Triceratop and Empire of Things

Frank Trentmann, ‘Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First’, 2016: 

“We live surrounded by things. A typical German owns 10,000 objects. In Los Angeles, a middle-class garage often no longer houses a car but several hundred boxes of stuff. The United Kingdom in 2013 was home to 6 billion items of clothing, roughly a hundred per adult; a quarter of these never leave the wardrobe. Of course, people always had things, and used them not only to survive but for ritual, display and fun. But the possessions in a pre-modern village or an indigenous tribe pale when placed next to the growing mountain of things in advanced societies like ours. This change in accumulation involved a historic shift in humans’ relations with things. In contrast to the pre-modern village, where most goods were passed on and arrived as gifts or with the wedding trousseau, things in modern societies are mainly bought in the marketplace. And they pass through our lives more quickly.

In the last few hundred years, the acquisition, flow and use of things – in short, consumption – has become a defining feature of our lives. It would be a mistake to think people at any time have had a single identity, but there have been periods when certain roles have been dominant, defining a society and its culture. In Europe, the High Middle Ages saw the rise of a ‘chivalrous society’ of knights and serfs. The Reformation pitched one faith against another. In the nineteenth century, a commercial society gave way to an industrial class society of capitalists and wage workers. Work remains important today, but it defines us far less than in the heyday of the factory and the trade union. Instead of warriors or workers, we are more than ever before consumers. In the rich world – and in the developing world increasingly, too – identities, politics, the economy and the environment are crucially shaped by what and how we consume. Taste, appearance and lifestyle define who we are (or want to be) and how others see us...”

“I thought it would be cool to have one, but now I just use it for storage.” 

Artist: Drew Dernavich, The New Yorker, August 2016 

The Three Dancers from Private passions...Pablo Picasso@140

#PabloPicasso140

Jonathan Jones, October 28 2019, ‘The Guardian’:

“...In modern times, Picasso coded every detail of his love life in his art, using it to celebrate and punish the women in his life. He even paid homage to the Renaissance cult of the art of love in a series of engravings of Raphael and his mistress La Fornarina. But in his violently carnal masterpiece, The Three Dancers, he tells a story of love gone wrong. Two of the figures represent his friends Ramon Pichot and his wife, Germaine Gargallo. The third is believed to be his youthful friend (and Gargallo’s lover) Carlos Casagemas, who killed himself over Gargallo..”

 

ही सारी माणसे (आणि प्राणी), त्यांनी आयुष्याला केलेले स्पर्श...Saul Steinberg, GA and Memories

Edgar Allan Poe

"Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, --as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? --from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been."
--from "Berenice"(1835) 

Proust  in Against Sainte-Beuve.

"The beautiful things we shall write if we have talent are inside us, indistinct, like the memory of a melody which delights us though we are unable to recapture its outline. Those who are obsessed by this blurred memory of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted ... Talent is like a sort of memory which will enable them finally to bring this indistinct music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note it down ..."

 


जी ए कुलकर्णी:

"...-ही सारी माणसे, त्यांनी आयुष्याला केलेले मायेचे स्पर्श, त्यांच्या या स्पर्शाचे लहान गोल आरसे बसवलेले वस्त्र पांघरून आपण येथपर्यंत निभावत आलो!"
('स्वामी',1973, 'पिंगळा वेळ', 1977)

Artist: Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker, November 1968

Shammi Kapoor@90

 मी मागे शम्मी कपूर वारल्यावर ऑगस्ट १६ २०११ ला प्रसिद्ध केलेली पोस्ट पुन्हा टाकत आहे. 

Friedrich Nietzsche: “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

Woody Allen:  "You could argue that the Fred Astaire film is performing a greater service than the Bergman film, because Bergman is dealing with a problem that you're never going to solve. Whereas Fred Astaire, you walk in off the street, and for an hour and half they're popping champagne corks and making light banter and you get refreshed, like a lemonade."

Casey Walker: "After all, Shakespeare’s work, like the moon, is a vast place; it exists not in some perfect superhuman archive, but in parallax view, from Earth, one reader at a time."

Govindrao Tembe: "I consider Narayanrao very cultured man because he never talks about himself."

(गोविंदराव टेंबे: "नारायणरावांना मी फार सुसंस्कृत मनुष्य समजतो - कारण ते स्वतःबद्दल कधी बोलत नाहीत -")

 As I have often felt, as a kid, movies were always surreal for me and I think it all started with Janwar (1965).

Our favourite Shashi-mama (शशी-मामा) who had already seen the movie more than a dozen times (!) took me to Janwar that was playing at Deval (देवल ) talkies in Miraj (मिरज ).

Even today I recall 'LAAL CHADI MAIDAN KHADI' (लाल छड़ी मैदान खड़ी) playing on silver screen.

An Evening in Paris (1967) is my favourite movie. First time, I watched its matinee show (3 PM) at Kolhapur (कोल्हापुर) after going through an overwhelming experience of standing in a boisterous queue in the hot sun for eternity to buy a ticket.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film. What did I like in it?...Shammi Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor…music of Shankar - Jaikishan, Rajendranath and bikini clad Sharmila Tagore.

