Evening of September 3 2003- Dilip Chitre followed by Vinda Karandikar

In September 2003, Dilip Chitre organized the release of VINDA KARANDIKAR’s (विंदा करंदीकर) the then latest book of poems -‘ASHTADARSHANE’ (अष्टदर्शने)- at ‘The Pathfinder’, Pune.

I was lucky to attend the event. It was like a Jazz concert.

Chitre's e-mail invitation said: "...This event is open to the public on a first-come-first-served basis and there are NO SEAT RESERVATIONS for the invited guests..." (Chitre was probably the most technology-savvy Indian artist of his generation. More on this in future posts.)

I sat in the first row. No one asked me to move.

Chitre made a small but moving speech where he compared Vinda to Sant Eknath(संत एकनाथ).

I though how appropriate considering Eknath's:

"जगाचिये नेत्री दिसे तो संसारी, परी तो अंतरी स्फटिक शुद्ध" ("In the world's eyes he looks ordinary married man but inside he is crystal pure.")

That was followed by reading by Vinda of his selected ‘reflective’ poems. The poem based on imaginary meeting of Tukaram and Shakespeare was among them. (Go to the end of this post to read it in Marathi in full.)

After the event I congratulated Chitre on the wonderful event. He just shrugged.

[The only jarring note in the entire function came from Dr. Sadanand More सदानंद मोरे, highly respected scholar of Tukaram, who presided over the function.More trashed British philosophers saying they were deservedly not included by Vinda.

It was unnecessary.

According to Schopenhauer, "There is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher taken together." (source- Wikipedia)]

Albert Einstein wrote that he was inspired by Hume's positivism when formulating his Special Theory of Relativity. (source- Wikipedia)

Immanuel Kant wrote that David Hume aroused him from dogmatic slumber. (source- "Stray Dogs" by John Gray)

Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant are among Vinda's chosen eight while Hume is not.)

Returning to Chitre on Vinda, what he didn't say in the speech but said on his blog, on Vinda's 90th birthday:

"...August 23 is the birthday of Vinda alias Govind Vinayak Karandikar. Today he is exactly ninety years old. I spoke with him a little while ago on the phone as he is one of my many 'Gurus' in poetry as well as in life. I reviewed his second collection of Marathi poems in 1954 when I hadn't yet graduated from high school. My review was published by the then leading Marathi cultural weekly Mouj.

Vinda was so excited by my appreciation of his poetry that he wrote me a postcard using every millimetre of its scant space and invited me to see him in person at his residence in Mahim, a suburb of Mumbai. In the event we met, he a person twenty-one years older than me, and I just deciding that poetry and the fine arts were my true vocation. I took admission in the Ramnarain Ruia College in Matunga, Mumbai where he had recently joined as a lecturer in English.

For my B.A. I chose English Literature as my major subject. Vinda taught us English prosody for our Honours degree. He came from the Konkan coast of Maharashtra and his English accent was influenced by his Marathi dialect. Students who came from English medium schools made fun of him for his quaint English accent and his whimsical style of teaching. But they also held him in awe partly because his grasp of prosody and partly because of his booming voice that went far beyond the classroom.

As a reader of poetry from a platform---whether in Marathi or in English---Vinda is unique. He is a performer who browbeats his audience with a thundering and sometimes melodramatic voice. Quite theatrical, he injures his own tender and delicately nuanced phrases and lines with an aggressive pitch and volume. However, he is loved by Marathi audiences and readers, and when he recently won the Jnanpith Award the whole of Maharashtra was ecstatic.

A.K. Ramanujan, Ramesh Sarkar, and Vilas Sarang have translated some of his poems into English; as have I, and Arun Kolatkar, though Kolatkar's translations cannot, unfortunately, be traced.

I wish him a long life. He would be able to use it well. He has donated the amounts received as literary awards to ngos and individuals doing social work. The longer he lives, the longer they all will be able to work in the public interest!"

