चिमणरावांचे कॉफी करायचे मशीन...Crazy Elaborateness of the Contraption and the Modest Demands of the Task in Hand

Today January 19 2016 is 124th birth anniversary of C V Joshi (चिं वि जोशी): one of the greatest Marathi writers of all time

Sarah O’Connor, FT, January 5 2016:

"...We are so fixated by the threat of human-like machines that we have failed to notice the spread of machine-like humans...It would not be easy or smooth but a fresh wave of automation would at least give us the opportunity to leave the robotic jobs to the robots, and find more fulfilling work for humans to do."

This post is based on my earlier post "चिमणरावांचे स्वैपाघरातील केळी कापायचे मशीन"

"Coffee Break" 

Artist: Christoph Niemann, The New Yorker, November 16 2015

Read Mr. Niemann's thoughts on his creation here. "The whole idea of a machine is outdated.”

But it reminded me of the following picture.

Artist: W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944)

Mr. Robert Butler writes about the drawing:

"...Part of the comedy in a Heath Robinson drawing lies in the gap between the crazy elaborateness of the contraption and the modest demands of the task in hand: extracting juice from a lemon, say, or peeling a potato. There’s a simple pleasure in seeing how cogs, wheels, pulleys, levers, tubes, ropes and bits of string might achieve these ends. In one black-and-white picture in the exhibition (above), a cord comes down from a lampshade to a lightbulb that’s fixed at a right-angle to face a banana that’s stuck on an upright fork that itself is turning on a wheel that is attached to a candlestick holder. The title is “Frittering a Banana by Electricity”.

But another part of the appeal of the drawing comes from the three people in the picture—the matronly wife and young maid, both sitting patiently, and the stout middle-aged man (with his apron on) who is standing up doing the cooking. The figures carry the same air of rapt attention as the figures in “The Orrery”. Lookers-on have a central importance in Heath Robinson's work as they allow him to capture a cosy but solemn, largely male, largely bourgeois world of boaters and top hats, stripey pyjamas and eiderdowns, spectacles and turn-ups, tea-pots and hot-water bottles. So often, the machines these men have devised are tackling thoroughly first-world problems: from a self-operating napkin to an apparatus designed to convey green peas to the mouth, to a device for taking a photograph of yourself (the first selfie). These are men who will go to extreme lengths to make life slightly more comfortable for themselves..."

Men in both the pictures look like Joshi's Chimanrao to me.