and the mother of birds in the Mahabharata (1.17-23) (an early instance of gambling on horses), to heated arguments by contemporary historians about the seemingly trivial question of whether Aryan horses galloped or ambled into the Indus Valley or the Punjab, more than three thousand years ago. Horses continued to be idealized in religion and art, in stark contrast with the broken-down nags that one more often actually encounters in the streets of Indian cities. Under the influence of the Arab and Turkish preference for mares over stallions, the Hindu bias in favor of stallions and against mares gave way to an entire Hindu epic literature that idealized not stallions but mares. Finally, horses are also metaphors for the senses that must be harnessed, yoked through some sort of spiritual and physical discipline such as yoga (a word whose basic meaning is “to yoke,” as in “to yoke horses to a chariot”)..."

Horse on  the Asoka Column at Sarnath, 250 BCE

Artist: Anonymous
 

She May Look Clean....How Syphilis Shaped The World We Live in

sexual health warnings from the second world war

Photograph: National Library of Medicine, UK        Courtesy: The Guardian, June 6 2013

Smallpox became small because syphilis once was a big pox!

Sarah Dunant:

"And then there are the artists; poets, painters, philosophers, composers. Some wore their
infection almost as a badge of pride: The Earl of Rochester, Casanova, Flaubert in his letters. In
Voltaire's Candide, Pangloss can trace his chain of infection right back to a Jesuit novice who
caught it from a woman who caught it from a sailor in the new world. Others were more
secretive. Shame is a powerful censor in history, and in its later stages syphilis, known as the
"great imitator", mimics so many other diseases that it's easy to hide the truth. Detective work
by writers such as Deborah Hayden (The Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis)
count Schubert, Schumann, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Flaubert, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Wilde and
Joyce with contentious evidence around Beethoven and Hitler. Her larger question – how might
the disease itself have affected their creative process – is a tricky one...

...Guy de Maupassant, who started triumphant ("I can screw street whores now and say to them 'I've got the pox.' They are afraid and I just laugh"), died 15 years later in an asylum howling like a dog and planting twigs as baby Maupassants in the garden."

(Guardian, May 20 2013)

CARL F. NATHAN:

"Even infections that used to be a breeze to treat, like gonorrhea, are becoming incurable." 

(The New York Times, December 9 2012)

शरद जोशी:

" ...जगाचा इतिहास 'सिफिलिस' या आजाराने मोठय़ा प्रमाणावर बदलला आहे. हा लैंगिक आजार व त्याचे जंतू हळूहळू मेंदूपर्यंत पसरतात आणि रोग्याच्या मनात त्यामुळे विनाकारणच काही तरी भव्यदिव्य करून दाखवावे अशी बुद्धी तयार होते. त्याकरिता आवश्यक तर हजारो नाही, लाखो लोकांचेही मुडदे पाडायला तो सहज तयार होऊन जातो. इतिहासात रशियातील पहिले तीन झार आणि अलीकडच्या इतिहासातील माओ त्से तुंग वगरे पुढारी या वर्गात मोडतात. भारतातल्याही एका नामवंत पुढाऱ्याची गणना यातच होते. आपण अकबराचे अवतार आहोत अशी भावना करून घेऊन त्यापोटी सगळा देश लायसेन्स-परमिट-कोटा-इन्स्पेक्टर राज्यात बुडवणारे आणि इंग्रजांनी प्रस्थापित केलेली कायदा आणि सुव्यवस्था संपवून टाकणारे नेतेही या वर्गातलेच." 

(Loksatta लोकसत्ता, May 29 2013)

The Times of India reported in November 2011:

"India is on the verge of eliminating syphilis, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases (STD) in the country. According to the National Aids Control Organization (NACO), syphilis, which earlier used to affect about 8% of pregnant women, has been reduced to less than 1%. Among female sex workers, it affects about 4% as against 30% till a few years ago."

I wonder about the veracity of this claim because Guardian article from which I have quoted above says:

"...Of course, we have not seen the end of syphilis – worldwide millions of people still contract it,
and there are reports, especially within the sex industry, that it is on the increase in recent
years..."


Marlene Zuk wrote in The New York Times on April 29, 2008:

"The new research suggested that syphilis originated as a skin ailment in South America, and then spread to Europe, where it became sexually transmitted and was later reintroduced to the New World.