विंदा करंदीकर:

तुकोबांच्या भेटी । शेक्सपिअर आला ।।
तो झाला सोहळा। दुकानात.
जाहली दोघांची । उराउरी भेट
उरातलें थेट । उरामध्ये
तुका म्हणे "विल्या। तुझे कर्म थोर;
अवघाचि संसार । उभा केला।।"
शेक्सपीअर म्हणे । एक ते राहिले; ।
तुका जे पाहिले विटेवरी."
तुका म्हणे, "बाबा ते त्वां बरे केले,
त्याने तडे गेले। संसाराला;
विठठ्ल अट्टल, । त्याची रीत न्यारी
माझी पाटी कोरी । लिहोनिया."
शेक्सपीअर म्हणे । तुझ्या शब्दामुळे
मातीत खेळले । शब्दातीत
तुका म्हणे गड्या । वृथा शब्दपीट
प्रत्येकाची वाट । वेगळाली
वेगळिये वाटे । वेगळिये काटे;
काट्यासंगे भेटे । पुन्हा तोच.
ऐक ऐक वाजे । घंटा ही मंदिरी।
कजागीण घरी । वाट पाहे."
दोघे निघोनिया गेले दोन दिशां
कवतिक आकाशा आवरेना ।

दिलीप चित्र्या, भेंचोद, तू खेचलस मला तुकारामाच्या दलदलीत

One of the best books ever written in any Indian language is "Punha Tukaram" (पुन्हा तुकाराम) by Dilip Purushottam Chitre (दिलीप पुरुषोत्तम चित्रे), 1990.

After reading it, I was hooked onto by Marathi poet-saints. There would be no escape from it since. I realised what I had missed in my earlier years.

And therefore I say: "Dilip Chitrya, sister-fucker, you dragged me into Tukaram's quagmire." ("दिलीप चित्र्या, भेंचोद, तू खेचलस मला तुकारामाच्या दलदलीत.")

Don't be appalled by the profanity.

I am just paraphrasing what Chitre himself famously wrote in the first line of a poem at the age of seventeen:

"Tukaram vanya, sister-fucker, you dragged me into quagmire of Marathi language." (तुकाराम वाण्या, भेंचोद, तू खेचलंस मला मराठी भाषेच्या दलदलीत.)

For an ordinary man like me Tukaram was up there. Chitre let me climb over his shoulders and allowed me to have a good look at him.

Thank you, Chitre-sir. The view(दर्शन) will last for the rest of my life.

For other posts, from this blog, on Chitre, who passed away on December 10 2009, click here.

I have had number of interactions with Chitre. Less in person, more in cyberspace. More on them later.

घुमट मशिदी मनोहर

For last few Monday nights, I have watched, on National Geographic Channel, six-part series 'Apocalypse: The Second World War'.

It's gruesome.

If there was any pride left in me at being borne a human instead of a cockroach, it's now purged. (I say a roach and not a spider. Why? Read here)

No wonder Stefan Zweig committed suicide.

Has all of Europe learnt the right lessons from the war?

Switzerland voters recently approved a constitutional ban on the construction of minarets on Muslim places of worship.

So technically, the Swiss can't have The Taj Mahal!

PETER STAMM wrote on Dec 5 2009 NYT:

"...We Swiss sacrificed our good standing as a multicultural and open-minded society to ban the construction of minarets that no one intends to build in order to defend ourselves against an Islam that has never existed in Switzerland..."

Some Swiss think minarets look like missiles.

Instead of Jaundiced eye, we should now say Swiss eye!


Although to our eternal shame, we Indians brought down the Babri Mosque in 1992, I am happy to note that no rabid Hindu fundamentalist has asked for something as crazy as a ban on the construction of minarets.

A lot of things are, these days, said and done to minorities, in the name of Shivaji, who was one of the most tolerant and cultured ruler the world has known. The capital of his kingdom was Fort Raigad and the temple of Jagdishwar is located there.

