Necessary Looking

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,500+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"... श्रीमंत बाळासाहेब पंतप्रतिनिधी : "बहुश्रुतता असल्याशिवाय सुसंस्कृतता नाही"

मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

सर्वपित्री अमावस्या...Democracy Makes Each Man Forget His Ancestors

Today September 23 2014 is Sarvapitri Amavasya day (सर्वपित्री अमावस्या / पितृमोक्ष अमावस्या) in Marathi calendar.

Richard Dawkins:

"As things stand, it appears that all known life forms can be traced to a single ancestor which lived more than 3 billion years ago.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Democracy in America’:

“Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.”

Well, not each man...

Artist: Barney Tobey, The New Yorker, June 23 1975

Saturday, September 20, 2014

एखादा दरबारी छबिना चौघडे-तुताऱ्या वाजवत डौलाने यावा...Kesarbai's Malkauns: Act of Cosmic Boasting

September 16 2014 was 37th Death Anniversary of Kesarbai Kerkar (केसरबाई केरकर).

Philip Ball:

"Music is the most remarkable blend of art and science, logic and emotion, physics and psychology, known to us."

जी ए कुलकर्णी, 'घर', 'पिंगळावेळ', 1977:

"…तिला एकदा तिचे घर मिळाले की मी सुटलो. मग मोडीत निघालेल्या माझ्या ठोकायंत्राची मला भीती नाही. केंव्हा का बंद पडेना ते ! मग शेजारी सिगरेटचे एक पूर्ण पाकीट असावे. एखादा दरबारी छबिना चौघडे-तुताऱ्या वाजवत डौलाने यावा, त्याप्रमाणे वाटणारा मालकंस टेपरेकॉर्डवर तासभर उलगडत असावा ..."

Yuval Noah Harari, author of 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind', 2014, in The Guardian podcast:

"...But if you take an outsider's perspective, a kind of cosmic perspective, what did humans do for the rest of the cosmos, the rest of the planet, then it is a very gloomy conclusion. I don't think we have done anything positive for anybody except ourselves so..."

Maybe we have done something positive for the rest of the cosmos. By sending there the Voyager Golden Records aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts that were launched in 1977.

Kesarbai's is the only Indian voice on them. The title of her song there is Jaat Kahaan Ho (जात कहाँ हो)...Where Are You Going? She seems to be asking Voyager and us.

Voyager- in August 2014 at a distance of 1.919×10¹⁰ km away from earth- may answer that with more accuracy than us, homo sapiens.

Why did we send Kesarbai and a few others to the stars?

Philip Ball has written a whole book-'The Music Instinct / How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It', 2010- to answer that.

Mr. Ball writes at the start of his book:

"...Fourteen billion miles away from Earth, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music is heading towards new listeners. An alien civilization encountering the Voyager 1 or 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977 and now drifting beyond our solar system, will discover a golden gramophone record on which they can listen to Glenn Gould playing the Prelude and Fugue in C from the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. You couldn’t fit much on a long-playing record in 1977, but there was no room for a more extensive record collection – the main mission of the spacecraft was to photograph and study the planets, not to serve as an interstellar mobile music library. All the same, offering extraterrestrials this glimpse of Bach’s masterwork while denying them the rest of it seems almost an act of cruelty. On the other hand, one scientist feared that including Bach’s entire oeuvre might come across as an act of cosmic boasting..."

Sending Kesarbai's Malkauns- as elaborated by S Anand in The Caravan, September 16 2014- too might come across as an act of cosmic boasting.

Raga Lalat and Raga Malkauns

Artist of disc jacket: Unknown to me

Picture courtesy: HMV/ EMI India and Blog Anthems for the Nation of Luobaniya

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Why Did Mata Hari Become a Household Name?

Today September 18 2014 is 109th Birth Anniversary of Greta Garbo

Richard Attenborough, maker of Gandhi (1982), died recently.

I started taking interest in the Mahatma only after watching the film.

Earlier, throughout my school and college days, I had heard and read only propaganda like stuff about Gandhi. That made me dislike Gandhi.

1969, Gandhi's birth centenary year, and my first at high-school, was particularly bad because they just went on and on with their boring songs, books and speeches.

I think future generations will learn more about Gandhi from the Attenborough film than any books or speeches. This is the power of a well made cinema and visual images.

Jonathan Yardley has written a review of Karen Abbott's book on September 5 2014 in Washington Post. Its title: "Mata Haris of the Civil War".

Mr. Yardley's assumption: readers of WP recognize Mata Hari.

I don't know now, but once Mata Hari was a well known name in middle class Maharashtra.

I often wondered why.

When I saw these pictures of Greta Garbo, from 1931 film "Mata Hari", I seemed to partly understand.

courtesy: FB page 'The Golden Age of Hollywood'