Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along
Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."
मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"
समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."
G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”
C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."
Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”
सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."
".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."
Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."
Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"
विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."
Thursday, July 10, 2025
सपाट, नाजुक, नखरेबाज/ बिलगुन गेल्या किती चंपल्या;...Vincent van Gogh, Shoes
Wednesday, July 09, 2025
Guru Dutt@100
माझे वडील राज कपूर चे भक्त, आमच्या घरात सारखे राज कपूर चे कौतुक चाले , ते बऱ्याच प्रमाणात मला सुद्धा पटायचे कारण मी त्यांचे अनेक सिनेमे पहिले होते...
पण १९७७ नंतर , केंव्हातरी , सांगलीमध्ये 'प्यासा' बघितला आणि त्यातील "हम आपकी आंखों में..." गाण्याचे सोंदर्य पाहून जाणवले की हे काही वेगळेच मिश्रण आहे .... हे गाणे घर आय मेरा परदेशी पेक्षा सुद्धा मोठे आहे ...
(The cinematographer for the classic Hindi film "Pyaasa" (1957), directed by Guru Dutt, was V.K. Murthy.
He is renowned for his exceptional work in Indian cinema and is often
credited with pioneering the use of lighting and shadows in Hindi films.
His collaboration with Guru Dutt in "Pyaasa" is considered iconic,
contributing significantly to the film's timeless appeal and visual
poetry.)
("Guru Dutt believed in using minimal instrumental pieces in songs, and ‘Jaane woh kaise’ does not have a prelude. As is the case with the other songs in Pyaasa (except ‘Sar jo tera chakraye’ and ‘Hum aapki ankhon mein’), background music in the song is sparse. All that is heard are piano notes and mild strains of the organ, with the minimal engagement of instruments allowing the voice to soar. The piano notes are prominent but the instrument is surprisingly nowhere in sight. Did Dutt mean to show a piano in the sequence or was Burman-da given to believe that there would be one?"...
Anirudha Bhattacharjee & Balaji Vittal 'Gaata Rahe Mera Dil: 50 Classic Hindi Film Songs', 2015)
आणि सगळ्यात महत्वाचे म्हणजे दिग्दर्शक सांगत होते , हे सगळे क्षणिक आहे , स्वप्न आहे , सगळे संपणार आहे ...
मला ते नट म्हणून कधीच मोठे वाटले नाहीत पण त्यांनी दिग्दर्शित केलेले सिनेमे बाझी, आर पार , मिस्टर अँड मिसेस ५५, सीआय डी हे बघताना जाणवले की ह्याचा दिग्दर्शक मोठा कलावंत आहे ...
Saturday, July 05, 2025
Aesop's Fables Are the Alphabet of Humanity- G. K Chesterton Vs. WSJ
Sam Sacks reviewed 'Aesop's Fables: A New Translation ' for WSJ in Oct 2024.
It said: "...“Aesop is not a good book for reformers,” a critic once observed, and it’s true that the fables present our natures and social standings as essentially fixed. Foxes are foxy, wolves predatory, mice timid. Trying to be what you are not, like “The Donkey in a Lion’s Skin,” brings about a fall. The lion is the king of the beasts and many fables are about the foolishness of hoping to challenge its authority. There is no democratic, much less revolutionary, spirit here. With rare exceptions, self-sacrifice is merely another example of naiveté.
What the fables offer instead is a wintry, fatalistic kind of knowledge. Mr. Waterfield writes that they were intended for popular audiences, meaning powerless people who could expect no change in their fortunes and might take consolation in seeing the world without illusions and laughing at its inanities. In dark times, I’m glad to have them, but I’ll keep my copy on the top shelf of the bookcase, out of reach of little hands."
