I saw the following picture in August 2023:
artist: William Cotton (1880-1958) for The New Yorker cover August 12, 1944
They are 'outraged' by the pictures hanging in a barrack.
Now see the picture below:
This time it's a school dormitory and a good explanation for why the picture is there...
I finished reading "Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II", 2023 by Evan Thomas in August 2023.
It ended much quicker than I had anticipated.
"...After about fifty military tribunals all over Asia, nearly a thousand Japanese army officers were executed for specific atrocities, up to and including cannibalism. But the main war crimes trial, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, held in Tokyo over more than two years stretching into 1948, was on less solid ground. In a massive courtroom carved out of the old War Ministry at Ichigaya Heights (with air conditioning installed), twenty-five senior Japanese officials were tried for “crimes against peace.” The hope was to put the world on notice that the international community would not tolerate wars of aggression—as opposed to defensive wars...
...To the Japanese, the proceedings in Tokyo had a strong whiff of “victors’ justice.” The Japanese defendants in the dock could argue, with some merit, that they were being prosecuted because they had lost. The Japanese also argued that they were the victims of white man’s justice, since almost all the judges were white men from colonial powers like Britain and its commonwealth, France, and the Netherlands, as well as the United States..."
I was disappointed not so much with Japanese attitude towards “victors’ justice.” but that the author forgot to mention three non-white judges on the tribunal.
One of them being Radhabinod Pal, who had a dissenting opinion.
The first group picture of the International Justices of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East on July 29 1946.
Evan Thomas, "Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II", 2023:
"...Hirohito is not a commanding presence. His voice is reedy, and he is seen slouching about the palace in slippers, talking to himself. He is happiest observing fireflies in the garden and pursuing his passion for sea anemones as a marine biologist. His courtiers try to cheer him up with humorous Walt Disney cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, seized when the Japanese captured Wake Island. More querulous than confident, Hirohito slumps under the weight of duty...."
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"Fireflies", 1978 by Noji Mikiko
artist: Andrew Wyeth, 1948
"Set in the stark landscape of coastal Maine, Christina’s World depicts a young woman seen from behind, wearing a pink dress and lying in a grassy field. Although she appears to be in a position of repose, her torso, propped on her arms, is strangely alert; her silhouette is tense, almost frozen, giving the impression that she is fixed to the ground. She stares at a distant farmhouse and a group of outbuildings, ancient and grayed in harmony with the dry grass and overcast sky.
Wyeth’s neighbor Anna Christina Olson inspired the composition, which is one of four paintings by Wyeth in which she appears. As a young girl, Olson developed a degenerative muscle condition—possibly polio—that left her unable to walk. She refused to use a wheelchair, preferring to crawl, as depicted here, using her arms to drag her lower body along. “The challenge to me,” Wyeth explained, “was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”
The high level of detail Wyeth gave to every object in his paintings encourages intense inspection, but his titles reveal the inner significance of their outwardly straightforward subjects. The title Christina’s World, courtesy of Wyeth’s wife, indicates that the painting is more a psychological landscape than a portrait, a portrayal of a state of mind rather than a place."
Now, cartoonist Harry Bliss saw this portrayal of a state of mind but also saw a tick!
I watched Kenneth Branagh's Belfast, 2021 on Netflix in July 2023. Average, forgettable film. But it was funny to hear these dialogues;
"...Ma: [sitting with family in movie theater watching buxom women in skimpy prehistoric garb] No wonder you brought us to this.
Pa: It's educational for the boys.
Ma: Aye. Raquel Welch is a hell of an education...."
The family is watching together Welch's 'One Million Years B.C.' (1966) at a local cinema.
I wrote a post "पौगंडावस्थेकाळी धरणीकंप...Raquel Welch@80" on this blog on Sept 5 2020.
"...I saw the movie in early 1970's at Amar talkies in Miraj. I was attracted to it by its poster and Marathi title.
I liked the film ok. I saw it again a few years ago on TV.
I don't remember what I liked then: the fight between a Ceratosaurus and a Triceratops- both of them look like caricatures of what we now know they looked like in real- or scantily clad Raquel Welch!
I guess both. All three of them are in the poster below. I wasn't alone facing that dilemma...."
चिंतामण विनायक वैद्य:
"... सहाही ऋतूंचे वर्णन असणे हे एक महाकाव्याचे लक्षण समजले जाते. ऋतूंची वर्णने रामायनाइतकी सुंदर दुसऱ्या कोठेही नाहीत. ... वर्षाऋतूचे वर्णन वाचीत असता आपण पावसात उभे असून पावसाच्या धारा आपल्या अंगावर पडत आहेत की काय असा भास होतो. त्याचप्रमाणे थंडीचे वर्णन करताना "गोदावरीचे पाणी पिण्याकरिता जे हत्ती आले त्यांनी सोंडेने पाण्यास स्पर्श करताच त्या मागे घेतल्या" असे कवीने जे म्हटले आहे, त्यावरून कवीची अवलोकन शक्ती किती सूक्ष्म व दांडगी आहे याची कल्पना येते. दुसऱ्या कोणत्याही काव्यापेक्षा या बाबतीत रामायणाचा नंबर वर लागतो. ..."
