The Vast Majority of Humans Today have Never Seen an Unpolluted, Natural Night Sky

 तारारूपाणि यानीह दृश्यन्ते द्युतिमन्ति वै । दीपवद् विप्रकृष्टत्वादणूनि सुमहान्त्यपि ॥३.४३.३०॥  (महाभारत, आरण्यकपर्व) " The luminous stars, thought really very large, appear small and twinkle like lamps on account of their great distance. "

लहानपणी मिरजेला अनेक वेळा घरासमोरील त्यावेळी कमी रहदारी असलेल्या रस्त्यात रात्र पडल्यावर बसत असू (आम्हाला अंगण आणि गच्ची नव्हते) आणि साहजिकच नजर वरती जाऊन चंद्राची अनेक रूपे , चांदण्या पहिल्या आहेत... चंद्र अगदी घरचा वाटे... त्याच्या पृष्ठभागावर कल्पना करू ती गोष्ट दिसत असे... हरीण, ससा वगैरे... आता आकाशाकडे केंव्हातरी पाहतो... 

Rebecca Boyle reviewing "Starborn: How the Stars Made Us (and Who We Would Be Without Them)" By Roberto Trotta, 2024 for WSJ:

"...The vast majority of humans today have never seen an unpolluted, natural night sky. They have never seen the gauzy stripe of the Milky Way arcing overhead on a summer evening, the fuzz of the Andromeda Galaxy, the faint stars that fill in the empty space between the brightest constellations. It is a great paradox of our age that even as the night sky is screened by a haze of artificial lighting, the glowing rectangles we hold in our palms can bring us to the edges of the universe. As Mr. Trotta artfully puts it: “The pixelized ghosts of photons that chanced to fall onto the mirrors of our giant telescopes after a few billion years’ journey through space are served up from the cloud in an instant.”..."

Stars over Biwa Lake, by Shoda Koho, 1930

 

Philip Ball's Enjoyable Drubbing of Richard Dawkins

John Gray:

"...In a well-known passage at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declared: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…” What is most in demand at the start of the 21st century, in contrast, is consolation and nothing else. Enlightenment fundamentalism—the insistence by writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that our salvation lies in affirming a highly selective set of “Enlightenment values”—serves this emotional need for meaning rather than any imperative of understanding. Like the religions they disparage, but with less profundity and little evident effect, the varieties of Enlightenment thinking on offer today are balm for the uneasy soul. The scientific-sounding formulae with which they appease their anxiety—the end of history, the flat world, the inexorable but forever delayed process of secularisation—are more fantastical than anything in Freud’s “gloomy mythology.”..."

 In Maharashtra, for a group of people, Richard Dawkins has been a 'deity'  oops "a great social reformer" for some time!...his takedown was necessary, of course the people I referred mayn't learn a thing from this...

 James McConnachie, The Times UK, Jan 7 2004:

 

"...You could read this book as a 500-page drubbing of Richard Dawkins. It is not a personal attack — although some barbed words are aimed — but it is a robust and sustained takedown of the “simplistic”, “distorted”, “barren” and “intellectually thin” notion that biology is all about the gene. There is very much more to life than that, according to Philip Ball. It might even have some meaning.

 

...He wonders why genes were ever worshipped so ardently. Maybe it is because DNA conveniently offers a new home for the age-old idea of an “essence”, or soul. Maybe it has something to do with the male scientists who have so often pushed gene-centric thinking while their female colleagues have pushed back. Ball coyly declines to offer any interpretation of that last, curious fact, but I’m happy to try to fill in. Does glorifying DNA cry up the relatively limited role of the man in the creation of a child?

 

As for Dawkins’s notorious claim that we are machines made by genes, this “alarming gambit” represents “a sterilisation of the life sciences”. It gives the gene “an almost sentient agency it does not possess”. Biologists have developed an allergy to words such as “purpose” and “meaning” — which all too easily open the door to those waiting to usher a god back in. Ball does not want to do that, but he does want to revalorise life — rich, complex multicellular life — while shoving the gene back in its proper place.

 

For Ball, the possession of agency — and purpose, and even meaning — is precisely how you might characterise life. Life, then, is not the servant of the selfish gene. Life happens at other levels. In the cell. In the organism. In us."

 

 

When Jacob Epstein Met Rabindranath Tagore...

 I saw very ordinary Netflix documentary of Albert Einstein ("Einstein and the Bomb") in February 2024. An important scene (that I liked) there is of Sir Jacob Epstein making his portrait bust in 1933.

I was going through Epstein's book "Let There Be Sculpture", 1940 where he has written about his making of bust of Rabindranath Tagore in 1926.

