Does Usain Bolt Understand French? Majority of Us Don't

Harry Shearer:

"When you want your euphemising to be particularly opaque, you go French."

French moralist Nicolas Chamfort:

 “A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

Patrick West, June 5 2013:

" If you consider that the English and the French spent a good part of 800 years at war with each other, it’s not surprising that relations between the two peoples and their cultures remain awkward. The latest manifestation of this came last week. We learned that many people in France have been up in arms about plans to allow English to be used to teach science courses in its universities. The British, in turn, have found such fury and indignation hilarious...

...Everyone in the world - except Dutch and Scandinavian footballers - learns American English because it is today’s lingua franca. It’s the principal means for disseminating ideas and getting work, as Latin used to be. As Luc Ferry of Le Figaro, writing approvingly of the new French legislation, noted last week: ‘Si Descartes n’avait pas écrit en latin, come le feront encore après lui Leibniz ou Spinoza, il n’aurait jamais été lu dans le monde entier.’ People stopped using French when that country went into decline and lost influence in the nineteenth century, and it was the same story for British English in the twentieth. But neither language has disappeared, and neither is ‘threatened’ by American English. It’s also worth remembering that as America declines, so will its influence and the importance of its language. No empire lasts for ever."
 
On the rainy evening of June 9 2013, on TV, I saw closing parts of Men's final at French open and then stayed on for the presentation ceremony.

Usain Bolt presented the trophies. But I wonder if he understood anything that was spoken around him in Spanish and French for a large part of the ceremony.

Shouldn't just every one try speak English as a courtesy to not just millions of TV viewers around the world but the chief guest?

Sure, you can translate each line into French for the stadium spectators and French-only TV viewers around the world.

Do French think this will popularise their great language? In India, I meet a lot of young people learning German and Japanese but hardly any one learning French.

I don't get angry at this, I am just amused.

Artist: Helen E. Hokinson, The New Yorker, September 2 1944 

I Only Want You to Love Me...What Was I Doing In That Kitchen?

Alejandro Zambra:

“My books would be very different if I had written them in another room, looking out another window.”

Charles Simic:

" A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny."
  
Margaret Atwood:

“...Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
 

Artist: Miles Aldridge, 'I Only Want You to Love Me', created 2005-2012

 When I first saw the picture above, needless to say where I was looking and what I was focused on...It took a while for me to note that she was doing plumbing work under a sink!

And what started only as carnal ended in very complex emotions.

Very glamorous 'she' was disconnected from her surroundings and yet she belonged...And what was I doing in that kitchen? Was it her or was it mine? Was I a being voyeur taking advantage of her discomfiture?

And finally, was she asking me to fuck off?

Probably yes!

Dnyaneshwari's Animal Planet: अहा कटा हें वोखटें । मृत्युलोकींचें उफराटें ।

Alfred Edward Housman:

"For nature, heartless, witless nature,

  Will neither care nor know

What stranger's feet may find the meadow

  And trespass there and go,

Nor ask amid the dews of morning

  If they are mine or no."

James Parker says: "Character, human character, expressed through relationship with bird, beast, or fish—that’s the Animal Planet method. "

This is so  because Animal Planet is not about animals it's about us, humans! 

James Parker continues:

“And if nature asks us to treat it with humor?” enquired Czeslaw Milosz, introducing a poem by Robert Francis in the anthology 'A Book of Luminous Things': If Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit, and his friends-and-relations, if all that humanization is precisely what nature expects from us? In other words, perhaps we are unable to say—to tell her—anything, except ascribing to her sadness, smiles, ominousness, serenity?  What a canny poet Milosz was. Nature unobserved, unsentimentalized, unpolluted with our delusions, is just a bunch of stuff eating itself. Here endeth the lesson of Animal Planet: it’s all about the human. Oh, Homo sapiens. Oh, blessed biped. Oh, you."

 "Nature is just a bunch of stuff eating itself."

But the nature in Dnyaneshwari is closer to the truth than in the animal planet.

Exhibit 1:

Dnyaneshwari (ज्ञानेश्वरी, अध्याय ९ राजविद्याराजगृह्ययोग):

"जंव जंव बाळ बळिया वाढे । तंव तंव भोजें नाचती कोडें । आयुष्य निमालें आंतुलियेकडे । ते ग्लानीचि नाहीं ॥ ५११ ॥

जन्मलिया दिवसदिवसें । हों लागे काळाचियाचि ऐसें । कीं वाढती करिती उल्हासें । उभविती गुढिया ॥ ५१२ ॥ अगा मर हा बोलु न साहती । आणि मेलिया तरी रडती । परि असतें जात न गणिती । गहिंसपणें ॥ ५१३ ॥

