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."

Monday, March 13, 2023

Paying Bills of Savile Row tailors- M. Nehru, Jinnah, Churchill

Hannah Furness wrote in Telegraph, UK on December 3 2015:

“...Sir Winston Churchill was not so adept, it appears, at paying his bills. The archives of Henry Poole & Co, the Savile Row tailors who dressed the young Sir Winston, have revealed how the politician repeatedly refused to pay for his suits, leaving a £197 bill outstanding. He became so infuriated by requests for payment, it discloses, that he “took umbrage and quit” their patronage, claiming it was good for “morale” and the tailor’s business for him to be dressed well. His last order was placed in 1937, for minor repairs to a yachting cap, according to the Henry Poole & Co archives, which stretch back to 1865 and are to be made public today....”

The Savile Row tailors played such a big part in the history of 20th century. Here are a couple of more examples from the history of subcontinent.

Katherine Frank, 'Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi', 2001:

"...Anand Bhawan was not merely an elaborate replica of an English country estate. The Nehru household was actually bifurcated between East and West, India and Britain. Motilal Nehru wore expensive suits ordered from Savile Row tailors (though contrary to rumour his linen was not shipped back to Europe to be laundered). He eschewed religion, drank Scotch whisky, ate Western food (including meat) prepared by a Christian cook, and insisted that only English be spoken at his table. He employed British tutors and governesses to educate his children and, after Harrow, sent his son to Cambridge..."

Nisid Hajari, ‘Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition’, 2015:

“...Jinnah had a cold, relentless courtroom style that earned him enemies but also victories; by 1916 he had become a force at the Bombay Bar. At the beginning of the twentieth century, politics on the subcontinent was a matter for gentlemen—successful lawyers, doctors, and wealthy industrialists—who gathered under the auspices of the Indian National Congress, established in 1885, to debate how to move the country gradually toward self-government within the British Empire. Jinnah fit right in with this crowd. If anything, his Savile Row suits were better tailored, his pants more sharply creased, his two-toned shoes even shinier than those of more established figures. Within the Congress, he quickly became known as a man to watch...”

And I am also sure that Mr. Nehru and Mr. Jinnah paid their bills unlike Mr. Churchill. Nehru and Jinnah would eventually stop wearing the western clothes.