तक्षक आणि परीक्षित, कोविड-१९ आणि आपण...Recalling Mahabharata During Epidemic of Covid-19

Joseph Epstein, National Review, April 2, 2020:

“…Two of Pascal’s best-known passages come into play in connection with the coronavirus. The first has it that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The second speaks to the human condition: “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom each day are butchered in the sight of others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.” The coronavirus has forced almost all of us, either in enforced or self-imposed quarantine, to sit quietly in our room, and the news of the continuing deaths it is causing — of the obscure and the celebrated — concentrates our minds on Pascal’s dark human condition….”

 

कोरोनाविषाणू मुळे  झालेल्या लॉकडाऊन मध्ये महाभारतातील परीक्षित आणि तक्षकाची गोष्ट आठवत राहती.

परीक्षित स्वतः:ला quarantine करून घेतो, social distancing वाढवतो तरी कडक बंदोबस्तातून तक्षक राजापर्यंत पोचतो. लहानपणी थोडी उंच इमारत दिसली तरी वाटे अशाच कोणा इमारतीच्या टोकाला परीक्षित रहात असावा.

खर सांगायचं म्हणजे पांडवांची मुले अश्वथाम्याने मारतो,  या घटनेच्या सोबत महाभारताचा गिअर बदलतो- यादवी युद्ध (तो सात्यकी इतका आवडायचा आणि इकडे त्याचे चाळे बघा), पांडवांचा हिमालयात मृत्यू , आणि परीक्षिताची गोष्ट. लहान बुद्धीला हादरवून टाकणारे, आतर्क्य प्रकार. 

त्या कथेची एक आवृत्ती, मी वाचलेल्या/ ऐकलेल्या गोष्टीपेक्षा जरा वेगळी,  अशी सांगितली आहे:

"... On the other hand, the son of Kadru was worried. He told his followers ” “Assume the shapes of Brahmins. Only Brahmins are not prevented from entering the ave where the yagna is taking place. Bless the king with fruits and flowers. Take a fruit and give it to him. Don’t go fast but slowly. Don’t let the followers of the king identity you.” 

Having said this, Takshak took shelter inside a fruit. Hearing this, all the serpents assumed the disguise of Brahmins. They went to the place where the king was seated, with many fruits and flowers. Brahmins were not prevented from crossing the doors of the King. They blessed the king will fruits and flowers which the King accepted with delight. Seeing a damaged fruit, the king damaged it further with his nails. A tiny red coloured insect was within it. The king saw its black face and told his ministers “Today’s the seventh day for which I was cursed. One minute is left for sunset. It is strange that the Brahmin’s curse is about to fail. This curse is supposed to be infallible. That’s why my mind is tensed. Let this insect be the Takshak and bite me so that the Brahmin’s word is not falsified.”

Having said this, he placed the insect on his head. When the ministers saw this, they warned” Don’t let this happen”. The king was debating with ministers about this, when the Takshak assumed it’s shape and roared like the cloud at the time of end of civilization. The ministers fled as soon as they heard the sound. Everyone was frightened on beholding the dangerous look of Takshak. Takshak held the body of the king with its tail. One thousand tongues of the Takshak assumed the shape of an umbrella. With a sound, Takshak bit the King’s head, after which it disappeared in space. The king was burning along with the platform, in the fire caused by the poison. His body was like a red lotus. The ministers wept at the demise of the king. This news also made everyone in the inner courtyard weep. The funeral rites of the King were immediately performed...."

लहानपणी ऐकल्यापासून ही गोष्ट मला अतिशय भीतीदायक आणि आयुष्यातील अटळता दाखवून देणारी वाटली आहे. 

अर्थात ह्या घटनेच्या आधीची परीक्षिताची वागणूक (१) आणि त्याच्या मृत्यनंतर त्याच्या वारसदारांनी केलेले सर्पसत्र (२) हे सगळेच परीक्षिताच्या मृत्यूइतके क्लेशकारक आहे. 

(१) “…‘Janamejaya said, “In our lineage, no king has ever been born who did not look after the welfare of his subjects and please them. Consider especially the conduct of my grandfathers, who were always devoted to a great life. How did my father, who was like them, come to his end? Describe it accurately to me. I wish to hear it.”’

