I don't mind the Indian independence movement as long as it doesn't have too much greed in it

शंकरराव किर्लोस्कर, मार्च २४ १९६९ :

जुने राज्य गेले, चालीरीती बदलल्या व पूर्वीचे स्थैर्यही गेले. आता धावपळीचा काळ आलाआहे. सध्या कुठलेही पत्र उघडा. त्यात हाणामारी, संप व हेवेदावे यांना ऊत आलेला दिसतो. अप्रामाणिकपणा नाही असे क्षुल्लकसुद्धा क्षेत्र नाही. आम्ही स्वातंत्र्य मिळवले यात मोठे भूषण समजतो. पण सगळीकडे बोकाळलेला भ्रष्टाचार पाहिल्यावर राष्ट्र या दृष्टीने आपलीउन्नती झाली का अवनती अशा विचारत पडतो.

('एक संपादक... / एक लेखिका...' संपादक डॉ अंजली सोमण, २००९)

(Shankarrao Kirloskar, March 24 1969:

Old regime is gone, ways of life changed and the stability of the past gone. Now is the time of running around. Open any newspaper. There fights, strikes, disputes, wranglings seem to have come to a boil. There is not even a single mundane field where there is no dishonesty. We feel very proud that we achieved independence. But when one looks at the pervasive corruption, one wonders whether as a nation we have progressed or digressed.)

'चिमणी' आपटे-सर ('Sparrow' Apte-sir), whom I liked a lot, taught us history in 9th at Miraj High School, where great Vasuvev-shastri Khare (वासुदेव-शास्त्री खरे) once taught.

Boston Tea Party was in the curriculum.

Learning it was such a thrill.

Some ninety thousand pounds tea powder was poured into Boston Harbor.

Although I didn't drink tea then, it was fun to imagine 'some' tea for bay creatures.

It of course is a political event. As Wiki says: The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and other political protests often refer to it.

My guess is a lot of burning of foreign clothes of 19th/20th century in India was inspired by that.

Caleb Crain has written a very interesting article on the event in The New Yorker.

Apparently George Washington disapproved of it, and so did Benjamin Franklin! It's like saying Mahtma Gandhi and Vallabhabhai Patel not liking something about the Indian independence movement from 1920 to 1948!

Crain writes:

"...over the past two years the history of America’s first insurgency has taken on a new pertinence, as the Tea Party movement has laid claim to its anti-tax and pro-liberty principles—and has inadvertently reproduced its penchant for conspiracy theory, misinformation, demagoguery, and even threats of violence. Furthermore, in much the way that journalists have begun to ask whether shadowy corporate interests may be sponsoring today’s Tea Party, historians have long speculated that merchants may have instigated early unrest to protect smuggling profits from British regulators..."

Sounds familiar.

Indivar Kamtekar writes in "Fables of Nationalism":

'.... For businessmen in India, the 1940s were a time of unprecedented war profits; for agricultural labourers, they were years of frightening starvation...'

SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR elaborates this thus:

"...Massive inflation was the inevitable outcome, something that did not happen in Britain itself. The food price index (1937=100) shot up to 311 by 1949 in India, against 193 in the US and only 108 in Britain. The data reflect the rationed price of food in India: the black market price was even higher.

Now, inflation is very good for producers and asset owners. All property owners saw property values skyrocket. Rising agricultural prices benefited all landowners, and even small ones got out of debt and bought fresh land. Many new salaried jobs were created by the war, and the problem of the educated unemployed disappeared.

Above all, the business class flourished. The war required unprecedented quantities of every sort of manufacture. Lack of shipping constrained competition from imports. The price of cloth rose five-fold before the colonial state imposed price controls: its top priority was to encourage production, not worry about janata cloth. Business fortunes were made, and new giants like Telco and Hindustan Motors emerged in this period. Tax evasion was widespread and not seriously checked by the authorities. Indeed, some businessmen defended tax evasion as “patriotic” non-cooperation with the Raj!

But the very scarcity that helped the propertied classes hit casual labourers. It also hit pensioners and others on a fixed income. The real wages of factory workers declined 30% between 1939 and 1943. By contrast, British real wages rose 49%, a levelling up.

The rural landless in India were the worst hit. They had neither access to the new urban jobs or rationed urban supplies. Ranging from a quarter of the rural population in Bengal to over half in Madras, they bore the brunt of spiralling prices..."


Artist: Helen E Hokinson, The New Yorker, March 15 1947

There have been many brilliant cartoonists and there will be many more but my life-time won't surely see another Ms. Hokinson (1893–1949) who "specialized in wealthy, plump, and ditsy society women and their foibles, referring to them as 'My Best Girls'...".

