Artist: Ken Krimstein, The New Yorker, January 2015
Saturday, May 14, 2022
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Saturday, May 07, 2022
आमच्या बोटांना पाकळ्यांचा रेशमी स्पर्श शिकवला...Remembering Durga Bhagwat, 20 Years After Her Death
आज मे ७ २०२२, दुर्गाबाईंना जाऊन २० वर्षे झाली
या एका परिच्छेदात कलावंत दूर्गाबाईंची सर्व शक्तीस्थळे दर्शनास येतात ...
एक स्त्री, एक naturalist , एक चौफेर वाचन असलेली ललित लेखक जिचे लेखन काव्याच्या सीमेवर लीलया जात असते , एक सौन्दर्यासक्त, एक मानवतावादी ....
दुर्गा भागवत:
"... गुलाबपुष्प काही भारतीय फूल नव्हे. आपले फूल कमळच. पण नूरजहाँच्या वेळेपासून गुलाब भारतात बहरला. तो होता लाल लाल वसंत गुलाब नि आपला नेहमीचा सुगंधाची बरसात करणारा लहान, देशी गुलाब. यानेच आपल्याला अत्तर दिले. गुलाबपाणी दिले, गुलकंद दिला. यानेच गरिबांची लहान लहान परसदारेही सुशोभित नि सुवासिक केली. यानेच आम्हाला लहानपणापासून आपल्याबरोबर बागडू दिले. आमच्या बोटांना पाकळ्यांचा रेशमी स्पर्श शिकवला. याच्या अर्धोन्मीलित कळीनेच हसू-रुसूच्या-प्रीतीच्या खेळाचे रहस्य वयात येणाच्या वेळी आम्हाला सुगंधाच्या भाषेत सांगितले. यानेच जीवनाची भंगुरता दाखवली नि अमर सुगंधाच्या आत्म्याची खूण पटवून दिली. वाळल्या तरी पाकळ्या सुगंधी. यानेच आमच्या केसांना शोभा दिली . गंध दिला. यानेच आम्हाला रंग पारखायला शिकवले. यानेच काट्यांचे भयानक अस्तित्व ठायी ठायी असते हे पटवून दिले...."
(पृष्ठ ४६-४७, 'भावसंचित', २०१५, संपादन : मीना वैशंपायन )
The Rose (undated) by Eugene de Blaas (Italian, 1843-1932)
Friday, May 06, 2022
Wednesday, May 04, 2022
हेअरपीन लावताना, वेणी घालताना, बुचडा बांधताना....Hair by Takeuchi Keishu, S S Hawaldar and Jillian Tamaki
Please refer to earlier post dated December 29 2017.
Artists: Takeuchi Keishu - 1861-1942 , Jillian Tamaki, S S Hawaldar
More on the picture on the extreme left:
Title - Beauty and Hairpin
Description- A beauty is putting a "kanzashi" (hair pin) made
of red coral on her hair. She is peeking out from a green bamboo shade.
An
Illustration for the novel, "Aki Donari", published in Bungei Kurabu
magazine, Vol.19, No.12.
An Illustration for the novel, "Aki Donari", published in Bungei Kurabu magazine, Vol.19, No.12.
Sunday, May 01, 2022
लम्बकर्णगंधा, मत्स्यगंधा, वराहगंधा, कुकुटगंधा...कंपोस्टगंधा...Everyone had Pimples and Smelled of Compost
While reviewing Anthony Harvey's 'The Lion in Winter', 1968, Alex von Tunzelmann writes in her remarkable book 'Reel History: The World According to the Movies', 2015:
"...The Lion in Winter
takes place at Chinon, a French residence of English king Henry II, over
Christmas 1183. Henry’s heir, Henry the Young King, had died just months
before. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was his prisoner. Relations with his
three remaining sons, Richard the Lionheart, John and Geoffrey, were on a knife
edge.