दर्दुर सापें गिळिजतु आहे उभा । कीं तो मासिया वेटाळी जिभा । तैसे प्राणिये कवणा । वाढविती तृष्णा ॥ ५१४ ॥

अहा कटा हें वोखटें । मृत्युलोकींचें उफराटें । एथ अर्जुना जरी अवचटें । जन्मलासी तूं ॥ ५१५॥"

(As a child grows, they fondle it with great joy and do not grieve that its life is getting reduced. A child comes under the sway of death from its very birth, but they celebrate its birthday with great pomp. O Partha, people cannot bear to hear the name of death and mourn when a relation dies. But they do not foolishly consider how their life is getting spent. When the serpent is swallowing the frog, the latter is catching flies with its tongue. In the same way, being increase their desires. Alas! How foul and perverse are the things of this mortal world! O Partha, even though you are born in this world by mere accident (511-515), spurn it and take to the path of devotion, by which you will come to my eternal abode.)

Snake is eating frog, frog is eating fly...

Exhibit-II:

"हें जाणों मृत्यु रागिटा । सिंहाडयाचा दरकुटा । परी काय वांजटा । पूरिजत असे ? ॥६०॥

महाकल्पापरौतीं । कव घालूनि अवचितीं । सत्यलोकभद्रजाती । आंगीं वाजे ॥६१॥

लोकपाळ नित्य नवे । दिग्गजांचे मेळावे । स्वर्गींचिये आडवे । रिगोनि मोडी ॥६२॥

येर ययाचेनि अंगवातें । जन्ममृत्यूचिये गर्तें । निर्जिवें होऊनि भ्रमतें । जीवमृगें ॥६३॥

न्याहाळीं पां केव्हडा । पसरलासे चवडा । जो करूनियां माजिवडा । आकारगजु ॥६४॥

म्हणौनि काळाची सत्ता । हाचि बोलु निरुता । ऐसे वाद पंडुसुता । क्षेत्रालागीं ॥६५॥"

("This Kala is dreadful like a den of lions. If after knowing this you indulge in empty talk, how will it help you? This Kala will hold in his fatal grip all of a sudden even the blessed denizens of Satyaloka at the final dissolution of the world. He enters the heavenly woods and destroys the eight regents and elephants that guard the eight quarters. In the whirl of this Kala, the deer in the form of human beings become dispirited and wander in the pits of births and deaths. Just see how this Kala has spread out his paw and has held in it the elephant in the form of the world and so the supremacy of this Kala over the Field is the sole truth.

O Arjuna, these are different views about the Field. (61-65)")

In this instance lion overpowering elephant and deer...

And the lions are not just in jungles and zoos...

Artist: Charles Barsotti, The New Yorker, February 8 1999

Infosys: An Honest and Politically-Correct Face of Nepotic, Inbreeding India

The Hindu, June 3 2013:

"Though dynastic succession is accepted in Indian businesses as much as in politics, the fact is that by inducting the son, even if it is as a mere assistant to the father, Infosys appears to have fallen short of the high standards of global corporate governance which it professes to practise."
 
Gardiner Harris, The New York Times, October 26 2012


"...In the past, private sector companies grew like gangbusters in part by shutting out the rest of India and avoiding interactions with a dysfunctional and corrupt government. But top executives here now say they can no longer turn their backs on the chaos that surrounds them. “Building these islands, or expanding them to become the whole of India, I don’t believe will work,” said S. Gopalakrishnan, executive co-chairman of Infosys, India’s leading technology giant. He gestured out the window at his company’s immaculate campus, which included a glass pyramid, food courts, basketball courts and gardens. “At some point, the resistance from the outside world will overwhelm them.” 

Indeed, India’s dysfunction is now taking a toll on Infosys’ well-known productivity, Mr. Gopalakrishnan said. His employees’ commutes are longer, their fights with schools more intractable. “If you have just 100 employees, the impact is not so much,” he said. “But with 150,000 employees, more and more the environment affects us as individuals, and, yes, it slows things down. At some point, you can’t shut your mind to what is happening around you....”


लोकसत्ता संपादकीय (Loksatta leader), June 3 2013:

"...तरुणांशी संवाद साधण्याची, त्यांच्या नजरेतून कंपनी चालवण्याची गरज फक्त चिरंजीवाशीच संवाद साधून पूर्ण होईल असे थोरले मूर्ती यांना वाटते काय? रोहन यांच्याकडे प्रशासकीय अधिकार नाहीत हे कबूल. ते अधिकृतपणे देण्याची गरजही नाही. कारण रोहन हे नारायण मूर्ती यांचे सुपुत्र आहेत ही एकच बाब त्यांना हवे ते अधिकार मिळण्यासाठी पुरेशी आहे. तेव्हा रोहन मूर्ती यांनी एक रुपया मानधन घेतले काय किंवा फुकट काम केले काय, तो देखावाच राहतो. रोहन हे तीर्थरूपांच्या कार्यालयाचे नेतृत्व करणार आहेत. तेव्हा त्यांच्याकडून आलेली सूचना वा विनंती ही कोणत्याही प्रशासकीय अधिकाराशिवायदेखील अन्य कर्मचाऱ्यांसाठी शिरसावंद्य असेल, हे उघड आहे. तेव्हा चि. रोहन यांना प्रशासकीय अधिकार नाहीत हा दावा दांभिकपणाचा झाला आणि तो मूर्ती यांच्याकडून अपेक्षित नाही..."