Apparently HEH depended on others to write captions to her cartoons. Therefore, if I were to write it for the one above:

"I don't mind the Indian independence movement as long as it doesn't have too much greed in it."

p.s. Return to the quote of the late Mr. Kirloskar at the top of this post. If you add terrorism to his list- which was missing in his days, our bitterness is even more than his.

Vote Your Caste Here

Justice J.S. Verma, a former Chief Justice of India:

"Earlier, people looked at caste only at the time of marriage. Now caste is not relevant at marriage, but it is prominent all the time. This malady exists at the highest levels.... Reservations are still with us though they were meant to be transitory. All this shows that we have not been able to integrate society. We see national integration only when there is a national calamity..."

Wendy Doniger:

“India is a country where not only the future but even the past is unpredictable. You could easily use history to argue for almost any position in contemporary India: that Hindus have been vegetarians, and that they have not; that Hindus and Muslims have gotten along well together, and that they have not; that Hindus have objected to suttee, and that they have not; that Hindus have renounced the material world, and that they have embraced it; that Hindus have oppressed women and lower castes, and that they have fought for their equality. Throughout history, right up to the contemporary political scene, the tensions between the various Hinduisms, and the different sorts of Hindus, have simultaneously enhanced the tradition and led to incalculable suffering.”

Pranab Bardhan:

"Our governance structures are also hemmed in by our sociology and culture. In 19th-century Europe (as in Mao’s China) the state took a leading initiative in spreading mass education and health services. In contrast, our elite is relatively callous about these basic needs of the poor; this may be a reflection of traditional elite disdain for the lower classes and castes. But even when the latter come to power, the issue of basic social services gets low priority in comparison with larger symbolic issues of dignity politics (particularly in North India). A perceived slight in the speech of a higher-caste political leader resented by a lower-caste one will usually cause much more of an uproar than if the same leader’s policy neglect keeps hundreds of thousands of children severely malnourished in the same lower caste. The issue of job reservation for backward castes catches the public imagination more fervently than that of child mortality or school dropouts that afflict the majority in those communities. Thus the demand from below for those basic social services is as inarticulate as their supply from above is deficient."

Hindi film 'Aarakshan' (आरक्षण) is being released today August 12 2011. (Or is it?)

I was just browsing "CASTE, ITS TWENTIETH CENTURY AVATAR", 1996 edited and introduced by the one and only the late M N Srinivas.

The best place to start reading the book is the back cover of the book.

It has this brilliant cartoon by the late Abu Abraham:


I would make just one change to it in 2011. Remove the word 'UP' from the ballot box.

(p.s I think it was Abu who created the word play on caste / cast that has now so pervasive.)

There is a brilliant cartoon by Sudhir Tailang in today's The Asian Age on how the film "Aarakshan" was reserved for different categories!

रक्त लाल रंगाचा दिस्तां खंडळ्याचो घाट Bloody Red Khandala Ghat

हिरव्या हिरव्या रंगाची, झाडि घनदाट
सांग्‌ गो चेड्वा दिस्तां कसो, खंडळ्याचो घाट.‌

Michael Kazin has written a review of "RAILROADED / The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America" By Richard White for The New York Times July 15 2011:

"...“Transcontinental railroads,” he asserts in “Railroaded,” “were a Gilded Age extravagance that rent holes in the political, social and environmental fabric of the nation, creating railroads as mismanaged and corrupt as they were long.”..."

"...To gain an edge on their corporate rivals, railroad owners built expensive lines into drought-prone areas that had few settlers and little prospect of attracting more. To finance their risky endeavors, they routinely bribed politicians and borrowed money they could not pay back — while publishing mendacious financial reports. To insure friendly coverage, railroad executives bankrolled local newspapers and arranged to kill or delay the publication of stories that might damage their interests. At the helm of a dangerous industry where workplace accidents were common, they resisted installing air brakes and other devices that would have sharply reduced the toll of maimings and deaths..."

Sounds so eerily familiar in today's India.

"...In contrast, Charles Francis Adams Jr., the head of the Union Pacific, regarded himself as a genteel intellectual. The grandson and great-grandson of presidents was merely dabbling, temporarily, in the biggest industry in the land, which he vowed to reform. Adams scorned the venality of his fellow railroad bosses. “Our method of doing business is founded upon lying, cheating and stealing — all bad things,” he remarked..."

Oh how we miss Mr. Adams' frankness in today's India?

"...But White calls Huntington and his ilk “men in octopus suits.” He views them as 19th-century equivalents of the profit-mad, short-sighted financiers who recently undermined economies on both sides of the Atlantic. Both transcontinental railroad managers then and the Wall Street bankers in our time ran “highly leveraged operations” that “depended on continued borrowing to meet their obligations.” Both groups made it rich because they had powerful enablers in Washington..."

Conflict of interest?