The origin of syphilis has always held an implied accusation: if Europeans brought it to the New World, the disease is one more symbol of Western imperialism run amok, one more grudge to hold against colonialism…"

Jared Diamond says about it:

“…when syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall off people’s faces, and led to death within a few months. By 1546, syphilis had evolved into the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today.”

('Guns, Germs, and Steel', 1997)

Michael Crichton says about it:

“…You can carry tuberculosis for many decades; you can carry syphilis for a lifetime. These last are not minor diseases, but they are much less severe than they once were, because both man and organism have adapted…”

('The Andromeda Strain', 1969)

This less severe syphilis (उपदंश) might have accosted a few prominent historical personalities that shaped India's destiny.

T S Shejwalkar (त्र्यं. शं. शेजवलकर) says in his classic "पानिपत, 1761" (Panipat):

“Ahmad Shah Abdali probably had a disease like syphilis and so too was the case of Najib khan”.

Battle of Panipat,  14th January 1761

courtesy: 'Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire' by Sheila Corr,  
from History Today, December 2012

Shejwalkar also speculates that a few prominent personalities from 18th century Maharashtra too might have suffered from the disease.

These bigwigs married multiple times and also kept mistresses. One reason, he argues, they married very young girls late in their life because it was believed an intercourse with such a girl would rid them of the disease. The other possible reason was hypothesized increase in virility that came after mating with such a girl.

Belief still exists in parts of today's India that “… having sex with a ''fresh'' girl can cure syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases, including the virus that causes AIDS.”

(JOHN F. BURNS, The New York Times May 11, 1998)

Indeed the disease played a decisive role in the history of the world.

Guardian , again : "How far his (Cesare Borgia)  behaviour, oscillating between lethargy and manic energy, was also the impact of the disease we will never know. He survived it long enough to be cut to pieces escaping from a Spanish prison. Meanwhile, in the city of Ferrara, his beloved sister Lucrezia, then married to a duke famed for extramarital philandering, suffered repeated miscarriages – a powerful sign of infection in female sufferers. For those of us wedded to turning history into fiction, the story of syphilis proves the cliche: truth is stranger than anyone could make up."


Artist: Dana Fradon, The New Yorker, 29 August 1959

"Have you heard about poor spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum? They've discovered a cure for him."

...well, not yet for syphilis

But First Our National Anthem!

Today January 26 2014 is India's 65th Republic Day

Thomas Meaney:

"..."You have been infected by the virus of European imperialism!” he (Rabindranath Tagore) told his Japanese contact, Toyama Mitsuru. For Tagore, the nation-state was a tragedy in the making for Asian peoples. “Now after [the Great War],” he told a Japanese audience, “do you not hear everywhere the denunciation of this spirit of the Nation, this collective egoism of the people, which is universally hardening their hearts?”..."

(The Nation, May 15 2013) 

विनोबा भावे:

"…स्वातंत्र्यप्राप्तीनंतर  आता पुढे काय? आता कोणते युग  येईल? आता जागतिक युग येईल.  त्या भावी युगाकडे दृष्टी ठेवून आपणांस क्षुद्र अभिमान सोडावे लागतील. भाषेचा अभिमान, देशाचा अभिमान वगैरे सर्वच अभिमान सोडावे लागतील. भारताचा अभिमान देखील सोडवा लागेल. आजच्या युगाला जरुरी आहे जय-जगतची. सर्व जगताचा जय असो!…" 

('ज्ञान ते सांगतो पुन्हा', 2004/2006)


Don Barzini in 'The Godfather', 1972:

"Times have changed. It's not like the old days when we could do anything we want. A refusal is not the act of a friend. Don Corleone had all the judges and the politicians in New York, and he must share them. He must let us draw the water from the well. Certainly, he can present a bill for such services. After all, we are not Communists."

Trilochan Sastry, EPW, January 4 2014:

"Based on publicly available data of over 62,800 candidates, who contested national and state assembly elections from 2004 to 2013, it shows that both crime and money play an important role in winning elections."

The way nationalism works in a modern democracy...two examples...

 1. A turkey tries to survive Thanksgiving Day ...

Artist: Mike Twohy, The New Yorker

2. And gangsters go to work...

Artist: Tom Cheney, The New Yorker