Souti said, ‘Thus asked by the king, the ministers, who were always engaged in that which brought pleasure to the king, told him everything that had happened. The ministers said, “O king! Your father was always addicted to hunting, like the greatly fortunate warrior and great archer, Pandu. He handed over all matters concerning the running of the kingdom to us. On one occasion, he was roaming in the forest and pierced a deer with an arrow. Having thus shot the deer, he pursued it deep into the forest, alone and on foot, with his sword, quiver and bow ready. But your father could not find that lost deer deep inside the forest. He was sixty years old and aged and felt tired and hungry. He then saw a great sage in that great forest. The lord of kings asked the sage, who at that time was observing a vow of silence and thus the sage did not reply to any of the questions. In his vow of silence, the sage sat motionless and peaceful like a piece of wood, and hungry and thirsty and not knowing that the sage was observing a vow of silence, the king became angry with the sage. Being angry, your father insulted the sage. O best of the Bharata lineage! With the end of his bow, he picked up a dead snake from the ground and placed it around the shoulders of that pure-souled sage. But that wise one did not utter a word, good or bad, and did not become angry. He remained as he was, with the snake around his shoulders.”’…”

('The Mahabharata Volume 1' , अनुवाद: Bibek Debroy)

(२) Arun Kolatkar (अरुण कोलटकर), 'Sarpa Satra', 2003/2004, page 56:

 "...A nice yajnya, this.

Not a single sacrificial post in sight.

No ropes, no knives.

There's no need for the queen,

or anybody else,

to lead the animal to the killing field

and take its life by smothering it,

bludgeoning it,

or worse.

No need to carve up the parts

-omentum, liver, lung, bladder,

genitals-

and cook them separately;

or to roast

the victim's still-bleeding heart on a spit.

Oh no. Nothing of the sort.

Nothing crude.

It's all sorcery: mantras do it all..."

 'सर्पसत्र', १९२० च्या सुमारास अज्ञात कलाकाराने काढलेले चित्र 

सौजन्य : विकिपीडिया

China In One Word: Bamboozle!....Yu Hua's 2010 Book

The Guardian, April 17 2020: “Friday briefing: China admits Wuhan deathtoll 50% higher”

यु हुआ यांचे 'China in Ten Words' हे २०१० साली प्रसिद्ध झालेले पुस्तक खूप गाजले.

ते दहा शब्द आहेत:

 People

 Leader

 Reading

 Writing

 Lu Xun

 Revolution

 Disparity

 Grassroots

 Copycat

 Bamboozle (忽悠)

Bamboozle ह्या चॅप्टरची सुरवात त्या अशी करतात :

"What is ?* Originally it meant “to sway unsteadily”—like fishing boats bobbing on the waves, for example, or leaves shaking in the wind. Later it developed a new life as an idiom particularly popular in northeast China, derived from another phrase that sounds almost the same: —“to mislead.” Just as variant strains of the flu virus keep constantly appearing,  has in its lexical career diversified itself into a dazzling range of meanings. Hyping things up and laying it on thick—that’s . Playing a con trick and ripping somebody off—that’s , too. In the first sense, the word has connotations of bragging, as well as enticement and entrapment; in the second sense, it carries shades of dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. “Bamboozle,” perhaps, is the closest English equivalent.

In China today, “bamboozle” is a new star in the lexical firmament, fully the equal of “copycat” in its charlatan status. Both count as linguistic nouveau riche, but their rises to glory took somewhat different courses. The copycat phenomenon emerged in collectivist fashion, like bamboo shoots springing up after spring rain, whereas “bamboozle” had its source in an individual act of heroism—the hero in question being China’s most influential comedian, a northeasterner named Zhao Benshan. In a legendary skit performed a few years ago, Zhao Benshan gave “bamboozling” its grand launch, announcing to the world:

I can bamboozle the tough into acting tame,

Bamboozle the gent into dumping the dame,

Bamboozle the innocent into taking the blame,

Bamboozle the winner into conceding the game.

I’m selling crutches today, so this is my aim:

I’ll bamboozle a man into thinking he’s lame.

In “Selling Crutches” he proceeds with infinite guile, trapping the fall guy in one psychological snare after another, exquisitely employing deception and hoax to lead him down the garden path until in the end a man whose legs are perfectly normal is convinced he’s a cripple and purchases—at great expense—a shoddy pair of crutches...."

While We Were Celebrating Our Victory Over Polio, Small Pox Causing Virus and such....