"...Grover Cleveland, the Democrat who sat in the White House during the depression of the 1890s, intoned, “Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.” Yet, in 1894, Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney, rushed to court to bust a national strike by railroad workers who were expressing solidarity with a walkout by employees of the Pullman sleeping car company. With a federal injunction in hand, Cleveland ordered thousands of American troops to break the strike and arrest its leaders. At the time, the attorney general was on the payroll of at least one major railroad company..."

"...At the end of his powerful book, crowded with telling details and shrewd observations about nearly every aspect of the world the railroad bosses made, White floats a counterfactual balloon: what if the steel lines that spanned the continent had been “built as demand required” instead of as part of a competitive dash that caused as much waste and hardship as progress? Slower, more rational development would have lessened the damage to the environment, given Native Americans a chance to adapt to conquest and perhaps saved thousands of lives. White advises, “We need to think about what did not happen in order to think historically.”
Such an alternative past would probably require a different country. The history of American capitalism is stuffed with tales of industries that overbuilt and overpromised and left bankruptcies and distressed ecosystems in their wake: gold and silver mining, oil drilling and nuclear power, to name a few. The railroad barons wielded more power than other businessmen in the Gilded Age. But their behavior revealed a trait they shared with many of their fellow citizens: too much was never enough."

Meanwhile what happened in British India?

Matthew Engel has reviewed "Blood, Iron and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World" by Christian Wolmar for Guardian November 29 2009:

"...The narrative takes on its most epic quality in the United States; its most stupid in Australia (where the different states set about building a charming variety of gauges without a thought about what would happen when you tried to link them up); and its most brutal in India, where maybe 25,000 workers died building the line through the Western Ghats alone..."

Yes, the same Ghat in this lovely song...
हिरव्या हिरव्या रंगाची, झाडि घनदाट
सांग्‌ गो चेड्‌वा दिस्तां कसो, खंडळ्याचो घाट.

We too need to think about what did not happen in order to think historically.

There is a strong counter-point to these arguments in The New York Times, July 27 2011 "The World as America Dreamed It":

"...But there was something quite different about much 19th-century American culture. The Industrial Revolution was not repelled but embraced; it was often seen not as an intrusion but as an offering of possibility. It brought miseries but also innovations. It did not overturn the natural world, it seemed to coexist with it...

...There are paintings here, for example, showing newly built railway lines puffing smoke. Those engines appear not as threats but as features of the pastoral landscape..."


Artist: Ernest Griset

"The Far West-Shooting Buffalo on Line of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad", Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 3 1871.

Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum

Next time I am on a train, climbing Khandala ghat, taking in a million-dollar view and the train stops without an apparent reason, I might hear echoes of dying screams of men and women.

Q: सांग्‌ गो चेड्वा दिस्तां कसो, खंडळ्याचो घाट?
A: रक्त लाल रंगाचा दिस्तां खंडळ्याचो घाट

Makers of Today's India- My 19

George Orwell:

History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell's soldiers slashing Irishwomen's faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the 'right' cause.

KENNETH MINOGUE:

Instead of recognizing the importance of apocalyptic thinking, Mr. Landes argues, we prefer to posit a common-sense world in which grand flights of imagination are construed as outbursts of misguided enthusiasm. Most historians, he says, make the same mistake. They view apocalyptic prophecy as a kind of falsified madness that leaves little of importance behind.

In fact, Mr. Landes says, the whole texture of our lives is deeply affected by our response to both past apocalyptic beliefs and current millennial aspirations. Nor is apocalyptic frenzy limited to the religious sphere. It also underlies the secular world of seemingly common-sense understanding. (WSJ, July 28 2011)


Ramachandra Guha's book "Makers of Modern India" was recently published.

It profiles nineteen Indians whose ideas, according to the author, had a defining impact on the formation and evolution of our Republic.

Here are my nineteen who were borne 1800 CE or later and whose ideas and actions, ahead of others, have a defining impact on the state of Indian union today:

(Names are not in any order. And I defy anyone who says history is progress.)

1. Lord Macaulay

2. B G Tilak

3. M K Gandhi

4. Rabindranath Tagore

5. M A Jinnah

6. B R Ambedkar

7. J L Nehru

8. M S Golvilkar

9. Indira Gandhi

10. L K Advani

11. V P Singh

12. Dhirubhai Ambani

13. Raj Kapoor

14. M. G. Ramachandran

15. Shankar-Jaikishan

16. C. Subramaniam

17. Rajesh Khanna

18. Manmohan Singh

19. Sachin Tendulkar

And remember, like Mr. Gridley in the picture below that is now 78-year old but remains brilliant, whether best-selling historians or ordinary bloggers, they put too much of themselves into 'it'!

Artist: Leonard Dove, The New Yorker, July 29 1933

Shravan! Three Swings

Today July 31 2011 is the first day of Shravan of Shaka year 1933 (श्रावण , शके १९३३). Shravan, the month of swings (झोका ) and mother's home (माहेर)!

