Sunny Side Up: World Egg Day

#WorldEggDay
 
Today Second Friday in October is World Egg Day

Artist: Seth Fleishman, The New Yorker,  July 2016

सर्वपित्री अमावस्या...Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come

आज भाद्रपद कृ १४, शके १९४०, सर्वपित्री अमावस्या.

Norman  Cohn, ‘Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith’, 1993

“.....The Rig Veda has nothing to say about the common people -naturally enough, since it was composed by and for members of the privileged strata of society. To the privileged it offers a most agreeable prospect. Provided only that they had honoured the gods and made the proper ritual offerings, had been generous to the priests and fulfilled their proper functions in the world, such people had no cause to worry about the netherworld. On the contrary, they could look forward to an afterlife as happy as that which awaited the most fortunate members of Egyptian society.

Vedic Indians believed that each such individual had a spirit - an impalpable substance, like a breath. But though the spirit was distinct from the body, it did not desert it for ever at the moment of death. At death the spirit made its way to heaven, easily and pleasantly - and once arrived there it met its body again. Not even cremation could prevent that: so long as the corpse had not been injured by bird or beast, and the bones had been collected afterwards and correctly arranged, the whole body was reconstituted in the next world, ready for the spirit to re-enter. Then life was resumed.

The dead continued their lives in heaven, where they dwelt with the Fathers - the dead who had gone before them - and with Yama, the first man and therefore the first to die. Now he reigned, rather than ruled, in heaven. That blissful realm is repeatedly described in the Rig Veda: it is full of radiant light, and of harmony and joy. Its denizens are nourished on milk and honey and of course soma. They make love - all the more deliciously because they have been freed from every bodily defect. The sound of sweet singing and of the flute is readily available. There are even wishcows, which supply whatever is wished for. In short, the afterlife of the fortunate minority would be a much improved version of the life they had lived on earth - a life, too, that would be free, at last and for ever, from harassment by the restless agents of chaos.

But none of this had any bearing on the future of the world itself....”

 

कुठे आहे स्ट्राइंडबर्ग यांची दुखरी नस?... Searching GA's Epigraph

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

ज्यांनी ज्यांनी "पिंगळावेळ" नुस्त उचलून उघडून बघितलंय , त्या सर्वांना हे अर्पणपत्रिकेतील (चपखल शब्द epigraph) वाक्य वीजेसारखे चमकते... जीए हे 'वेगळे' लेखक आहेत याची जाणीव तिथून सुरु होते, किमान माझ्याबाबतीत ती १९८१ साली झाली....

जीएंच ते मला ब्ध्येय  वाक्य वाटत... "माझ्या लेखनात नावीन्य पाहू नका, माझ्या प्रत्येक कथेकडे दुखऱ्या नसेकडे जायचा प्रयत्न म्हणून पहा."

अलीकडे वाटू लागले हे वाक्य इतके भारी आहे, याच्या आजूबाजूचा परिसर पण तसाच तेजस्वी असेल. म्हटल बघूया कुठे आहे ते वाक्य....स्ट्राइंडबर्ग (१८४९- १९१२) यांचे सर्व लेखन गेली कित्येक वर्षे पब्लिक डोमेन मध्ये आहे आणि ठिकठिकाणी उपलब्ध आहे.....

मला मात्र हे वाक्य स्वीडिश स्ट्राइंडबर्ग  यांच्या कोणत्याही इंग्लिश मधील अनुवादित पुस्तकात अजून मिळालेले नाही!

त्यांच्या गाजलेल्या, सहजपणे इंग्लिश मध्ये उपलब्ध असलेल्या पुस्तकांत पहिले. नंतर गूगल आणि Google Books वर शोधले Delphi Collected Works of August Strindberg (Illustrated). 

Sue Prideaux यांच्या अत्यंत गाजलेल्या Strindberg यांच्या चरित्रात ('Strindberg: A Life', २०१२) मध्ये ते नाही ...

