India In One Word....Indira is India, India is Indira....कुठून आले हे? चीन मधून?

T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan, 'Padmavati controversy once again exposes history's Achilles Heel’:

“ ....In India, the extent of KGB funding of the Congress, as revealed by Vasily Mitrokhin, has been glossed over entirely. Ditto for the role of the CIA...”

(Business Standard, November 19 2017)

D. K. Barooah, Congress president, c 1974: 

"Indira is India, India is Indira"

 हे  नंतरचे अर्थातच लहानपणीच वाचले होते पण हे कसे सुचले याबद्दल clue यावर्षी मिळाला.

Yu Hua, 'China in Ten Words',  2011:

"...In my childhood years “the people” was just as marvelous an expression as “Chairman Mao,” and when I first began to read, these were the first words I mastered; I could write them even before I could write my own name or the names of my parents. It was my view then that “the people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people.”

That was during the Cultural Revolution, and I marched about proudly sharing this insight with everyone I met. They responded with dubious looks, apparently finding something problematic about my formulation, although nobody directly contradicted me. In those days people walked on eggshells, fearful that if they said anything wrong, they might be branded a counterrevolutionary, endangering their whole family. My parents, hearing of my discovery, looked equally doubtful. They eyed me warily and told me in a roundabout way that they couldn’t see anything wrong with what I’d said but I still had better not say it again.

But since this was my greatest childhood insight, I couldn’t bear to hush it up and continued sharing it with the world at large. One day I found supporting evidence in a popular saying of the time, “Chairman Mao lives in our hearts.” I took this to its logical conclusion: “Chairman Mao lives in everyone’s heart, so what lives in Chairman Mao’s heart? It has to be the entire people.” Therefore: “The people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people.”

Those doubtful looks among the residents of my little town gradually dissipated. Some people began nodding in approval, and others began to say the same thing—my little playmates first, and then grown-ups, too.

But I felt threatened when lots of people started saying, “The people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people.” In a revolutionary era one cannot claim a patent for anything, and I found my status as inventor was being steadily eroded. “I was the first one to say that,” I would declare. But no adults set any store by my claim of authorship, and in the end even my young companions refused to accept that I deserved credit. Faced with my strenuous arguments or pathetic pleas, they would shake their heads: “No, everybody says that.”

I was upset, regretting bitterly that I had made my discovery public. I should have stored it forever in my own mind, safe from anybody else, keeping it for myself to savor my whole life through..."

 ..

An 'An ABZ of Love'

Today February 14 2018 is Valentine's Day

 Artist: Eiler Krag featuring in 'An ABZ of Love', 1963 by Inge and Sten Hegeler

लक्ष-दुर्लक्ष, झरा-लाईव्ह स्ट्रीमिंग, निसर्गात-खुराड्यात...Ward Sutton's The Luncheon on the Grass, 2016!

#TheLuncheonontheGrass2016

n plus one mag:

“For David Hume, increased conversation between men and women corresponded to “an increase of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together.” But Hume didn’t know about Gchat, which offers us so many opportunities for conversation that conversation becomes impossible. We are distracted from chatting by chatting itself.”

John Harris:

“ In the book, (Nicholas) Carr looks back on such human inventions as the map, the clock and the typewriter, and how much they influenced our essential modes of thought (among the people whose writing was changed by the latter were Friedrich Nietszche and TS Eliot). By the same token, he argues that the internet's "cacophony of stimuli" and "crazy quilt" of information have given rise to "cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning" – in contrast to the age of the book, when intelligent humans were encouraged to be contemplative and imaginative...”

Jonathan Franzen, ‘Freedom: A Novel ‘, 2010:

“...“This was what was keeping me awake at night,” Walter said. “This fragmentation. Because it’s the same problem everywhere. It’s like the internet, or cable TV—there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.”...”

 
Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) has poked an occasional fun at some great art. An example could be found here: The Persistence of Memory. Vasant Sarwate style!

Here is a similar effort that made me laugh and introspect.

'The Luncheon on the Grass' , 1863

Artist: Édouard Manet

courtesy: Wikipedia 

Wikipedia says about Manet's masterpiece:

"The painting features a nude woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men. Her body is starkly lit and she stares directly at the viewer. The two men, dressed as young dandies, seem to be engaged in conversation, ignoring the woman. In front of them, the woman's clothes, a basket of fruit, and a round loaf of bread are displayed, as in a still life. In the background a lightly clad woman bathes in a stream. Too large in comparison with the figures in the foreground, she seems to float above them. The roughly painted background lacks depth – giving the viewer the impression that the scene is not taking place outdoors, but in a studio..."

Artist: Ward Sutton, 2016

Now watch Sutton's master-parody: 

 The two men, dressed as young dandies, and the nude woman are all ignoring each other...In the background a lightly clad woman is NOT bathing in a stream but perhaps busy is live streaming  something....the scene is probably not taking place outdoors...and if it is, one of the persons is certainly trying to catch Pokemons...