D G Godse writes: "Builders of Jagdishwar temple on Raigad did not feel shy of employing Islamic architecture in its construction..." ('shakti soushthav', 1972)

(द ग गोडसे: "रायगडावरचे जगदीश्वराचे मंदिरसुद्धा थाटघाटात यावनी दर्ग्याच्या घराण्याचे दिसते ते मंदिराला दर्ग्याचा घाट देण्यास, मंदिर बंधणारांना त्या काळी कोणताही संकोच वाटला नाही म्हणून..." 'शक्ति सौष्ठव', १९७२)


Jagdishwar Temple, Fort Raigad

The Taj (completed c1653) and Jagdishwar temple were built around the same time. In a letter to D G Godse, I asked him: "When Shivaji visited Agra in 1666, he most likely saw The Taj. If he did, what did he likely think of it?".

Godse felt The Taj and Raigad were very beautiful in their own way. A sensitive person like Shivaji would have appreciated the beauty of both.

For me, mosques and minarets were never eyesores. On the other hand, perhaps like Samarth Ramdas (समर्थ रामदास), I have found "domes, mosques pleasing" (घुमट मशिदी मनोहर).

My native Miraj had plenty of them.

In winter, at dawn, I liked azan (the Islamic call to prayer) as much as early morning devotional singing (काकड आरती) that was done in the nearby Vithoba temple or Bhakti-sangeet that my mother tuned into or the sound of train whistle that proved the Doppler effect.

Much before I saw the Taj, as a 13-year old when I saw Gol Gumbaz of Bijapur, I was awestruck.


Gol Gumbaz, Bijapur

Pu Shi Rege, a Yaksha, Leads Upward and On

Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) spoke very warmly about him in November 2009 when he visited us.

Ashok Shahane says: "...imposed dejection has not touched his poems." [Napeksha, 2005] (अशोक शहाणे: "...बळजबरीने लादल्या गेलेल्या निराशेचा ह्यांच्या कवितेला स्पर्शही झालेला नाही." [नपेक्षा])

I am talking about Pu Shi Rege (पु शि रेगे) whose birth centenary falls next year.

(btw- Year 2009-10 is rich with centenaries. Watch this space for my favourites Baburao Arnalkar बाबूराव अर्नाळकर, N G Kalelkar ना गो कालेलकर & D K Bedekar दि के बेडेकर to make maiden and Durga Bhagwat दुर्गा भागवत & Setu Madhavrao Pagadi सेतु माधवराव पगडी to make one more appearance on this blog.)

I have just finished reading, for the first time, his novella 'Matruka' (मातृका),1978.

I found it quite good, certainly the part that takes place in India i.e. first 39 of 70 chapters spanning 80 of 136 pages.

I wish I read it in my adolescence. Very sensuous. In any case, for me: a cigar is never just a cigar!

Vilas Sarang (विलास सारंग) has written an excellent but not very favourable review of it in two essays that are included in his book: 'aksharaanchaa shram kelaa', 2000 (अक्षरांचा श्रम केला). (Sarang has helped me a lot in my quest to access literature. Some of it has already appeared on this blog earlier. More will come later.)

Rege's dedication reads:

"Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan."
Goethe, Faust II

Thanks to Google, I now know the meaning:

"Eternal womanhood
Leads upward and on."

D G Godse (द ग गोडसे) wrote an essay on Pu Shi Rege after his death: '...Ek Yaksha' (...एक यक्ष), included in his book 'Nangi Asalele Phulpapharu' (नांगी असलेले फुलपाखरू), 1989. (Read more about Godse's book here.)

Godse and Rege worked together on the team that produced Marathi magazine Chhand (छंद) which was dedicated to the subject of arts. Like most Marathi magazines, it died long ago.

Going by Godse's description of how a typical issue of Chhand was produced, it must have been exhilarating stuff...reminding us of what John Maynard Keynes has said: "...nothing mattered except states of mind... timeless, passionate states of contemplation...one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these, love came a long way first...We were among the last of the Utopians...we repudiated all versions of original sin...”

Godse thought Rege was a Yaksha who inhabited the earth for a few years before he went back to his abode...to once again return to the earth.

