25 Years After Bamiyan Buddhas...So richly and brightly were they decorated that...

 25 years ago, The Taliban began the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas on March 2, 2001, and completed the demolition over several days that same month

 Edmund Richardson, “Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City”, 2021:

“…The gigantic Buddhas were almost 1,500 years old. The smaller Buddha, 115 feet tall, was constructed in the middle of the sixth century ad. The larger Buddha, which stood even taller, at 174 feet, joined it around half a century later. The Buddhas did not mark a serene pilgrimage site on the edges of the known world: Bamiyan was, at the time, a riotous stop on the Silk Road. The Buddhas were painted in wild, vivid colours: incandescent red for the larger and blinding white for the smaller. So richly and brightly were they decorated that the Chinese traveller Xuanzang thought one of them was made entirely of brass.

But Buddhism had been swept out of Afghanistan in the wake of the Islamic conquest of the region. Not even the stories remained....

...Standing at the foot of the smaller Buddha, Masson spotted a flight of stairs ascending into the rock walls. He followed them uncertainly. The passageway was narrow and dark, carved out of the red stone of the cliffs. The walls and ceiling seemed to press in on him. Masson climbed higher and higher. The only light came from narrow slits cut in the rock.⁷² Through them, he caught glimpses of the Buddha: a fold of drapery, a gigantic arm, a pendulous earlobe. Outside, the world was hushed and still. A few plumes of black smoke rose on the wind.

Then Masson emerged into the light above the Buddha’s head and saw a world more beautiful, and stranger, than he had ever dared to imagine. Outside, the winter sun shone on clear, bright drifts of snow. Close to the top of the cliff-face, within the caves, lapis lazuli and gold shimmered in shafts of sunlight. Everywhere Masson looked there were domes, intricate carvings and impossibly beautiful paintings. This was no footnote in history: this was an entire lost civilisation, unknown to western scholarship. It was like seeing colour for the first time: he realised that here in Afghanistan, there was a whole world of wonders waiting to be discovered.

Masson was dizzy with awe. Even his sketches, after years of sober black and white, suddenly spring into full colour. At that moment, looking down on Bamiyan, he knew that he wanted to tell the story of Afghanistan. He had no idea how: he knew that he was ‘standing only on the threshold of discovery’.⁷⁵ But, inside, his heart was dancing. ‘Inveni portum,’ he scribbled on a pencil sketch of the caves. ‘Spes et Fortuna valete.’ ‘I have reached safe harbour. Farewell, hope and fortune. You have played your games with me: now, play them with others.’

That night, the sky was full of falling stars…”

(Charles Masson is the central figure in Edmund Richardson’s book Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City, described as an ordinary, working-class Englishman who deserted the East India Company army to become a renowned 19th-century explorer, archaeologist, and spy in Afghanistan. He is credited with discovering the ancient city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains.)

 

a 19th-century lithograph by French artist Xavier Raymond depicting the two colossal Bamiyan Buddhas

 

Silences in 2001: A Space Odyssey (25 Years Later!)

 What I remember most from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 is either music or silence. Nothing else much. But its music haunts me. It was all by design. Brilliance of Stanley Kubrick.

"...Silence was also a vital component of the film’s soundtrack. Back in 1960, Kubrick had told Charles Reynolds, ‘It is almost as important to decide where there will be no music, for the constant use of a film score generally deadens the ear, lessening the effectiveness of music when it will be most wanted.’ Kubrick was sensitive to the audience’s capacity for sound, and their threshold of fatigue – factors that demand the director’s attention to the entire disposition and composition of the soundtrack. Kubrick knew that silence when well placed – perhaps akin to the negative space in visual compositions, or the vastness of space in this film – could affect the audience as greatly as music.

Kubrick’s decision not to use an original score for 2001 – a film he must have recognized as a new height of technical and artistic achievement and innovation – marked an aesthetic advance in his use of music. The result was what one critic called a ‘modernist musical’. Another hailed it as ‘less a dramatic narrative than a concerto for film images and orchestra’..."

 

 

 

 

Stefan Zweig, Billy Wilder and The Wandering Jew

 I fell in love with Bill Wilder's 'The Apartment', 1960 in early 2025. I had seen it earlier but discovered all its beauty and sadness then after watching the film multiple times.

I knew Stefan Zweig since 1960s as my father has published a couple of his novellas in Marathi translation. I have read my father's translations multiple times.

I feel their unhealed wounds of having to leave their homeland are behind their creative work. 

Zweig wrote extensively about themes of exile and the "wandering Jew" in his works, and some sources suggest that the story of the Wandering Jew may be at the heart of Wilder's film "The Apartment".

 

 Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment

Dog Show in Our Housing Society Every Morning and Evening

 

 

Mascoutah Kennel Club dog show (1901) artist : George Ford Morris, (1873 - 1960)

 The women don't yet look like her but our society resembles this picture every morning and evening. Who would have thought!

Even When He's With the Girl He Loves, He Loves the Girl He is Near!

 

 

artist: Warren Miller, The New Yorker,  22 March 1976  

ह्या कानगोष्टी कधी संपू नयेत ,,,Eugene de Blaas's The Friendly Gossips@125

 हे इतके सुंदर चित्र पहिल्यांदा पाहिले आणि इतका आनंद झाला ... त्या मुलींचे सौन्दर्य तर स्मरणीय आहेच पण तो दारातील तरुण वादक कोण ? एक कथाच तयार होते.... 

"

"The Friendly Gossips", 1901 artist: Eugene de Blaas 

a debate on this wonderful picture:

Curator: Let’s turn our attention to "The Friendly Gossips," an oil painting by Eugene de Blaas from 1901. The moment captured feels intimate, doesn't it?

Editor: It does. The light spills across the scene like warm honey, but those gossiping women... there’s something performative about them. All that cloth and lace feels weighty, suggestive of labor but also luxury, doesn't it?

Curator: Precisely. De Blaas was known for depicting these sorts of genre scenes, almost theatrical vignettes of everyday life. Look at the way he's framed the man in the doorway – poised, almost lurking with that mandolin – the women’s secrets are about to get some musical accompaniment!

Editor: The man seems to be a distraction! Think about the production: oil paint, canvas stretched and primed... De Blaas is carefully constructing a specific vision of domesticity, and its labor—hiding as much as he's showing us.

Curator: And perhaps that’s where the magic lies! There’s this little spark of mystery, a private world we’re invited to glimpse. The soft focus on their faces enhances the dreamlike quality, as if we are drifting between memory and fantasy.

Editor: I find the material conditions fascinating. That billowing fabric is rendered with a realism that’s almost seductive, but the act of laundry here isn't celebrated; it’s just background dressing for the real drama – gossip as social currency!

Curator: Absolutely, I find that the very brushstrokes dance across the surface. We're witnessing more than just a moment; it’s a symphony of gestures, of whispered secrets and knowing glances.

Editor: And the unspoken anxieties that women workers always had to face... or are these idle bourgeois women for whom washing laundry is just one more piece of household management to control? I am going to assume, until the evidence pushes back, that this painting uses the scene for the benefit of an upper-class consumer.

Curator: Regardless, these layers provide a mirror to our own stories, reflecting our desires, fears, and ultimately, the fleeting beauty of our shared humanity, don't you agree?