Ajit Dayal:

"At one level, the decision of Narayana Murthy at the age of 66 years, to head back to the chair can be explained as pure wealth protection. His family owns own about 5% in Infosys. That is worth some Rs 7,000 crore today. The April announcement of lower visibility saw a 20% knock in the share price - a loss of some Rs 1,500 crore for the Murthy family in that one day. That is a lot of erosion of wealth for any family."


Recycling my earlier post dated December 1 2007

On November 27, 2007, I saw Shekhar Kapoor saying, on NDTV panel discussion in Goa, that Hindi film Saawariya does NOT feature newcomers but kids of (well established insiders like) Rishi Kapoor, Nitu Singh and Anil Kapoor.

He wondered if Sony corp. would have indeed invested Rs. 38 crores on a pair of unknown artists.

Indian film industry, similar to Indian businesses, is like larger Indian society, deeply nepotic right from the days of Mahabharat.

If Saawariya pair is a new comer, following Indians should also be called "newcomers" to their respective fields:

Rahul Gandhi, Supriya Pawar, M.K. Kanimozhi, Uddhav Thackeray, Rahul Mahajan, Maran brothers…to infinity.

Would you?

Nepotism has not worked in sports yet. But who knows? I would bet on a Tendulkar or a Ganguly captaining Indian national cricket team around year 2025.

In India, social mobility was always suspect because of caste system. What about the rest of the world?

Nepotism is prospering every where.

Newsweek November 3, 2007 announced: “The Death Of Social Mobility. In the Asian Tiger economies, the next generation will struggle to do as well as their parents did.”

Once beacon of social mobility, America too is turning very nepotic.

Paul Krugman:

“…Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence. This goes along with other studies indicating that rags-to-riches stories have become vanishingly rare, and that the correlation between fathers' and sons' incomes has risen in recent decades. In modern America, it seems, you're quite likely to stay in the social and economic class into which you were born… “

(“The Death of Horatio Alger”)

The Economist (January 8, 2004) said:

“…AMERICA likes to think of itself as the very embodiment of the spirit of meritocracy: a country where all people are judged on their individual abilities rather than their family connections. The American Revolution swept away the flummery of feudal titles. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of creating a “natural aristocracy”. Benjamin Franklin sniped that “a man who makes boast of his ancestors doth but advertise his own insignificance.”

… But are they right? The more you look at modern America, the more you are struck by how frequently it departs from the meritocratic ideal. George Bush's Washington is a study in family influence: look at the Powells, the Chao/McConnells, the Scalias and the Cheneys, not to mention the Shrub himself.

The biggest insult to meritocracy, however, is found in the country's top universities. These institutions, which control access to the country's most impressive jobs, consider themselves far above Washington and its grubby spoils system. Yet they continue to operate a system of “legacy preferences”—affirmative action for the children of alumni…”






Artist: R K Laxman, The Times of India, 11 September 2006

J S MIll: Why I Don't Share Ashok Shahane's Frustration With G G Agarkar

May 8 2013 was  John Stuart Mill's 140th death anniversary and May 20 was his 207th birth anniversary. May is Mill!

 

Artist: Scott Garrett

 John Stuart Mill:

"Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."

 John Gray:

"To account for the Fukuyama/Wilson faith that mankind can achieve conscious mastery of its evolution, we need to look back to an early 19th-century cult - French positivism. Led by thinkers such as Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, the positivists were the inventors of the religion of humanity that has inspired the secular religions of the past two centuries. They had many eccentricities, including a version of the Catholic practice of crossing oneself in which they tapped the parts of the cranium believed by phrenologists to be connected with order and progress, but their religion has been vastly influential. It inspired not only Marx but also, through John Stuart Mill, many liberals, and it stands behind the faith in progress that is shared by all parties today."
  

Ben Yagoda, “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It”:

"The nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill holds out a temptingly lofty rationale for a consideration of the parts of speech, claiming that they represent fundamental categories of human thought."

  
This is in continuation of my earlier post dated May 22 2013.

Sadly,  Ashok Shahane's (अशोक शहाणे) book 'Napeksha' (नपेक्षा) has no index- typical of many serious/ nonfiction Marathi books that are published.