Epstein writes: "...“I am he that sitteth among the poorest, the loneliest, and the lost.”

This quotation from Gitanjali was strangely contradicted by my sitter, whose handsome, commanding presence inspired in his followers awe and a craven obedience. On entering my house I brought to him for presentation a little Indian boy, Enver, who was living with me. He was the son of Sunita. Tagore looked at him and asked, “A Hindu?” I said, “No, a Moslem,” whereat Rabindranath lifted his eyes to the ceiling and passed on...The manners of Tagore were aloof, dignified, and cold; and if he needed anything only one word of command to his disciples escaped him.

It has been remarked that my bust of him rests upon the beard, an unconscious piece of symbolism."

 

When Godot Knows You are Waiting...

 

 courtesy: The Spectator, UK

सुंदर मी होणार,, सुंदर ती झाली ...श्रावण मासी , हर्ष मानसी....Indian Hockey

मराठीतील एक अप्रतिम कविता म्हणजे कवी गोविंदांची  (१८७४-१९२६)

"सुंदर मी होणार, आतां सुंदर मी होणार !

सुंदर मी होणार । हो । मरणाने जगणार ।धृ.।

.... 

मी १२ वर्षांचा असताना , माझ्या डोळ्यादेखत, भारतीय हॉकी ची अवस्था  १९७२ च्या म्युनिक ऑलिम्पिक मध्ये  वाईट झाली.

 त्या  वर्षी ब्रॉन्झ मिळाल्यावर  प्रचंड टीकेचा आणि उपहासाचा सामना करायला लागला होता. १९७५ साली आपण कसाबसा वर्ल्ड काप जिंकला खरा पण आपली घसरण  सुरु झाली आहे अशी भीती वाटायला लागली होती. ती खरी ठरली. नंतर ब्रॉंझ सुद्धा मृगजळ ठरू लागले.

२०२१ सालच्या टोकियो ऑलिम्पिकस पर्यंत मी सर्वआशा  सोडल्या होत्या. 

पण भारताची मोडलेली, अपंग हॉकी त्या वर्षी पुन्हा सुंदर झाली , आणि आज चार वर्षांनंतर तिचे  सौन्दर्य कायम आहे.... 

माझे बालपण परतले , श्रावण मासी , हर्ष मानसी अशी अवस्था ह्या पदकाने सर्वात जास्त झाली आहे

Indian Hockey team with their bronze on August 8 2024

What do you call Diarrhea of Wokeness?

 

 

artist: Harry Bliss

Alexandria and India...what empty words these kingdoms were

Islam Issa, 'Alexandria: The City that Changed the World', 2024:

"...Alexandrians also made the most of their location to travel. In the second century BCE, the Ptolemies learnt how to use the monsoon winds to sail directly from the Red Sea to the Indian coast, thus taking complete control of the Red Sea ports. Strabo records fleets of more than 120 ships setting sail towards India. According to a cargo list on a papyrus discovered in the late twentieth century, a huge ship named Hermapollon crossed the Indian Ocean and its crew returned to Alexandria with some 140 tonnes of pepper, 80 boxes of muskroot plants and 167 elephant tusks weighing 3.3 tonnes. On other occasions, they would return with sparkling gemstones and pearls, in addition to fine silks. They also brought back malabathrum (a cinnamon-like plant) and spikenard (a honeysuckle plant) whose leaves were pressed to make essential oils for perfume and medicine...."

"...The act of imagining Alexandria’s past inspired Cavafy to understand its present. In ‘Alexandrian Kings’, he visualises Cleopatra and Antony’s festival in which the queen crowned her children, insinuating that the whole population has always been able to see through the political façades:

and the Alexandrians rushed to the festival

filled with excitement, and shouted acclaim

in Greek, and in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,

enchanted by the lovely spectacle −

though they knew what they were worth,

what empty words these kingdoms were...."

 

 Alexander’s incredibly lavish funeral procession, as imagined by Andrew Bauchant, 1940

 

100 Years of Joseph Conrad's Absence...नव्या नगाऱ्याच्या आवाजात फार दुर्लक्षित झाले आहेत

 जी ए कुलकर्णी, मे १७ १९८०:

"...Conrad किंवा Hardy सारखे लेखक नव्या नगाऱ्याच्या आवाजात फार दुर्लक्षित झाले आहेत. विशेषतः Conrad मला फार श्रेष्ठ लेखक वाटतो. कारण त्याचे कथानक एक metaphor असतो, तर विषय जीवनातील साक्षात्कार किंवा भ्रमनिरास किंवा anguish चे असतात..."