"Suno Sajana Papihe Ne" from director Raghunath Jalani's "Aaye Din Bahaar Ke" (1966), composed by Laxmikant-Pyarelal and sung by Lata Mangeshkar, is one of the best songs I have heard.

I never tire of listening to it. Although I am already fifty Shravans old, it creates excitement for the fifty-first!

Towards the end of the song there is a sequence on a swing.

"baaghon men pad gaye hain, saawan ke mast jhule"

Now watch another sequence on a swing from Satyajit Ray's "Charulata", 1964


Notice how, towards the end, camera rides with Madhabi Mukherjee (Charulata) looking at Soumitra Chatterjee (Amal).

I was stunned when I first noticed it.

Normally, for me, a good cinema almost always loses to a good book except The Godfather. But this sequence brings out the power of the cinema.

If a writer were to describe Charulata's confusion, her dilemma about her feelings towards cousin-in-law Amal, it would take more effort and time- even for Tagore or Tolstoy- than what Mr. Ray accomlishes so elegantly by that rocking camera.

And don't we all know how different the world looks from a swing?

Once I saw 'Charulata', I always thought what a disappointment 'Aaye Din Bahaar Ke' scene was. The song is divine but the director's treatment is so pedestrian.

Mr. Jalani could have learnt a lot just watching 'Charulata' which was released almost 2 years earlier than his own film.

And finally a swing on which I wish I sat one day...


"The Swing" Artist: Francisco Goya, Completion year: 1779

Shallow People Demand Variety. Even in Cartoon Captions!

August Strindberg :
"Shallow people demand variety – but I have been writing the same story throughout my life, every time trying to cut nearer the aching nerve"

When I read this quote as epigraph of G A Kulkarni's (जी ए कुलकर्णी) "Pingla Vel", 1977 (पिंगळा वेळ) sometime in the late 70's, I was startled.

First I thought it was a clever ploy of an artist: Just keep repeating the same story by changing names of the characters. (Actually I have read a Marathi book of short stories by a female writer where every story is same except the names of the characters!)

But since then I have realised that it infact is "the same story".

At some level, Vyasa's 'The Mahabharata' and Francis Ford Coppola's 'The Godfather' (1972) are "the same stories". Both profoundly beautiful and cathartic.

G A himself has indeed written "the same story" a few times. My current favourite philosopher John Gray seems to be writing the same stuff. Cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan seems to be drawing the same picture again and again. Homer Simpson, Doug Heffernan, Ray Barone react to the life in the same manner in every episode of their respective TV shows.



And I seem to enjoy their "same" stuff.

Is that a bad thing?

Even to survive in this complex world one may keep using the same strategy as illustrated below.

I first read about Prisoner's Dilemma in the essay by Douglas R. Hofstadter for Scientific American (May 1983), now part of his book “Metamagical Themas", Penguin 1985.

What is Prisoner's Dilemma?

“In it, two prisoners accused of the same crime find themselves in separate cells, unable to communicate. Their jailers try to persuade them to implicate one another. If neither goes along with the guards, they will both receive a sentence of just one year. If one accepts the deal and the other keeps quiet, then the turncoat goes free while the patsy gets ten years. And if they both denounce one another, they both get five years.

If the first prisoner is planning to keep quiet, then the second has an incentive to denounce him, and so get off scot-free rather than spend a year in prison. If the first prisoner were planning to betray the second, then the second would still be better off pointing the finger, and so receive a five-year sentence instead of a ten-year one. In other words, a rational, self-interested person would always betray his fellow prisoner. Yet that leaves them both mouldering in jail for five years, when they could have cut their sentences to a year if they had both kept quiet."

Wikipedia:

"Strategy for the classic prisoner's dilemma...interest in the iterated prisoners dilemma (IPD) was kindled by Robert Axelrod in his book The Evolution of Cooperation (1984). In it he reports on a tournament he organized of the N step prisoner dilemma (with N fixed) in which participants have to choose their mutual strategy again and again, and have memory of their previous encounters. Axelrod invited academic colleagues all over the world to devise computer strategies to compete in an IPD tournament. The programs that were entered varied widely in algorithmic complexity, initial hostility, capacity for forgiveness, and so forth...

...The best deterministic strategy was found to be tit-for-tat, which Anatol Rapoport developed and entered into the tournament. It was the simplest of any program entered, containing only four lines of BASIC, and won the contest..."

A menacing sounding, almost like taking revenge, actually it's a very simple strategy:
"Cooperate on move 1;
thereafter , do whatever the other player did the previous move."

When translated in a computer program , it won against very complex and cunning strategies.

It was an eye opener. I learnt you don’t have to be clever and cunning to be effective.