William H. McNeill, ‘Plagues and Peoples', March 1997:

 

“….The climate of medical opinion has changed considerably since this book came out, for in 1976 many doctors believed that infectious diseases had lost their power to affect human lives seriously. Scientific medicine, they supposed, had finally won decisive victory over disease germs. Newly discovered antibiotics and relatively simple prophylactic and public health measures had at last made infections easy to prevent and cure. The World Health Organization actually succeeded in eliminating smallpox from the face of the earth in the same year this book was published, and optimists believed that other infections, like measles, might go the same way if sufficient medical effort were put into worldwide campaigns to isolate and cure each and every infection.

A glance at my concluding remarks on this page will show that I did not accept this view of what doctors had accomplished, and it is now clear that the elimination of smallpox in 1976 was the high point of the World Health Organization’s remarkably successful post-World War II campaign to reduce human deaths from infections. Thereafter, infectious organisms launched a counteroffensive. The appearance of AIDS was the first notable landmark of this process; and despite initial expectations, the subsequent identification of the HIV-1 virus that causes AIDS has not yet led to a cure.

 

Development of resistant strains of malaria, TB, and other familiar infections was a second, and in many ways more important, sign that twentieth-century victories over the parasitic microorganisms that feed upon our bodies was only an unusually dramatic and drastic disturbance of the age-old balance between human hosts and disease organisms. As the century comes to its close, it seems sure that infections are coming back, regaining some of their old importance for human life; and medical men have begun to recognize how their increasingly powerful interventions had the unexpected effect of accelerating the biological evolution of disease germs, making them impervious to one after another form of chemical attack…

 

…The apparent conquest of infectious diseases between 1884, when Robert Koch first identified the cholera bacillus, and 1976, when WHO succeeded in eliminating smallpox, was assuredly one of the most drastic disturbances of older ecological balances ever achieved by human beings. Nonetheless, the way infectious diseases have begun to come back shows that we remain caught in the web of life—permanently and irretrievably—no matter how clever we are at altering what we do not like, or how successful we become at displacing other species.

 

This book explores one important aspect of our extraordinary capability for altering natural balances, and the limitations of those capabilities. Nothing that has happened since it was written contradicts its general thrust. We remain part of the earth’s ecosystem, and participate in the food chain whereby we kill and eat various plants and animals, while our bodies provide a fair field full of food for a great variety of parasites. No conceivable change in the earth’s ecosystem will alter that fundamental condition of human life, even though changes in our knowledge and behavior can and will continue to alter the incidence of disease and the array of what we eat….”

 

 

Even If We Are Wicked, It’s Still Nice To Be Here...: Albert Einstein's Favorite 'Brothers Karamazov'

Fyodor Dostoevsky: “....“Give him something, Mitya,” Grushenka kept saying; “you must make him some nice present. He’s so poor and he has to put up with so much ! . . . You know what, Mitya—I think I’ll become a nun. I’m not just saying that, I mean it—I’ll end up in a convent some day. Alyosha said something to me before I came here, something I’ll always remember. Tomorrow it’ll be the convent, but today I’ll dance! I want to have a wild time today, good people! Now what’s wrong with that? I’m sure God will forgive me. If I were God, I’d forgive everyone. ‘My dear sinners,’ I’d say to them, ‘as of today, you are all forgiven!’ Tomorrow I’ll go and ask people for forgiveness: ‘Forgive me, stupid woman that I am,’ I’ll beg them. I’m a beast, that’s what I am, and I want to pray. I gave away an onion, though. A vicious woman like me needs to pray. Mitya, let them dance; don’t interfere. Everyone in the world, without exception, is good. It’s nice to live in the world—even if we are wicked, it’s still nice to be here . . . We’re both good and bad, bad and good . . . Come over here, everybody, come over here! I want every one of you to tell me why I am so good. Because I am good, am I not, very, very good? All right then, tell me why I am so good.”

Grushenka went on and on like this, getting more and more drunk, and in the end declared that she wanted to dance all by herself. She rose from her armchair, staggering.

“Don’t give me any more wine, Mitya,” she mumbled, “don’t. Wine won’t give me peace. Everything is turning, turning, the stove is turning . . . I want to dance. I want everyone to watch me dance. I want everyone to admire how marvelously I can dance . . .”...” (Book Eight: Mitya, 'The Brothers Karamazov', 1880)   (translatorAndrew R. MacAndrew)

Untitled (Grushenka and Mitya at the Drunken Party), ca. 1938, 14 ¼” x 10”. 

Artist: Alice Neel (1900-1984) 

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.