The reviewer clearly wants to see the world reformed with every other book!\
G. K Chesterton (1874-1936) too wrote about the fables:
"...But by using animals in this austere and arbitrary style as they are used on the shields of heraldry or the hieroglyphics of the ancients, men have really succeeded in handing down those tremendous truths that are called truisms. If the chivalric lion be red and rampant, it is rigidly red and rampant; if the sacred ibis stands anywhere on one leg, it stands on one leg for ever. In this language, like a large animal alphabet, are written some of the first philosophic certainties of men. As the child learns A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow, so man has learnt here to connect the simpler and stronger creatures with the simpler and stronger truths. That a flowing stream cannot befoul its own fountain, and that any one who says it does is a tyrant and a liar; that a mouse is too weak to fight a lion, but too strong for the cords that can hold a lion; that a fox who gets most out of a flat dish may easily get least out of a deep dish; that the crow whom the gods forbid to sing, the gods nevertheless provide with cheese; that when the goat insults from a mountain-top it is not the goat that insults, but the mountain; all these are deep truths deeply graven on the rocks wherever men have passed. It matters nothing how old they are, or how new; they are the alphabet of humanity, which like so many forms of primitive picture-writing employs any living symbol in preference to man. These ancient and universal tales are all of animals; as the latest discoveries in the oldest prehistoric caverns are all of animals. Man, in his simpler stories, always felt that he himself was something too mysterious to be drawn. But the legend he carved under these cruder symbols was everywhere the same; and whether fables began with Aesop or began with Adam, whether they were German and medieval as Reynard the Fox, or as French and Renaissance as La Fontaine, the upshot is everywhere essentially the same; that pride goes before a fall; and that there is such a thing as being too clever by half. You will not find any other legend but this written upon the rocks by any hand of man. There is every type and time of fable; but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything."
A detail of a Greek ceramic vase showing a fox teaching fables to the writer Aesop, ca. 400 B.C
Wednesday, July 02, 2025
ती धनुर्धारीण मंगोल असेल किंवा नसेल.... Mongol Women Archers
Artist: Frederick Sands Brunner 1886-1954, The Archer Star weekly, 1948
Sunday, June 29, 2025
M K Dhavalikar Says Archeology is Supreme. Is it? Mary Beard Has An Answer
I never liked the late M K Dhavalikar's assertion captured in the enclosed para from his Marathi book 'Maharashtrachi Kulkatha', 2011.
As I understand it, if something that happened in last two thousand years is not proven by archeology, it probably did not happen. He also concludes, it probably did not happen because of frequent droughts in India.
I wonder how much we have excavated to claim that a lot of our history is based on falsehood.
Mary Bard says in TLS in October 2024:
'Archaeology has had its fair share of hype
over the decades. Occasionally that has been entirely justified (it is hard to
imagine not hyping the tomb of Tutankhamun, for example). But the pressure from
headline writers, from university PR departments and (I suspect) from
underfunded excavators looking for sponsorship is to turn any discovery,
however interesting but ordinary it might be, into “the first”, “the best”,
“the most valuable”, or whatever superlative you choose.'
Thursday, June 26, 2025
शिवास्ते सन्तु पन्थानो मा च ते परिपन्थिनः...Karna, Kunti and Gaganendranath Tagore
Monday, June 23, 2025
पिपात मेला एकच (पण सुंदर) उंदीर...But where, oh where is the compassion?
Two books on rats were published and reviewed in 2024. I read only reviews and found them very intriguing.
Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker:
"...Two new books take up the subject of Calhoun and his rats. The authors of the first, “Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun” (Melville House), are a pair of British researchers, Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, who for a time both taught at the London School of Economics. The second, “Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity” (University of Chicago), is by Lee Alan Dugatkin, a historian of science at the University of Louisville. Both books cast Calhoun as a visionary. Both also portray him as eccentric to the point of crankdom...."
Simon Ings write in The Spectator, UK:
"...Among rodents, a rising population induces stress, and
stress reduces the birth rate. But push the overcrowding too far (further than
would be likely to happen in nature) and stress starts to trigger all manner of
weird and frightening effects. The rodents start to pack together, abandoning
all sense of personal space. Violence and homosexuality skyrocket; females
cease to nurture and suckle their young; abandoned, these offspring become food
for any passing male. The only way out of this hell is complete voluntary
isolation. A generation of ‘beautiful ones’ arises, that knows only to groom
itself and avoid social contact. Without sex, the population collapses. The few
Methuselahs who remain have no social skills to speak of. They’re not
aggressive. They’re not anything. They barely exist...
...But whether we behave exactly like rats in conditions of overcrowding and/or social isolation is not the point. The point is that, given the sheer commonality between mammal species, something might happen to humans in like conditions; and it behoves us to find out what that something might be before we foist any more hopeful urban planning on the proletariat. Calhoun, who got us to think seriously about how we design our cities, is Rat City’s visionary hero, to the point where I started to hear him. Observing some gormless waifs staring into their smartphones at the bottom of the escalator, I recalled his prediction that ‘we might one day see the human equivalent’ of his mice, pathologically crammed together in ‘a sort of withdrawal – in which they would behave as if they were not aware of each other’..."
Artist: Tomi Um, The New Yorker