I have struggled with The New Yorker cartoon caption contest. This blog is littered with those attempts.

But maybe I just missed a simple trick, a kind of 'Tit_for_tat' for the contest- one caption fits all.

Cory Arcangel thought about it: read it by visiting What a Misunderstanding!.

He says: "I think the same joke over and over becomes something eternal".

Look at the following picture from The New Yorker Caption Contest.

The winning entry is brilliant:

“Well, you’re the one who insisted on the smoking section.” by John Pignata, Brooklyn, N.Y.

But look at the caption below the picture.


Artist: Christopher Weyant
Caption: Cory Arcangel

I decided to try this in Marathi.

'What a Misunderstanding!' translates in Marathi as "केवढा गैरसमज!"

Artist: Vasant Sarwate (1969) sourced from his book "The Best of Sarwate" editor: Avadhoot Paralkar, Lokvangmay Gruh 2008

वसंत सरवटे (1969) "सरवोत्तम सरवटे" संपादक: अवधूत परळकर, लोकवाङ्मय गृह 2008

Caption when translated in English reads:

Aurangzeb:-"This is brilliant, Samarth! I understand, for all your life, you spied for me and were on our payroll; but until the end even I never got to know about both! Secrecy has to be maintained like this!! Bravo..."

Replace it with: "केवढा गैरसमज!"

Not Bad, eh?

What a misunderstanding! About the importance of variety!

लहान माझी बाहुली was such a far cry from Barbie

Barbie's co-creator, Elliot Handler, died on July 21 2011.

They say Barbie, born 1959, with her long legs, love of pink-tinged glamour, and hair made for combing, was a world away from the baby-like creatures cradled by girls of previous generations.

Indeed.

A world away in Miraj India, I probably never had a doll of my own. But I recall some of the dolls my younger sister had.

The following description fitted them all except one.

"लहान माझी बाहुली
मोठी तिची सावली
घारे डोळे फिरवीते
नकटे नाक उडवीते
गुबरे गाल फुगवीते..."

(Small is my doll
Large is her shadow
Rotates her light-coloured eyes
turns her short nose up
inflates het puffy cheeks...)

Now nothing of this description fits Barbie except perhaps the shadow part.

I said all of my sister's dolls except one because around 1970 a doll entered our home who was nattily dressed and had sharp features. She was a wind-up doll busy pouring wine in a glass and drinking it. We called her pour-gulp doll (ओतते-पिते बाहुली).

She was a special lady, in many ways like Barbie.

At our home, she never shared physical space with other Kakubai (काकुबाई) dolls. She 'lived' for many years before she was broken by my sister.

That remained my only brush with Barbie until 1990's.

I don't know when Barbies were first imported in India. Were they ever smuggled in heydays of Indian smuggling?


Ponytail Barbie courtesy: Wikipedia

Greek tragedy does not allow any comic relief. Or does it? Trojan Horse

Wikipedia: Greek tragedy does not allow any comic relief.

Bernard Lewis:
“In the history of human thought science has often come out of superstition. Astronomy came out of astrology. Chemistry came out of alchemy. What will come out of economics?”

Matthew Lynn for History Today, August 2011:
1929 the Harvard economist Charles Bullock published a magnificent essay on a monetary experiment conducted by Dionysius the Elder, ruler of the Greek city state of Syracuse from 407 BC until his death in 367. After running up vast debts to pay for his military campaigns, his lavish court and spectacles for the common people he found himself painfully short of ready cash. No one wanted to lend him any more money and taxes were drying up. So Dionysius came up with a great wheeze. On pain of death he forced his citizens to hand in all their cash. Once all the drachmas were collected he simply re-stamped each one drachma coin as two drachmas. Simple. Problem solved. Syracuse was rich again.

This sounds a lot like India's own Muhammad bin Tughluq who too experimented with coinage. But in Tughluq's case it's said that the schemes introduced by him, unlike Dionysius the Elder, were very good but were poorly executed.

On May 7 2010, I wrote on this blog:

"In 2009, my son and I were watching Travel and Living channel.

It was a Samantha Brown hosted program where she had taken us to a Greek coastal town.

It all looked great until she mentioned hotel tariffs in Euros €.

It was an ugly figure when converted into INR.

My son and I immediately looked at each other and started laughing. The reason being who would go to that 'stupid' place when one could go to Goa or any number of Indian beaches, in winter, for fraction of that cost..."

More than a year later, Greece seems to have sunk even further in trouble.

Now for someone as shallow as me, Greece always invokes image of Troy which is best known for being the focus of the Trojan War.

And the Trojan War brings up the tale of Trojan Horse and then it becomes funny...

Watch "Tales from the Public Domain", the fourteenth episode of The Simpsons' thirteenth season.