तुम्हाला कोठे मिळाल्यास जरूर कळवा .....

------ह्या संबंधित माझ्या दोन तीन  पोस्ट - एप्रिल ३ २०१६, जानेवारी ३० २०१७ , मार्च १२ २०१६-  When There Were No Wikipedia and Google...and Now That They Are Here... ,

  गोडसेंचा गोंधळ : कुठाय चांदण्यातील मखमली नीलिमा?...James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Two Nocturnes  आणि

  जी. एंचा पहिला यात्रिक अनुल्लेखित दुसर्‍याचा...Henry van Dyke's 'The Story of the Other Wise Man', 1895  पाहू शकता.

------त्याशिवाय फेसबुकवर लिहल्या प्रमाणे जी. एंची एक कथा 'संवेदना', वाङ्मय शोभाच्या जुलै १९५०च्या अंकात छापून आली होती. ती कथा अनुवादित आहे पण मूळ लेखकाचा, कॉपीराईट चा उल्लेख कुठेही नाही!

.---- त्यांची आणखी एक कथा 'नारिंगी हातरुमाल' वाङ्मय शोभा डिसेंबर १९५० च्या अंकात आहे, पुन्हा अनुवादित पुन्हा मूळ लेखकाचा , कॉपीराईट माहितीचा उल्लेख नाही...

---- तसेच :
ऑक्टोबर ९ १९५९ला श्री पु भागवतांना लिहलेल्या पत्रात, जीए, रॉबर्ट ग्रेव्हस यांच्या एका कवितेच्या दोन ओळी quote करतात :

 "Alas, it is late
Already bolder tenants are at the gate."  

त्या ओळी तशा नाहीत तर अशा आहेत: 
"Too far, too late:
Already bolder tenants were at the gate." , 

'Here Live Your Life Out!' from 'The New Yorker', March 1959....

....  भरपूर फरक आहे, दोन अवतरणांमध्ये 

-----In one of the most impressive passages from N G. Kalelkar's (ना गो कालेलकर) book '"bhasha ani sanskriti" (भाषा आणि संस्कृती) he says:

When a class containing Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) was asked to write an essay on the subject of the Last Supper, Byron wrote just one line- 'The water saw its Lord and blushed'...Water in Latin is feminine...etc. etc. (page 47, edition December 1982)

This moved me so much that since my first reading of it in the 1980's, I memorised it and kept quoting it in my conversations.

There are a couple of problems with this.

First, it was not the Last Supper but Marriage at Cana. And second, it was not Lord Byron- then a third grade boy- who first said this. In fact it was Richard Crashaw (c.1613-1649) who wrote:

'The conscious water saw its God, and blushed' (original in Latin: Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit)

I feel Kalelkar should have attributed this to Crashaw but did he know that it was Crashaw who first wrote it?

 A lot of stuff written in Marathi has gone unchallenged.

पुस्ती : हे वाक्य Strindberg यांचे नसून जीएंचे असल्यास मला त्यांच्या बद्दल वाटणारा आदर आणखी वाढेल!

courtesy: Delphi Classics

Homosexuality is Decriminalised in India ....New Riddle in Arithmetic

Artist: William Haefeli, The New Yorker, March 1999

Charles Addams 30th Death Anniversary

#CharlesAddams30thDeathAnniversary 

Robert Mankoff answering the question "What influence has Charles Addams’s work had on cartooning and American humor?":
"I think his influence is, like the man, largish. He tapped into that vein of American gothic that has a touch of paranoia about it, seeing behind every comforting façade the uncomfortable truth about the duality of human nature. But where Gothic literature usually combined these themes with romance, Addams made the horror hilarious: disturbing, but at the same time friendly, identifiable, and acceptable. In cartooning, you can see the direct influence of his work in someone like Gahan Wilson, and in many other cartoonists. Horror films that combine humor with horror, such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” with its wise-cracking Freddy Krueger, are also in his debt. And, of course, Addams’s humor was “black” and “sick” before those terms applied.