While criticizing  B G Tilak (बाळ गंगाधर टिळक) for quoting John Stuart Mill in 'Gitarahasya' (गीतारहस्य), Shahane says: 

"....मिल आणि स्पेन्सर ह्यांचा त्यांनी विचारसादृश्य असणारे म्हणून तळटिपांतून उल्लेख केला. ही त्या काळच्या बुद्धीच्या दारिद्र्याची ठळक निशाणी म्हणून सांगता येईल. 

मिल आणि स्पेन्सर ह्यांची पुस्तके 'क्रमिक' स्वरुपाची आहेत, ही गोष्ट ध्यानात घेतली म्हणजे त्या काळच्या महाराष्ट्रातल्या वैचारिक नेतृत्वाची कल्पना येईल..."

["Footnotes mentioned (John Stuart) Mill's and (Herbert) Spencer's thoughts were similar (to Bhagavad Gita's or Tilak's?). This can be described as the bold sign of poverty of intellect of those times.

If one comprehends the fact that Mill's and Spencer's books were sort of 'text' books, one realises about the nature of the then thought-leadership of Maharashtra... "]

I strongly disagree with the assertion that quoting of JSM was a sign of poverty of intellect.

Shahane is free and maybe even justified to fault the then Maharashtra's thought-leadership but he can't blame the problem on Mill.

Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (गोपाळ गणेश आगरकर) was a great disciple / fan of John Stuart Mill.

In May 1893 (he died in June 1895),  he was very ill. One night, while in high  fever, as he could not sleep, he wrote a note to his close relatives and friends. 

A part of it reads as follows:

"...जॉन  स्टुअर्ट मिलसाहेब, पुढील जन्मीही तुमच्या पायाशी बसून शिकता आले तर मला अतिशय समाधान लाभेल. जर आपणास माझे सर्वात प्रिय व आदरणीय गुरु होणे शक्य झाले आणि मलाही आपला सर्वात नम्र आणि अज्ञात शिष्य होणे जमले तरच हे सुख मला लाभेल..."

('आगरकर', य  दि फडके, १९९६)

("....John Stuart Mill-saheb, in next birth if I can learn sitting at your feet, I will have great satisfaction. I will get that pleasure only if you could become my dearest and most respected teacher and if I could be your most humble and incognito student...",

 'Agarkar' by Y D Phadke, 1996)

Why is Mr. Shahane so much dismissive of Mill? (Btw- Why doesn't Mr. Shahane see G G Agarkar as a great Socratean figure?...More on this some other time.)

It's most likely because Nietzsche's antipathy towards British utilitarianism, expressed in the cartoon below, and its greatest proponent JSM : "Man does not strive for happiness, only the English do that." 

(This is how John Gray talks about Nietzsche: 

"Like innumerable, less reflective humanists who came after him, Nietzsche wished to hold on to an essentially Christian view of the human subject while dropping the transcendental beliefs that alone support it. It was this impulse to salvage a religious conception of humankind, I believe, that animated Nietzsche's attempt to construct a new mythology. The task set by Nietzsche for his imaginary Superman was to confer meaning on history through a redemptive act of will. The sorry history of the species, lacking purpose or sense until a higher form of humanity came on to the scene, would then be redeemed. In truth, Nietzsche's mythology is no more than the Christian view of history stated in idiosyncratic terms, and a banal version of it underpins nearly all subsequent varieties of secular thought. ")



Commenting on the list of current thinkers / intellectuals published by Foreign Policy magazine in 2011 and comparing it to an imaginary list prepared in 1861, Gideon Rachman says:

"...It is an impressive group of people (from 2011). But now compare it with a similar list that could have been compiled 150 years ago. The 1861 rankings could have started with Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill – On the Origin of Species and On Liberty were both published in 1859. Then you could include Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. And that was just the people living in and around London. In Russia, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were both at work, although neither had yet published their greatest novels. Even if, like Foreign Policy, you have a preference for politicians, the contrast between the giants of yesteryear and the relative pygmies of today is alarming..." 

(Financial Times, January 24 2011)

Look at the company JSM keeps in the statement above- Darwin, Marx, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky....(I don't say Dickens because very likely Mr. Shahane is dismissive of him!). 

Another important thing to note: along with Darwin, Dickens, Marx, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard,  Mill survives and remains relevant even today.

John Gray remains a fan of  JSM for:

"Not his utilitarianism, not his belief in progress, not his Victorianism - but his eclecticism. He took things from different systems of thought. The truth about human civilisation is very unlikely to lie in some single form. Which he understood."

'The truth about human civilisation is very unlikely to lie in some single form.'?...Even Shahane's 'darling'  Soren Kierkegaard would be impressed!

courtesy: 'Action Philosophers: Two Millennia of Philosophy in Comic Form' by Maria Popova