In its first segment, Homer is Odysseus, and delivers the King of Troy (Ned Flanders) a Trojan horse. He and his crew, including Apu, Lenny, Moe, Professor Frink and Carl, kill all of Troy's citizens and win.

Moe, as he descends from the Trojan horse, looking at the sleeping soldiers of Troy, says: Ohhh...look at them...sleeping like angels (and then he orders)...spare none!


Moe as Claudius in Hamlet from the same episode

I must have seen tens of cartoons on the subject of Trojan Horse. Even the recent The New Yorker has one by Christopher Weyant- Looking at Trojan Horse just outside the gate, one Troy soldier says to the other: "How do we know it's not full of consultants?"

But none of them comes close to the one, see below, by master Richard Decker- Troy soldiers look so relaxed because it's an elephant and not a horse. They have been warned about horse. Elephant sure is harmless!

Artist: Richard Decker, The New Yorker, Feb 9 1963

Look at RGJ's picture of June 2011. The anxiety on the faces of Troy soldiers clearly shows because what if it contains Greek debt.

Artist: Richard Graham Jolley (RGJ), The Spectator, June 2011

Trojan horse always reminds me of wooden play horse we rode as kids. We had our customary pictures taken on it.

I think it was fun but not all that great one.

Had we known the Greek story then, it would have made our horse more exciting. Soldiers emerging from its saddle- because it was often torn (showing stuffed hay inside)- while we slept, causing mayhem? Ultimate fantasy of a then middle-class boy!

p.s.

John Gray:

There are several versions of the myth of the Trojan Horse, but the heart of the story is clear enough - the folly of the leaders of Troy in allowing an enormous wooden horse into the city, when everything pointed to the fact it was a stratagem devised by their enemies.

Seemingly a trophy signifying the end of the war in which Troy had been besieged for 10 years, the horse was left outside the city by the Greeks. Troy's leaders had heard and rejected many warnings against bringing the horse within their walls.

More than anything else, they wanted to believe the 10-year siege of the city was over. So they disregarded the warnings and brought the horse within the walls. The soldiers hidden inside stole out at night and opened the city gates to the Greek forces. As we all know, Troy was reduced to ruins.

The Trojans wanted to believe the siege of their city was over. Having held out for so long, they could not bear the thought that their decade-long struggle had been for nothing.
Today we are no different. We humans will do anything to secure a meaning in our lives. We hold on to the projects that have given our lives shape, even at the cost of losing all we care for.
Confronted with intractable difficulties, the most sensible thing to do may be to toss the past aside and improvise. But this involves casting off our beliefs, and we would rather be ruined than face facts. That is the perverse persistence we call folly, and nothing is more human. (19 August 2011)

मुंबई नगरी बडी बांका, जशी रावणाची दुसरी लंका

CNN July 14 2011:

"Mumbai returned quickly to a strange sense of normality on Thursday, less than 12 hours after triple blasts hit the city late Wednesday, leaving dozens dead and many more injured.

Heavy monsoonal rain overnight and all day Thursday posed the only practical impediment to residents.


At a live press conference in Mumbai early Thursday, Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram said Mumbai and Mumbaikars “responded splendidly” in evacuating the injured and assisting police.

“Children are going to school, people are going back to work … this is the resolute response that one expects from Mumbai.” 


“Mumbai has always lived up to that high expectation,” the minister added.

"


Indian Rebellion of 1857 which happened from May 10 1857 to June 20 1858 was one of the most important events of world history that year.

Almost as much as India's independence in year 1947.

A scene from that:

The British retaliated with horrific violence against the native population. (Charles Ball, `History of the Indian Mutiny', Vol. 1.)


Irfan Habib :

"Therefore, when our statesmen (as our Prime Minister did, the other day, at Oxford) speak of the good things that happened under British rule, like the establishment of the Indian Civil Service, they should think sometimes of 1857, not only of the rebels but also of the ordinary citizens - men, women and children - who were shot or hacked to death or killed by various means, under the aegis of our great praiseworthy benefactors."

"While the death toll is often debated by historians with figures ranging between one hundred thousand and one million, it is usually agreed that several hundred thousands were killed (in Indian Rebellion of 1857)." (Wikipedia)

0.05% to 0.50% of estimated Indian population of 200 million died. It easily is the second most violent chapter in the history of modern India, next only to her partition. Far ahead of any of her wars or terrorist attacks on her.

How was Mumbai impacted by this in 19th century?

"१८५७ सालच्या बंडाची धामधूम जेव्हा चालली होती तेव्हा मुंबईतला व्यापार आणि तिथले व्यवहार पुष्कळसे नेहमीसारखेच चालू होते. "

(गंगाधर गाडगीळ, 'प्रारंभ', 2002).