People: The events shown did not actually take place at
Chinon over Christmas 1183. The film elides a meeting of Henry with his sons at
Angers earlier that year, with a summit between him and Philip II of France at
Gisors on 6 December. Still, the prickly family Christmas is an event with
which many in the audience will identify, though most families only plot each
other’s grisly demises as a whimsical fantasy. Not so the Plantagenets, who are
ready and waiting with actual armies to take each other out if the division of
the turkey (or the kingdom) goes the wrong way. Peter O’Toole gives the same
performance as Henry II he gave in Becket, with the same delicious result. This
time, though, an Eleanor of Aquitaine has been found to match him in the form
of Katharine Hepburn. ‘I haven’t kept the great bitch in the keep for ten years
out of passionate attachment,’ growls Henry. ‘I could peel you like a pear and
God himself would call it justice!’ bellows Eleanor.
Romance: Henry has decided to marry his young mistress, Alys
Capet, to his drippiest son, John. Petulantly, Alys objects: ‘I don’t like your
Johnny. He’s got pimples and he smells of compost.’ Goodness, you couldn’t be
that picky in the twelfth century. Everyone had pimples and smelled of compost...."
Peter O'Toole as King Henry II and Jane Merrow as Alais
courtesy: AVCO Embassy Pictures
That was the reality of 12th century: Everyone had pimples and smelled of compost...
Sadly no history book, movie, play captures the smells....
George Orwell has said: "One of the essential
experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of
human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would
not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its
necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil
war."
No literature in Marathi on Panipat, 1761 quite captures the smells that must have prevailed when Marathas were caught in a siege for weeks before the famed battle that broke out on January 14 1761.
For some one like me, with ultra sensitive sense of smell, it would have been hell, probably enough to kill me much before the battle!
On this blog, I have written lovingly about the days we spent at Kolhapur during our childhood. What I never mentioned while writing that was the smell of night soil that prevailed around our aunt's house where we stayed. Manual scavenging was still practised. The bucket of the bucket-toilet that was used by almost half a dozen families was located just a couple of meters away from the entrance of my aunt's house!
Thursday, April 28, 2022
अपराध....Indian Noir...When Dreamers Become Schemers
Laura Lippman:
"My definition of noir has long been: Dreamers become schemers."
"My definition of noir has long been: Dreamers become schemers."
सीमा देव, अपराध, १९६९
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
विंदा विट्गेन्स्टाइनना विसरले!...Ludwig Wittgenstein@133...The Most Important Philosopher of Modern Times
विंदा करंदीकर यांच्या अष्टदर्शने, २००३ पुस्तकात Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Charvak आहेत पण Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Hume and George Santayana नाहीत.
Ian Ground, TLS: "...Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become. He sought to uncover the deep undercurrents of thought that had produced this attitude. He feared it would lead not to a better world but the demise of our civilization. That perhaps explains his deep unpopularity today. It is for the same reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of modern times."
Monday, April 25, 2022
मराठी ऐतिहासिक कादंबरीत किती घोडा आहे?....Horse and Marathi Historical Novels
Peter Frankopan: “...This region is where the world’s great
religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and
Hinduism jostled with each other. It is the cauldron where language groups
competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged
alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. This is where great
empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and
rivals were felt thousands of miles away. Standing here opened up new ways to
view the past and showed a world that was profoundly interconnected, where what
happened on one continent had an impact on another, where the after-shocks of
what happened on the steppes of Central Asia could be felt in North Africa,
where events in Baghdad resonated in Scandinavia, where discoveries in the
Americas altered the prices of goods in China and led to a surge in demand in
the horse markets of northern India....” (The Silk Roads: A New History of the
World, २०१५)
मध्यमवर्गीय लोकांचा अलीकडे एकत्र भेटल्यावर बोलण्याचा एक आवडता विषय म्हणजे - मोटारगाड्या... (मला मोटार चालवता येत नाही आणि लहानपणापासून त्याबाबदल आवडत नाही. बसायला आवडते.)
आता कल्पना करा घोडा हा १७-२०व्या शतकात महाराष्ट्रात किती लोकप्रिय बोलण्याचा विषय असेल ते... मी २०व्या पासून लिहल्या गेलेल्या खूप मराठी ऐतिहासिक कादंबऱ्या वाचल्या नसतील, पण मी ज्या वाचल्यात, त्या कोणत्याही कादंबरीत घोड्यावरती दीर्घ, सूक्ष्म , समाधानकारक असे मला काही आढळलेले नाही ....
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