Dylan Thomas @100: The Wheel’s Still In Spin

Today October 27 2014 is 100th Birth Anniversary of Dylan Thomas

Notes on the Art of Poetry:

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on

in the world between the covers of books,

such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,,,

such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,

such and so many blinding bright lights,,,

splashing all over the pages

in a million bits and pieces

all of which were words, words, words,

and each of which were alive forever

in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

Mr. Thomas was decidedly a poet who thought in images.

"...Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’..."

The Most Fantastic Monster I Have Seen

Today October 24 2014 is 146th Birth Anniversary of the former ruler of princely state of Aundh: Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi (भवानराव श्रीनिवासराव पंत प्रतिनिधी) 1868-1951

Marina Warner, The New York Review of Books, January 3 2014: 

“Monsters are made to warn, to threaten, and to instruct, but they are by no means always monstrous in the negative sense of the term; they have always had a seductive side. With the weakening of belief in their supernatural origins, their appeal—their animal magnetism—shows every sign of growing stronger. ”

Boria Sax says:

"The most fantastic monster in all of Western history just might be the demon in the center of Hell, from Hieronymus Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights," painted around the start of the sixteenth century..."

(The Huffington Post, January 2 2014)

Artist: Hieronymus Bosch (c 1450–1516)


But for me, it is a figure of demon Kabandha from epic Ramayana...I still remember how grotesque, fearsome but seductive in some ways it looked when I first looked at its following depiction as a kid

 Artist: Bhavanrao Shrinivas alias Balasaheb Pandit Pant Pratinidhi (भवानराव श्रीनिवास उर्फ बाळासाहेब पंडित पंत प्रतिनिधी)

तरी पंपतो फिबस काळोख...Phoebus The God of Light Pumps Darkness

Today October 21 2014 marks the beginning of the festival of lights- Diwali (दिवाळी)

B S Mardhekar (बा. सी. मर्ढेकर): 

"...पंक्चरली जरि रात्र दिव्यांनीं,

तरी पंपतो कुणी काळोख; ..."

("...Punctured though night is by light-bulbs,

 Some one still pumps darkness ;..")

This year (2014) the Nobel prize in physics goes to Isamu Akasaki, Meijo University and Nagoya University, Hiroshi Amano, Nagoya University, and Shuji Nakamura, University of California, Santa Barbara, for inventing the blue light emitting diode (blue LED) 20 years ago…“Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps,” notes a statement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes.

Wikipedia: "Apollo, like other Greek deities, had a number of epithets applied to him, reflecting the variety of roles, duties, and aspects ascribed to the god. However, while Apollo has a great number of appellations in Greek myth, only a few occur in Latin literature, chief among them Phoebus which was very commonly used by both the Greeks and Romans in Apollo's role as the god of light."

Thomas Pynchon, 'Gravity’s Rainbow', 1973 is considered one of the greatest books of 20th century.  I have still not read it.

Paris Review informed me this month how the book talked about “Phoebus”, an international light-bulb cartel.

"Phoebus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland..."

But  Phoebus is NOT Pynchon's imagination. It really existed!

Markus Krajewski informs on September 24 2014 in IEEE Spectrum:

"On 23 December 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would alter the world for decades to come. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers, including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, and the United States’ General Electric. As revelers hung Christmas lights elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas. It was the first cartel in history to enjoy a truly global reach...."

And concludes on a grim note:

"...True, today’s lighting industry is much larger and more diverse than it was in the 1920s and ’30s, and government monitoring of collusive behavior is more vigilant. Nevertheless, the allure for businesses to cooperate in such a market is strong. And the Phoebus cartel shows how it could succeed."

'Is he Phoebus'

Image courtesy: Philips Company Archives

As I looked at the picture above and re-read lines from Mardhekar's poem, they assumed a new meaning.

Is that towering figure- who looks like Lee Falk's Phantom- the god Phoebus?

 Mardhekar says some one is pumping darkness...तरी पंपतो फिबस काळोख... Is Phoebus doing that? A god spreading darkness instead of light...Mardhekar might have liked this twist!

Isn't any such carteling activity ethically equivalent to pumping of darkness? Isn't this an integral shadowy side of current version of capitalism?

"पंक्चरली जरि रात्र दिव्यांनीं, तरी पंपतो कुणी काळोख;…"

These lines by Mardhekar, which appear in the very first post of this blog, are indeed a powerful metaphor. They are funny and poignant. I never thought they would come handy here.

And I Do Not Really Want to Understand...

According to Wikipedia,  Jonas Mekas is called the godfather of American avant-garde cinema.

Watch an excerpt from his 2000 film, "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty." on YouTube here. It runs for only 2 min 29 sec.


"I have never been able, really, to figure out where my life begins and where it ends. I have never, never been able to figure it all out, what it's all about, what it all means. So when I began now to put all these rolls of film together, to string them together, the first idea was to keep them chronological. But then I gave up and I just began splicing them together by chance the way that I found them on the shelf.

Because I really don't know where any piece of my life really belongs, so let it be. Let it go. Just by pure chance, disorder.

There is some current, some kind of order in it, order of its own, which I do not really understand same as I never understood life around me.

The real life, as they say. Or the real people. I never understood them. I still do not understand them. And I do not really want to understand them."