But I think his influence extends beyond the horror genre, to humor not as a comforting “laughter is the best medicine” anodyne but as something deeply skeptical of the purported values of middle-class American life. By making us laugh at, and with, his fiendish protagonists, he makes us temporarily share their values, and doubt our own."

Charles McGrath:

“Punch failed, moreover, to produce anyone on the order of a Saul Steinberg, a Peter Arno, a Charles Addams — an artist who raised cartooning to something approximating fine art.” 

Andrew Stark:
“....The mix, in Charles Addams's world, of virtue and "evil"—of love and sadism, of the grotesque and the homespun—makes his drawings, taken as a whole, much richer than cartoons aimed at simple gags and artistically more nuanced—if unsettlingly incomplete. Addams furnishes a perspective on our own world, too: a world in which the average human has learned to be physically nonviolent in light of our physical fragility and emotionally intact (more or less) in the face of the emotional abuse that life regularly hurls our way.

We are lucky in our own physical and emotional ecology. Ours may not be the best of all worlds. But Addams's inability to realize the alternative fully suggests that it may be the best of all possible worlds. One of the signs of genius is that an artist sheds new light on the human condition. Or, in Addams's case, casts new shadows....”

"Medusa for Haircut"

The New Yorker,  August 15 1936

The New Yorker, February 9 1946

२०व्या शतकातील एका सर्वोत्कृष्ट व्यंगचित्रकाराबद्दल काय लिहायच?...... त्यांची अनेक कार्टून ह्या ब्लॉगवर आली आहेत.

पद्मा सहस्रबुद्धे- त्या चारचौघी...Padma Sahasrabuddhe's Four Women

#PadmaSahasrabuddhe #VasantSahasrabuddhe  #सहस्त्रबुद्धे #वाङ्मयशोभा

रत्नाकर मतकरी, लोकसत्ता , नोव्हेंबर २०१२:
"...पुस्तक पाहताना पहिल्या क्षणीच ज्यांच्या कर्तृत्वाचा साक्षात्कार होतो, त्या माझ्या उपकारकर्त्यांचा आता अगदी शेवटी उल्लेख करतो. हे आहेत अर्थपूर्ण, आकर्षक मुखपृष्ठं तयार करून पुस्तकाला चेहरा देणारे कसबी चित्रकार. माझं भाग्य थोर म्हणून माझ्या पुस्तकांना वसंत सरवटे, श्याम जोशी, रघुवीर तळाशीलकर, पद्मा सहस्रबुद्धे, सुभाष अवचट, पुंडलिक वझे, साईनाथ रावराणे, कमल शेडगे आणि अर्थातच चंद्रमोहन कुलकर्णी या सर्वच काळात आधुनिक ठरलेल्या थोर चित्रकारांची मुखपृष्ठं लाभली!..."

पद्मा , सौ पद्मा म्हणजेच पद्मा सहस्त्रबुद्धे (Padma Sahasrabuddhe) .... कितीतरी मराठी पुस्तकांची उत्कृष्ट मुखपृष्ठे त्यांनी केली आहेत ... त्यांनी आणि वसंत सहस्रबुद्धेंनी कितीतरी वर्षे 'वाङ्मय शोभा' सजवले ... (पहा http://searchingforlaugh.blogspot.com/…/mukhprushtha-shobha…)

काही वर्षांपूर्वीच माझ्याघरी एकदा आले असता कै वसंत सरवटेंनी सुद्धा पद्मा सहस्त्रबुद्धे यांच्या कामाची खूप तारीफ केली होती.

सर्व चित्रांसाठी कृतज्ञता: पद्मा सहस्त्रबुद्धे, वाङ्मय शोभा, बुकगंगा.कॉम

हे त्यांचे चित्र मला फार आवडले.. हा जो मॉडर्न लुक त्यांनी त्या स्त्रीला दिला आहे तो त्याकाळी (१९७३) भारतात प्रचलीत नव्हता....हिंदी सिनेमातील त्याकाळातील स्त्रिया पहा .... नूतन, गीताबाली , नर्गिस , मधुबाला , मीनाकुमारी नंतरचा काळ .... केसाचे घोसले... स्लीव्हलेस... मोठ्या आयलॅशेस.... कृत्रीम पणे बोलणे ... कानात, गळ्यात मोठ , बटबटीत ....कपाळावर कुंकू नाही...