('संस्कृत वाङ्मयाचा इतिहास', 'रामायण', १९२२-१९९४, पृष्ठ ८०)
John Gray, 'Seven Types of Atheism', 2018:
"...The belief that we live in a secular age is an illusion. If it means only that the power of the Christian churches has declined in many western countries, it is a description of fact. But secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion. The idea of a secular realm originated in Jesus teaching his disciples to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. It is Jewish and Christian monotheism – not the European Enlightenment – that is the chief source of the practice of toleration. But monotheism also inspired many of the anti-liberal movements of modern times. A mix of Christian notions of redemption with a Gnostic belief in the salvific power of knowledge has propelled the project of salvation through politics. With the revival of religion in recent times, we may seem to be living in a post-secular era. But since secular thinking was not much more than repressed religion, there never was a secular era..."
John Gray, 'The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths', 2013:
"...Humanists today, who claim to take a wholly secular view of things, scoff at mysticism and religion. But the unique status of humans is hard to defend, and even to understand, when it is cut off from any idea of transcendence. In a strictly naturalistic view – one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm – there is no hierarchy of value with humans at the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with their own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science..."
Historian Tom Holland had a lot to say about secularism in his book 'Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind', 2019.
"...Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed. The insistence of United Nations agencies on ‘the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man’8 was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction.
Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context.
In Europe, the secular had for so long been secularised that it was easy to forget its ultimate origins. To sign up to its premises was unavoidably to become just that bit more Christian.
Merkel, welcoming Muslims to Germany, was inviting them to take their place in a continent that was not remotely neutral in its understanding of religion: a continent in which the division of church and state was absolutely assumed to apply to Islam..."
"...The great claim of what, in 1846, an English newspaper editor first termed ‘secularism’ was to neutrality. Yet this was a conceit. Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. That there existed twin dimensions, the secular and the religious, was an assumption that reached back centuries beyond the Reformation: to Gregory VII, and to Columbanus, and to Augustine. The concept of secularism – for all that it was promoted by the editor who invented the word as an antidote to religion – testified not to Christianity’s decline, but to its seemingly infinite capacity for evolution. Manifest in English, this was manifest in other languages too…"
भारताचे पंतप्रधान नरेन्द्र मोदी:
"... 22 जनवरी, 2024 का ये सूरज एक अद्भुत आभा लेकर आया है। 22 जनवरी, 2024, ये कैलेंडर पर लिखी एक तारीख नहीं। ये एक नए कालचक्र का उद्गम है। राम मंदिर के भूमिपूजन के बाद से प्रतिदिन पूरे देश में उमंग और उत्साह बढ़ता ही जा रहा था। निर्माण कार्य देख, देशवासियों में हर दिन एक नया विश्वास पैदा हो रहा था। आज हमें सदियों के उस धैर्य की धरोहर मिली है, आज हमें श्रीराम का मंदिर मिला है। गुलामी की मानसिकता को तोड़कर उठ खड़ा हो रहा राष्ट्र, अतीत के हर दंश से हौसला लेता हुआ राष्ट्र, ऐसे ही नव इतिहास का सृजन करता है। आज से हजार साल बाद भी लोग आज की इस तारीख की, आज के इस पल की चर्चा करेंगे। और ये कितनी बड़ी रामकृपा है कि हम इस पल को जी रहे हैं, इसे साक्षात घटित होते देख रहे हैं। आज दिन-दिशाएँ... दिग-दिगंत... सब दिव्यता से परिपूर्ण हैं। ये समय, सामान्य समय नहीं है। ये काल के चक्र पर सर्वकालिक स्याही से अंकित हो रहीं अमिट स्मृति रेखाएँ हैं।..."
After Ram Temple consecration, I went to V S Naipaul's 'India: A Wounded Civilization' , 1977 and reread this:
"...It was at Vijayanagar this time, in that wide temple avenue, which seemed less awesome than when I had first seen it thirteen years before, no longer speaking as directly as it did then of a fabulous past, that I began to wonder about the intellectual depletion that must have come to India with the invasions and conquests of the last thousand years. What happened in Vijayanagar happened, in varying degrees, in other parts of the country. In the north, ruin lies on ruin: Moslem ruin on Hindu ruin, Moslem on Moslem. In the history books, in the accounts of wars and conquests and plunder, the intellectual depletion passes unnoticed, the lesser intellectual life of a country whose contributions to civilization were made in the remote past. India absorbs and outlasts its conquerors, Indians say. But at Vijayanagar, among the pilgrims, I wondered whether intellectually for a thousand years India hadn’t always retreated before its conquerors and whether, in its periods of apparent revival, India hadn’t only been making itself archaic again, intellectually smaller, always vulnerable...."
What would Naipaul (1932-2018) say now on Jan 23 2024?
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