कुठे आहे माधवराव जोशी यांचे 'म्युनिसिपालिटी'?....When V S Khandekar Loved a Satire

 John Gray: “...In his letter commenting on Russell’s book on China, Conrad wrote: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world.’ Russell’s passionate admiration for Conrad may have had a number of sources. One of them was surely his suspicion that Conrad’s sceptical fatalism was a truer account of human life than his own troubled belief in reason and science. As reformer, he believed reason could save the world. As a skeptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of the passions. Sceptical Essays was written as a defence of rational doubt. Today we can read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading rationalist who doubted the power of reason...”. 

Walter Kirn: “...Then, that fall, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 appeared, abruptly downgrading war's special status as an existential crucible and also, unwittingly, beginning the process of rendering four-star male novelists irrelevant. The book treats war on a par with business or politics (to Heller they were very much the same), portraying it as a system for alienating people from their own interests and estranging them from their instincts. Protocol replaces principle, figures plucked from thin air supplant hard facts, and reason becomes rigamarole. Heller's island airbase of freaked-out aviators oppressed by cuckoo officers is the ding-a-ling civilian world in microcosm, not an infernal, tragic realm apart....”

JOSEPH EPSTEIN : “…Chichikov, the character at the heart of Gogol's masterpiece, is a lower-echelon civil servant with a corrupt past who specializes in what Gogol calls "blandiloquence," or elaborately empty compliments. Chichikov was brought up by a father whose last words of advice to his son were to please his superiors, not to be seduced by friendship, and to remember that nothing in life is so important as money—advice, notes Gogol, "that remained deeply engraved in his soul."…” 

मी ललित मासिक घेणे या वर्षी बंद केले. सुदैवाने ललितच्या मार्च २०१९च्या अंकात वि स खांडेकर यांचा '५५ वर्षांपूर्वी' हा लेख वाचायला मिळाला.

त्यातील काही अंश सोबत जोडला आहे.

कृतज्ञता : वि स खांडेकर यांच्या लेखनाचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स आणि 'ललित'

सध्या मला वाईट या गोष्टीचे वाटतंय की जोशींचे नाटक तर मी वाचल नाहीच आहे पण ते आता उपलब्ध तरी आहे का हे सुद्धा मला माहित नाही.

१९२६चे नाटक Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka वगैरे अशा परंपरा सांगत आले होते... जगाने / सिस्टिम ने कसे काम केले पाहिजे हे न सांगता ते प्रत्यक्ष  कस काम करत हे ते सांगत होत. मराठीत विडंबनाचा असा उपयोग  अजूनही विरळा आहे.

आणि आदर्शवादी वाटणारे खांडेकर काय म्हणतायत पहा :
 "... नगरपालिका ही स्वराज्याच्या शिक्षणाची शाळा आहे, अशी श्रद्धा असणाऱ्या आणि समाजाच्या प्रगतीकडे आशावादी दृष्टीने पाहणाऱ्या गंभीर प्रकृतीच्या लोकांना हे विडंबनचित्र पचण्याजोगे नव्हते..."

Madhavrao Joshi's 'Municipality' anticipates Jagte Raho (1956), Catch-22 (1961), Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbari (1968),  Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983)...हे जोशींच्या नाटकाचे मोठेपण....