["When rebellion of year 1857 had caused tumult then trading and other activities in Mumbai were going on almost normally."
(Gangadhar Gadgil, 'Prarambh')]

Gadgil's book- part history, part fiction- on 19th century Mumbai is very good but not great. (To start with it lacks index.) The book is also a slap in the face of those people who say that Marathi speaking population of Mumbai has not contributed significantly towards making the city financial capital of India.

When I read it, I realise the kind of problems the ordinary people of Mumbai have faced since the city's founding.

And who were (and are) those people?

People of multiple races, religions, languages, castes, skin colours, nationalities, class.

Of course, they were fortunate to get leaders like Jaganath Shunkerseth (जगन्नाथ शंकरशेट) and Balshastri Jambhekar (बाळशास्त्री जांभेकर)- both visionary giants who happen to be very liberal and Marathi speaking- in 19th century.

(There was a Hindu-Muslim flare-up in Bhiwandi, Thane in c 1830's.

Mr. Shunkerseth, a devout Hindu, gave exemplary leardership to help quell it. As long as Mr. Shunkerseth was on the Governor'c Council, Muslims never asked for their own representative to be included in it.

Gandhiji and others would play such roles in 20th century.)

They have helped make the city what it is today, described aptly by inimitable poet Paththe Bapurao (पठ्ठे बापूराव):

"Mumbai Nagari badi banka, jashee Ravanachee dusari Lanka" (मुंबई नगरी बडी बांका, जशी रावणाची दुसरी लंका)

The Times of India, July 15 2011:

"A rough estimate shows that diamonds worth Rs. 25 crore flew into the air at the time of the blast."


Bombay Stock Exchange c 1864

G G Agarkar knew whether there was Hell or not

Today is 155th birth anniversary of Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (गोपाळ गणेश आगरकर ).

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Édouard Fournier, 1889 courtesy: History Today

A prominent English obituary trumpeted:

"Shelley the Atheist is dead. Now he knows whether there is Hell or not."

(from 'The best poems of the English language/ from Chaucer through Frost' Selected with commentary by Harold Bloom, 2004)

Arthur Schopenhauer:

For whence did Dante take the materials of his hell but from our actual world And yet he made a very proper hell out of it. But when, on the other hand, he came to describe heaven and its delights, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world affords no materials at all for this. . . ,

Ram Jethmalani:

“If I had been a judge I would not sentence Kasab to death for a different reason. It is only by remaining in the hell of an Indian jail that he would realise that what the Mullahs told him is false.
Long stay in an Indian prison will detoxify him of all the superstitions and illusions instilled into him.”

George Orwell:

"Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another."

त्र्यंबक शंकर शेजवलकर:

"आपल्या तत्वांचा जयजयकार पहाण्यास आगरकर जगले नाहीत याबद्दल जरी अंतःकरणाला चटका लागून राहतो , तरीं आतां त्याबद्दल दुःख करण्याचे कारण नाही. आपला जयजयकार व्हावा यासाठीं आगरकरांनी केंव्हाही फिकीर केली नाही." (जून १५, १९२९)

Gopalrao's life- as sensitively documented by Y D Phadke (य दि फडके) in his 'Agarkar', 1996 (आगरकर)- of just 39 years, reads many times, like the lives of his favourite Shakespeare's tragic heroes.

(Although I love Phadke's book, like all his books, it leaves me hungry for more because the benchmark for a good biography is now quite high.

For instance, I want to know more about the books that shaped Agarkar's world view. He was such an Eklavya-like disciple of John Stuart Mill, son of a Scotsman, that even in his next birth he wanted to be Mill's student and sit at his feet to learn! But did he read two other great Scotsmen- Adam Smith, David Hume and others like Charles Darwin, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Nietzsche?

[p.s.- John Gray informs on Sept 21 20011: "The Origin of Species (of Darwin) appeared in the same year as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), but the most influential liberal humanist (who died in 1873) never mentioned Darwin in his seminal works." If he had, Agarkar would have surely read Darwin!]

Agarkar rated The Bard ahead of Bhavabhuti (भवभूति) and Kālidāsa. He translated Hamlet into Marathi- 'Vikarvilasit' (विकारविलसित). Although the translation has never been rated highly, it is significant that it was one of the first translations of the Bard into Marathi and that Agarkar, a secular humanist, was attracted to 'Hamlet'.

(Appreciate how a nationalist opposing the British had no hesitation openly embracing a British artist ahead of the two of India's best. )

Like P B Shelley, Agarkar was an atheist.

However, I feel he was more like a Cultural Hindu, the way Richard Dawkins describes himself as Cultural Christian. (Cultural Christian is a broad term used to describe people with either ethnic or religious Christian heritage who may not believe in the religious claims of Christianity, but who retain an affinity for the culture, art, music, and so on related to it.)