 

(पृष्ठ: १९४, 'जी.एं.ची निवडक पत्रे: खंड १', १९९५)

 

Jacob Epstein, "Let There Be Sculpture", 1940:

 

"...A sculptor had previously made a bust of him which represented him as an open-necked, romantic, out-of-door type of person. In appearance he was the very opposite. His clothes were immaculately conventional, and his collar enclosed his neck like an Iron Maiden’s vice or a garroter’s grip. He was worried if his hair and beard were not trim and neat as became a sea captain. There was nothing shaggy or Bohemian about him. His glance was keen despite the drooping of one eyelid. He was the sea captain, the officer, and in our talks he emphasized the word “responsibility.” Responsibility weighed on him, weighed him down. He used the word again and again, and one immediately thought of Lord Jim—the conscience suffering at the evasion of duty. It may have been because I met him late in life that Conrad gave me a feeling of defeat; but defeat met with courage...

 

....He was a good sitter, always strictly punctual, and he stuck to the stand, giving me plenty of opportunity for work and study. I was with him for twenty-one days. Once, while posing, he had a heart attack, and he felt faint. His manservant brought him a stiff whisky, and he insisted on renewing the sitting. I had no hesitations while at work, owing to his very sympathetic attitude. A doubtful or critical attitude of the sitter will sometimes hang like a dark cloud over the work and retard it. Conrad’s sympathy and good will were manifest. He would beam at me with a pleased expression and forget his rheumatism and the tree outside the window at which he railed. The tree was large and beautiful, but to Conrad it was a source of misery." 

 

  Bust of Joseph Conrad, by Jacob Epstein, 1924 at National Portrait Gallery, London

Doctor Fischer of Geneva, Or, the Bomb Party...How Life Imitated Art

 Since I read Graham Greene's 'Doctor Fischer of Geneva, Or, the Bomb Party', 1980,  sometime in 1980's, the book has stayed with me because I have found more and more people behaving like either Doctor Fischer or his toadies...especially my relatives....

"...But it was not for his money that I detested Doctor Fischer. I hated him for his pride, his contempt of all the world, and his cruelty. He loved no one, not even his daughter..."

"...Anna-Luise called them 'Toads', her English not being perfect. She meant, of course, toadies, but I soon adopted the title which she had given them. Among the Toads was an alcoholic film actor called Richard Deane, a Divisionnaire ~ a very high rank in the Swiss army, which only has a general in time of war ~ called Krueger, an international lawyer named Kips, a tax adviser, Monsieur Belmont, and an American woman with blue hair called Mrs Montgomery. The General, as some of the others called him, was retired, Mrs Montgomery was satisfactorily widowed, and they all had settled around Geneva for the same reason, either to escape taxes in their own countries or take advantage of favourable cantonal conditions. Doctor Fischer and the Divisionnaire were the only Swiss nationals in the group when I came to know them and Fischer was by a long way the richest. He ruled them all as a man might rule a donkey with a whip in one hand and a carrot in the other. They were very well lined themselves, but how they enjoyed the carrots. It was only for the carrots that they put up with his abominable parties at which they were always first humiliated ('Have you no sense of humour?' I can imagine him demanding at the early dinners) and then rewarded. In the end they learnt to laugh even before the joke was sprung. They felt themselves to be a select group ~ there were plenty of people around Geneva who envied them their friendship with the great Doctor Fischer..."

  Dr. Fischer of Geneva (TV Movie 1984)

गारी गोट्या ...Suggestive Games of Marbles at Miraj

मिरजेला रहात असताना १९७०च्या दशकात मी आणि माझे काही जवळ राहणारे मित्र गारीगोट्यांचे दोन खेळ प्रचंड खेळात असू, अक्षरशः तहानभूक हरपून...  ह्यन्नी-गंड आणि बेंद ... 

त्या दोन्ही खेळांचा आता विचार केला तर वाटते, ते चक्क संभोग किंवा तत्सम कृत्य सूचित करणारे खेळ होते. 

ह्यन्नी-गंड (हे शब्दांचे मूळ कन्नडा मध्ये आहे hennu-ganda आणि त्याचा अर्थ स्त्री-तिचा पती असा आहे) खेळात एक छोटा खड्डा असे त्याला आम्ही गद म्हणत असू, आणि त्यात गोटी घालणे हा एक भाग असे... 

सोबतचे नॉर्मन रॉकवेल यांचे चित्र मात्र त्या सगळ्यापासून दूरचे वाटते.... 

 Marble Champion by Norman Rockwell (1939)