This went on and one day, after watching Brahmchari (1968), Shammi Kapoor became Shammi-mama.

Why did he become Mama? We almost never had my father's four brothers visiting us and mother's three brothers didn't come that often too. So we met Shammi Kapoor more often than any of them. And like Bart Simpson tells his father: "It's just hard not to listen to TV: it's spent so much more time raising us than you have." (Episode: 2F06 “Homer Bad Man” Original air-date: 27-Nov-94)

 I still remember how, while watching Brahmchari, sitting with my mother in 'Ladies' of Deval cinema in Miraj, I got to my feet and started cheering wildly during his fight with Pran towards the end of the movie.

I read somewhere that when Lata Mangeshkar called great Mehboob Khan on phone on his death bed, he requested her to sing- 'Rasik balma hai re dil kyon lagaaya tose' (रसिक बलमा, हाय, दिल क्यों लगाया तोसे).

I want to not just hear but watch 'Main Gaoon Tum So Jao' (मैं गाऊँ तुम सो जाओ) followed by a poem or two of Tukaram (तुकाराम).

No author, no playwright, no actor, no singer, no cricketer, no athlete, no music composer, no cartoonist, no poet, no stand-up comedian has entertained me more than Shammi Kapoor.

Poet Philip Larkin has famously said:

“Life is first boredom/ Then fear.”

Maybe. But how fortunate we are that we have remedy in the form of Shammi Kapoor for the first.

Another characteristic of the late Mr. Kapoor was he seldom talked about himself in all the TV interviews he gave in recent years. It was always about music composers, Mohammad Rafi, co-stars, directors, his parents, brothers, his own family...And when he turned to himself, it was all self-deprecating humour. (For instance: "Ranbir Kapoor and others came over and pulled my leg...or whatever is left of them!", "If I were to become aeronautical engineer, more Mig aircrafts would have crashed than what they today!")

Mr. Kapoor said if his film 'Tumsa Nahin Dekha' (1957) had flopped, he would have gone to Assam and become a tea garden manager, riding horse with a whip in hand and whiskey in back pocket!

I lived on a tea estate of Assam from 1989-90. I never saw a horse on any tea estate of Upper Assam or manager with a whip but kept seeing fair bit of whiskey in glasses and Mr. Kapoor on TV.

However, I think I was destined to meet him. If not on silver screen surrounded by pitch-darkness, it would have been at Doom Dooma planters club! (We lived next to the club.)

Woody Allen brings up lemonade to describe Fred Astaire movie experience. For Shammi Kapoor movie experience, I would pour a glass of fresh sugarcane juice that we often drank in Miraj. At a sugarcane juice parlour (गुर्हाळ) not too far from Deval talkies.

 

 

बुद्धी ही अनिष्ट । अशी गोष्ट ...हेन्री बर्गसन (बर्गसॉं), आइनस्टाइन आणि विंदा करंदीकर ... Henri Bergson@162, Albert Einstein and Vinda Karandikar

#HenriBergson162

आज ऑक्टोबर १८ २०२१ रोजी हेन्री बर्गसन (बर्गसॉं) यांची १६२वी जयंती आहे. 

कै विंदांच्या 'अष्टदर्शने', २००३ मध्ये सातवे दर्शन आहे बर्गसॉंदर्शन...

बर्गसन आइनस्टाइन यांच्या बद्दल काय विचार करायचे हे आज २०२१ साली सुद्धा अंतर्मुख करून टाकते ...

“Bergson mentioned Einstein one last time, in writing, in 1937. He was seventy-eight years old. …

The note described Einstein as brilliant, savvy, and ambitious. But it provided an image of Einstein that differed markedly from the one the physicist promoted of himself. According to Bergson, Einstein was driven as much by discipline as by pleasure. There was no denying that in his early years he had been a soldier with a mission, but things changed in his later ones. Einstein was a man who had “practiced grand tourism, covering, first as a soldier [for science] and then for his own pleasure, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Holland, and even more countries.” But Bergson then accused Einstein of having used the League of Nations not for its intended purpose of promoting relations among scientists and intellectuals, but primarily as a networking forum used for his own advantage—to “get in contact with scientists all over the world, corresponding with a princess, lecturing to a queen.” Yes, sometimes, Bergson pictured Einstein deep in thought. But mostly he pictured him as an action hero: “I also see him on a ship where the crew conspire to steal and to throw overboard, anticipating them, and drawing his sword to hold back the bandits.” The scene described by Bergson was like those that could be seen in the new blockbuster movies and propaganda films that were gaining more and more audiences during those years. “Einstein,” explained Bergson, always tried to produce a “maximum effect” from his efforts. His whole life was organized for this purpose, argued the philosopher. The physicist had positioned himself in America in order to “organize his life to draw maximum effect from it.”

Bergson did not commend a life as active as Einstein’s, but he did not preach passivity either. Bergson urged his reader to strive to connect thought with action more tightly. Delivering one of his most celebrated and oft-quoted phrases, he concluded: “One should act like a man of thought, and think as a man of action.”…”

(Jimena Canales, 'The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time', 2015)

पृष्ठ ७१,  'अष्टदर्शने', २००३

सौजन्य : विंदा करंदीकर यांच्या साहित्याचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स