Agarkar did not 'waste' time reading the Puranas and other religious books but enjoyed attending a performance of Kirtan (कीर्तन).

Phadke tells a funny story.

A Kirtan artist Narayanbua Ghamande (नारायणबुवा घमंडे) was well aware of atheism of Agarkar and used to be surprised not just to find him in his audience but concentrating hard on the discourse. Ghamande used to tell his friends: "That Mahar alone was paying attention to the Kirtan" (तो महार तेवढा एकटा लक्ष देऊन कीर्तन ऐकत होता.)

[The term 'Mahar' was used derogatorily by Mr. Ghamande. I wonder if real Mahars (Dalits) were allowed to attend his kirtans because they were then NOT allowed to use municipal water tanks meant for Brahmins.

I also wonder what other attendees of the kirtan used to do. Ogle at women in the audience? My mother's mother used to complain how some men- all Brahmin- used to behave naughtily, even shamelessly, at Kirtans! Watch 'Ghashiram Kotwal' (घाशीराम कोतवाल) for a demo.]

On May 12 1881, there was a get-together of the past and the present students of Deccan college. It was attended by Mahadev Govind Ranade (महादेव गोविंद रानडे), Lokhitwadi (लोकहितवादी) Gopal Hari Deshmukh, Agarkar among others.

In the gathering, there was a public debate on the issues related to religion.

Agarkar argued in a spirited speech: religious belief is a source of misery and is suspicious and hence should be abandoned and atheism should be embraced. (धर्मवाद दुखःमूलक आणि संशयपूर्ण आहे. यासाठी तो मुळीच सोडून देऊन नास्तिक पंथ धरावा.)

We can guess what Agarkar based this upon: "religion of humanity"-the secular humanist creed imbibed by Mill from the French positivist thinker Auguste Comte, which aimed to replace the traditional faiths of the West with a belief in human progress. (It's interesting to speculate: Had Agarkar lived till 1930's, what would he have thought of the crimes of Nazism and Communism, knowing that a type of atheism was at the core of both of them.)

Lokhitwadi replied: "Since religion is yoked to man's heart, it's not going to be affected even a little by empty threats of an atheist. In fact, because it is challenged, it will shine even more." (ज्य़ा अर्थी धर्मतत्व मनुष्याच्या अंतःकरणाशी खिळून आहे त्या अर्थी नस्तिकाच्या पोकळ धमकीनं त्यास लेशभरदेखील धक्का बसणार नाही. उलट हे धर्मतत्व कसास लागून अधिकच चमकू लागेल.)

(I am an absolute sucker for the 19th century Marathi that has been quoted above...its vigour, its strength, its confidence, its brevity, its vocabulary... Read another example of it here. But sometimes it degenerated beyond any civility as described here.)

How prescient Lokhitwadi has turned out to be!

In year 2011, in India, religion is going as strong as ever. Maybe noisier, and perhaps less tolerant.

Even in the West, as John Gray says: "Everyone believed the world was becoming steadily more secular. Yet on 11 September war and religion were as deeply intertwined as ever they had been in human history. The terrorists were foot soldiers in a new war of religion."

Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (14/7/1856- 17/6/1895)

Artist: Gopal Damodar Deuskar (1911-1994)

courtesy: Deccan Education Society and Fergusson College, Pune

Now this is a beautiful portrait of Agarkar.

But did Agarkar look like this? Does the picture reflect Agarkar's Shakespearean-Tragic-Hero qualities?

I am not sure. Some of the descriptions of Agarkar's looks are not very kind. The late Mr. Deuskar never saw him.

G G Agarkar knew that there was Hell because he experienced it right here on the earth.

No, I am not talking about his ugly feuds with B G Tilak.

It was located in Dongri (डोंगरी) prison in South Mumbai where he was jailed for 101 days in 1882. He wasn't a political prisoner, a la Jawaharlal Nehru's imprisonment in 1942-1946 at Ahmednagar, and also wasn't treated anything like 2G and Commonwealth-Games-2010 scamsters in 2011.

He, B G Tilak (बाळ गंगाधर टिळक) and two others shared a cell of 13 sq ft! (Is '13' a typo in Phadke's book? According to Wikipedia modern subway standards specify 3 square feet for rush-hour standees. So four of them took 12 sq ft standing!) They were each given an iron pot for excretion. They had to stay in the cell from 5:30 PM to 6:30 AM each day along with their pots. A single flat stone was a common bed.

Agarkar used to often get runny nose and didn't have even a good hanky to wipe mucus. Food was unpalatable, more so because Tilak-Agarkar didn't eat onion and garlic. For first 25 days, they were denied any access to books and writing material.

Most of us, if not prison, are familiar with other forms of hell.


‘I never expected hell to be as bad as this.’

Artist: (I am guessing) Paul Wood Courtesy: The Spectator