कुठे आहे माधवराव जोशी यांचे 'म्युनिसिपालिटी'?....When V S Khandekar Loved a Satire

 John Gray: “...In his letter commenting on Russell’s book on China, Conrad wrote: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world.’ Russell’s passionate admiration for Conrad may have had a number of sources. One of them was surely his suspicion that Conrad’s sceptical fatalism was a truer account of human life than his own troubled belief in reason and science. As reformer, he believed reason could save the world. As a skeptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of the passions. Sceptical Essays was written as a defence of rational doubt. Today we can read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading rationalist who doubted the power of reason...”. 

Walter Kirn: “...Then, that fall, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 appeared, abruptly downgrading war's special status as an existential crucible and also, unwittingly, beginning the process of rendering four-star male novelists irrelevant. The book treats war on a par with business or politics (to Heller they were very much the same), portraying it as a system for alienating people from their own interests and estranging them from their instincts. Protocol replaces principle, figures plucked from thin air supplant hard facts, and reason becomes rigamarole. Heller's island airbase of freaked-out aviators oppressed by cuckoo officers is the ding-a-ling civilian world in microcosm, not an infernal, tragic realm apart....”

JOSEPH EPSTEIN : “…Chichikov, the character at the heart of Gogol's masterpiece, is a lower-echelon civil servant with a corrupt past who specializes in what Gogol calls "blandiloquence," or elaborately empty compliments. Chichikov was brought up by a father whose last words of advice to his son were to please his superiors, not to be seduced by friendship, and to remember that nothing in life is so important as money—advice, notes Gogol, "that remained deeply engraved in his soul."…” 

मी ललित मासिक घेणे या वर्षी बंद केले. सुदैवाने ललितच्या मार्च २०१९च्या अंकात वि स खांडेकर यांचा '५५ वर्षांपूर्वी' हा लेख वाचायला मिळाला.

त्यातील काही अंश सोबत जोडला आहे.

कृतज्ञता : वि स खांडेकर यांच्या लेखनाचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स आणि 'ललित'

सध्या मला वाईट या गोष्टीचे वाटतंय की जोशींचे नाटक तर मी वाचल नाहीच आहे पण ते आता उपलब्ध तरी आहे का हे सुद्धा मला माहित नाही.

१९२६चे नाटक Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka वगैरे अशा परंपरा सांगत आले होते... जगाने / सिस्टिम ने कसे काम केले पाहिजे हे न सांगता ते प्रत्यक्ष  कस काम करत हे ते सांगत होत. मराठीत विडंबनाचा असा उपयोग  अजूनही विरळा आहे.

आणि आदर्शवादी वाटणारे खांडेकर काय म्हणतायत पहा :
 "... नगरपालिका ही स्वराज्याच्या शिक्षणाची शाळा आहे, अशी श्रद्धा असणाऱ्या आणि समाजाच्या प्रगतीकडे आशावादी दृष्टीने पाहणाऱ्या गंभीर प्रकृतीच्या लोकांना हे विडंबनचित्र पचण्याजोगे नव्हते..."

Madhavrao Joshi's 'Municipality' anticipates Jagte Raho (1956), Catch-22 (1961), Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbari (1968),  Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983)...हे जोशींच्या नाटकाचे मोठेपण....

50 Years After So Huge a Phallic Triumph of Our Aesthetic Instincts

Rod Liddle, The Spectator, September 2018:

"...In truth, the moonshot was quintessentially about American triumphalism and almost nothing else — the good of humanity was not a consideration, except insofar as more successful rocket technology at last put the US ahead of the Soviet Union, behind which repulsive country it had lagged alarmingly, well into the 1960s. It was two fingers to the Russkies and a reminder to the rest of the world that the US was the greatest country on earth. In short, as President Kennedy knew, it was the only thing which could trump Sputnik, Laika and Yuri Gagarin. It won the space race...."

Matthew Walther, July 17 2019:

“...The significance of Apollo also has nothing to do with the speculative images of "space" with fake color embellishments that we put today in front of children who do not know the names of trees and flowers. Nothing could be less awful, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, than today's space program.

I would like to suggest that the moon landing was above all a triumph of our aesthetic instincts. What Goethe began at Weimar in 1789 ended on August 15, 1969. Apollo 11 was the culmination of the Romantic cult of the sublime prefigured in the speculations of Burke and Kant, an artistic juxtaposition of man against a brutal environment upon which he could project his fears, his sympathies, his feelings of transcendence...”

 
W H Auden, August 1969:

Moon Landing

   

 It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for
    so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
        it would not have occurred to women
        to think worth while, made possible only

    because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
    the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
        hurrah the deed, although the motives
        that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.

    A grand gesture. But what does it period?
    What does it osse? We were always adroiter
        with objects than lives, and more facile
        at courage than kindness: from the moment

    the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
    a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's,
        still don't fit us exactly, modern
        only in this---our lack of decorum.

    Homer's heroes were certainly no braver
    than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
        was excused the insult of having
        his valor covered by television.

    Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
    Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
        and was not charmed: give me a watered
        lively garden, remote from blatherers

    about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
    on August mornings I can count the morning
        glories where to die has a meaning,
        and no engine can shift my perspective.

    Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
    as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
        Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
        still visits my Austrian several

    with His old detachment, and the old warnings
    still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
        an ugly finish, Irreverence
        is a greater oaf than Superstition.

    Our apparatniks will continue making
    the usual squalid mess called History:
        all we can pray for is that artists,
        chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

Artist: Tom Gauld

Artist: P.S. Mueller