पु ल देशपांडे त्यांच्या मल्लिकार्जुन मन्सूर यांच्या वरील एप्रिल १९७३ च्या अप्रतिम लेखात म्हणतात:
"... तंबोरे जुळले जात असताना माणसे गप्पा मारीत बसलेली पाहिली की, मला मनस्वी चीड येते, जुळत येणारे तंबोरे ऐकणे हे प्रसाधनात गुंग झालेल्या युवतीला पाहण्यासारखे आल्हाददायक आहे..."
('एक गाण्यात राहणार माणूस', "गुण गाईन आवडी", १९७५-२०११)
'The Iliad' by Homer & Emily Wilson, 2023;
"...Helen knows that she is destined to play a part in The Iliad itself. According to the lost epic the Cypria, Zeus designed the Trojan War in order to reduce the pesky population of humans. He needed only two elements: Helen, the premise for the war, and Achilles, its greatest warrior. Without Helen’s abduction, there could be no war. Without the Trojan War, there is no story. Like Achilles, Helen has a particularly broad perspective on the wider narrative in which she plays a crucial part: she can view and name all the Greek warriors from the walls of Troy (in Book 3), and she can represent their stories in her weaving:
. . . a massive double-layered cloth
in dazzling colors, patterning upon
the many troubles, tests, and tribulations
that Trojan horsemen and bronze-armored Greeks
suffered at Ares’ hands because of her.(3.155–59)
Neither Achilles, nor Helen, nor the poet, can change the outcome of the Trojan War, or save any mortal from death. But each can offer a sense of the larger story within which each life’s thread is woven..."
आज माझ्या आईचा ८७वा वाढदिवस
त्या निमित्ताने, मूळ मार्च १४ २०१९ रोजी फेसबुक लिहलेली पोस्ट , इथे आणतोय...
पटण्यातील अफूच्या कारखान्याची, शिवलाल (साधारण १८१७-१८८७) यांची १८५७ च्या सुमारास काढलेली १९चित्रे आहेत.
अमिताव घोष त्यांच्या कलेबद्दल लिहतात:
"... The war may also have played a part in imparting something else to Shiva Lal’s images: a subtle, almost involuntary, subversiveness that is strangely incongruent with the intense colonial loyalties that he is said to have displayed in 1857. Whereas both Sherwill and Sita Ram had, each in their own way, portrayed the Opium Factory as a testament to Empire, highlighting the buildings and their monumentality, Shiva Lal’s focus is almost exclusively on the workers and the tasks they perform. The built environment seems scarcely to exist, apart from a few walls and doorways in the background. Much of the factory’s work seems to be happening out of doors, in conditions that are all too grimily familiar in India.
Unlike Sherwill and Sita Ram, Shiva Lal is also attentive to the surveillance that was ever-present in the factory: one of his paintings shows workers being checked as they leave the factory. Even more subversive, perhaps, are his depictions of Indians working in the factory’s chemical laboratories. As Childers points out in her insightful article, to portray Indians as skilled technicians working in a laboratory was to flout colonial conventions, which typically represented natives as technologically inept. This was even more pointedly true of opium factories, where chemical tests had a specifically racial dimension in that they were intended to prevent underpaid Indians from adulterating the product. The success of the tests was thus held to be entirely dependent on ‘strict European superintendence’ because Indians ‘could not altogether be relied upon’.
In their simplicity Shiva Lal’s compositions are representative of the firqa genre; in no sense do they aspire to the perspectival grandeur or pictorial complexity of Sherwill’s and Sita Ram’s paintings, even though the artist was by no means lacking in technical proficiency. Yet, it is instructive to compare Shiva Lal’s pictures with later images of the Patna and Ghazipur opium factories
There are several such photographs dating from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. They mainly show the workers labouring outdoors in grimy, crowded conditions, bare-bodied and clad in dhotis, just as they are in Shiva Lal’s pictures. The buildings that are visible in the background are by no means monumental: they look like low sheds, of the kind that can be seen in any workshop or mill in India. Stranger still, even in the most recent photographs, the processes of production seem to be much like they were back when Shiva Lal painted them.
In short, Shiva Lal’s images may have been exceedingly simple but they were more true to their subject than the highly sophisticated pictures produced by Sherwill and Sita Ram."
('Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories')
टी एस एलियट त्यांच्या "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", जून १९१५ ह्या गाजलेल्या कवितेत म्हणतात; "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;..."
तसेच काहीसे मला खालील दोन क्रिकेट फोटो बघून वाटले... I have measured out my life with toe crushing yorkers...
गारफील्ड सोबर्स जुलै १९६३ (ज्यावेळी मी ३ वर्षांचा होतो) मधील टेस्ट मॅच मध्ये केन बॅरिंग्टन ना त्रिफळाचीत करताना
फेब्रुवारी २०२४ (ज्यावेळी मी ६३ वर्षांचा होतो) विशाखापट्टणम येथील टेस्ट मॅच मध्ये जसप्रीत बुमराह ओली पोप यांना त्रिफळाचीत करताना
Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Stars and Stardom in French Cinema: In-Depth Studies of Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Juliette Binoche, and More ‘, 2000:
“…Bardot undoubtedly ushered in a new femininity in 1950s France. Her spectacular youthful looks, her insolent wit, her blatant promiscuous lifestyle and her outspokenness were unlike any other star of the time, in France or elsewhere. Yet, at the same time her appeal depended on 'old' values: on traditional myths of femininity and on the display of her body, though a body repackaged for the times: nude, more 'natural', on location, in colour and Cinemascope. Bardot's stardom rested on the combination and reconciliation of these opposed sets of values. My analysis in this chapter concentrates on Bardot's period of high stardom, which was surprisingly short - from the release of Et Dieu ... crea la femme in 1956 to La Verite in 1960, her highest grossing film in France1 —though I will refer to earlier and later films, in particular her two New Wave films, Vie privee (1961) and Le Mepris (1963). As discussed in Chapter 1, in box-office terms alone, Bardot's ranking is relatively low. Yet, she outstrips all the stars in this book in fame. Both during her film career and since it ended in 1973, Bardot has been extraordinarily visible through press, television shows, documentaries, postcards, books, internet sites, etc. Original posters of her films are among the most expensive, and outside France they are among the few French posters available….”
Her husband Roger Vadim directed her for the first time in 1956’s Et Dieu...Crea La Femme (...And God Created Woman). The film gained notoriety worldwide due to her overt sexuality and she became an international star.
Photograph: Allstar
Shawn Levy, "
"...Two things distinguished the young Marcello Mastroianni, according to those who knew him best and longest, and they remained essential truths about him, in important ways, throughout his varied and extraordinary life and career.
One, in the words of his mother, was “He never really knew how to lie. . . . I’d tell him not to bother to go on. He had such a simple face, like an open book.”
The other he himself declared in interviews for decades: “I am,” he would say, explaining some decision he’d made (or, more often, hadn’t made), “lazy.”
Both traits—an inability to dissemble and an inveterate indolence—were, it happened, perfect tools for the profession in which Mastroianni would become famous. On the one hand, he was at his absolute best as an actor when cast as someone whom he understood instinctively, someone whose experiences and attitudes were so natural to him that they might as well have been his own. On the other, his aversion to preparation, to study, even to learning scripts, lent his work an air of spontaneity, discovery, and immediacy that might have been lacking if he had put in more effort...."
"...This is the exact opposite of what I was taught at school, which was that Golden Age Dutch art was all about things, and the way those things look. My father laughed when I told him what my teacher said, which was that the Dutch just loved stuff, and commissioned paintings of that stuff so they could look at it forever. Here is a Dutch tulip, red-and-white-striped, and here is a painting of it meticulously preserved for the day the real flower dies. Paintings are not substitutes, he said, they are something else altogether. A likeness is never the only reason an artist paints a picture.
Why did he paint the way he did, what was in his head? His pictures held other versions of peaches and planets than anything he might draw for a child; his art was closer to abstraction..."
"...In fact, if you look closely, you can often catch them embroidering a true-seeming scene with details that are less than true. Even Vermeer, renowned for his verisimilitude, shifted the placement of some buildings in his “View of Delft.”..." Diane Cole, WSJ, Aug 4 2023
... तेंव्हा जीएंनी सुद्धा Vermeer च्या चित्राच्या कॉपीत स्वतःचे रंग भरले असणार!