याउलट या चित्रात ... मंद लिपस्टिक, केस स्टायलिश पण कॉमिक नाहीत, बाह्यांचे ब्लॉउज , न बडबड करता विचाराधीन ,कानात कुड्या, गळा मोकळा....डिस्प्रपोर्शनेटली मोठी अंगठी ...कपाळावर कुंकू ...
कोण असेल श्रीमती पद्माच्या डोळ्यासमोर ?

New Age Trophy Hunters of Pune Roads: World Car Free Day

#worldcarfreeday

Today September 22 2018 is World Car Free Day.

In 2017, our building neighbor, Mr. Deshpande, about 60,  who had just retired, was killed in a hit-and-run accident, in a broad daylight, in a very crowded square, not too far from where we live in a Pune suburban. 

His 'hunter' is still on the loose.
 

 The Spectator, July 2013


If you still have NOT, please note the human trophy head on the wall

समुद्, अकिलीस आणि जीएंचे अस्तिस्तोत्र.... What Does Sea Make Of It All?

जी ए कुलकर्णी : 

"... समुद्राचा अवजड करडा पडदा स्थिर आहे. त्याच्यात आपली प्रतिबिंबे आहेत म्हणून आपण अस्तित्वात आहो  असे निःशंकपणे खडकांना वाटते. व  ते अलिप्तपणे उभे आहेत. 

        समुद्र केवळ निरीक्षक आहे..."

('अस्तिस्तोत्र', १९७१, 'सांजशकुन', १९७५,२०१५)

Friedrich Nietzsche:

“How differently the Greeks must have viewed their natural world, since their eyes were blind to blue and green, and they would see instead of the former a deeper brown, and yellow instead of the latter (and for instance they also would use the same word for the colour of dark hair, that of the corn-flower, and that of the southern sea; and again, they would employ exactly the same word for the colour of the greenest plants and of the human skin, of honey and of the yellow resins: so that their greatest painters reproduced the world they lived in only in black, white, red, and yellow).”

Maria Michela Sassi:

“In trying to see the world through Greek eyes, the Newtonian view is only somewhat useful. We need to supplement it with the Greeks’ own colour theories, and to examine the way in which they actually tried to describe their world. Without this, the crucial role of light and brightness in their chromatic vision would be lost, as would any chance to make sense of the mobility and fluidity of their chromatic vocabulary. If we rely only on the mathematical abstractions of Newton’s optics, it will be impossible to imagine what the Greeks saw when they stood on their shores, gazing out upon the porphureos sea stretching into the distant horizon.”

Achilles:

 "What do you think the sea makes of it all, Patroclus? We come here, we fight, we bleed, patch up . . fight again. To us, it's everything. But to the sea?"

David Gyasi, left, as Achilles and Lemogang Tsipa as Patroclus in 'Troy: Fall of a City', 2018

WILD MERCURY PRODUCTIONS /BBC

ps://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=troy-fall-of-a-city-2018&episode=s01e03

Where and How Is Nirav Modi?

#NiravModi

Artist: Alex Gregory , The New Yorker, September 2018

Sure, honey....then I go design PNB's LoU's.....

Self-Honking Cars: Something Badly Needed In Pune!

#NoHornDay

The Times of India, September 2 2018: "Pune: The city will observe the ‘no horn day’ on September 12"

 

“These self-honking cars make it so much easier to focus on driving.” 

 Artist: Drew Dernavich , The New Yorker, March 2015

I have always thought that most Pune motor vehicles were self-honking already....therefore I did not quite think this could be the subject of a cartoon.