"...ते एक यक्ष आहेत. यक्ष गंधर्वांची सवेंदनक्षमता अशी सूक्ष्म असते असे म्हणतात. बांध्याने स्थूल पण तेवढेच चपळ. आकाराने ठस-ठोम्बस तेवढेच सूक्ष्म... आणि सालस, भाबडे तेवढेच मिश्किल. लेण्यांतून तथागतांच्या अथवा देवाधिदेवांच्या भोवताली असलेल्या गर्दीतून हळूच डोकवाणारे. कधी आकाशातून पुष्पवृष्टी करणारे, कधी कमलनाल तर कधी चवरी धरलेले, कधी मृदंग घुमाविणारे तर कधी वीणा छेडणारे. कधी भीक्कूंच्या मेळाव्यात तर कधी शिवगणांच्या गर्दीत. असे हरकामी आणि बहुरूपी. स्वछंदी आणि अनंतफंदी! लेणी पाहताना सहसा त्यांच्याकडे कोणाचे लक्ष जात नाही, पण जवळ जाऊन न्याहाळले तर त्यांचे अनोखे मिश्किल व्यक्तिमत्व चटकन मनात भरते.

आज वाटते, याच यक्ष-गन्धर्व-विद्याधरांतला एक काही वर्षे आमच्यात राहून परत आपल्या लेण्यात गेला...कधी काळी पुन्हा परत येण्याकरिता."



Although, I have embedded this beautiful image of a Yaksha here, I wish I did better.

Godse's essay talks about the portrait he did of Rege. The portrait apparently hung very proudly in Rege's house for a number of years. I don't know if I will ever get to see it.

'Matruka''s back-cover carries Rege's photo. The image reinforces Godse's contention of his resemblance to Yaksha but I wish it carried Godse's portrait instead.

Do we love our artists enough?

B S Mardhekar is Now 100

Had he lived, B S Mardhekar (बा. सी. मर्ढेकर) would have turned 100 on Dec 1, 2009.

(btw- Year 2009-10 is rich with centenaries. Watch this space for my favourites Baburao Arnalkar बाबूराव अर्नाळकर, N G Kalelkar ना गो कालेलकर & D K Bedekar दि के बेडेकर to make maiden and Durga Bhagwat दुर्गा भागवत & Setu Madhavrao Pagadi सेतु माधवराव पगडी to make one more appearance on this blog.)

Mardhekar has been this blog's favourite.

See previous entries on him here.

My love for him has diminished slightly in last few years.

It's largely because of the late M V Dhond (म वा धोंड).

Although Dhond has done more than any other to interpret Mardhekar for us, he rated him far lower than the Marathi saint poets. On phone with me, Dhond was almost dismissive of Mardhekar when I spoke reverently about him.

W H Auden and T S Eliot, Mardhekar's idols, were great poets of 20th century. He too was a very good poet but greatness certainly eluded him.

I am not complaining though. I am happy with his 'shadja'(षड्ज) that is lower but smiling.

अस्थाईवर पुन्हा परतलों,
चुकून गेला पहा अंतरा;
ढिल्या गळ्यावर षड्ज बांधणें
अतां खालचा परंतु हंसरा.

Godse Bhataji's Day-Night Game of Cricket at Jhansi in 1858!

Wikipedia informs: "The British brought cricket to India in the early 1700s, with the first cricket match being played in 1721. In 1848, the Parsi community in Bombay formed the Oriental Cricket Club, the first cricket club to be established by Indians. After slow beginnings, the Europeans eventually invited the Parsis to play a match in 1877..."

In 1827c, Godse Bhataji aka Vishnubhat Godse (गोडसे भटजी / विष्णुभट गोडसे) was borne in a poor Brahmin family in Varsai (वरसई), which is now in district of Raigad, Maharashtra. His book 'Maza pravas' (माझा प्रवास), published in 1883, is a first travelogue in Marathi.

It remains one of the best Marathi books that have been published in last one twenty-five years.

In March 1858, Godse was in Jhansi. There he saw first hand the battle between the forces of British and Rani Lakshmibai, ruler of Jhansi.

I wonder if anyone knows if and when Godse saw a game of cricket. Or indeed participated in one. Or did he just hear about it? Was the colour of the ball red in those days?

He refers to cricket as 'chenduphalii' (चेंडुफळी) in following passage that describes exchange of shells on the third day of the battle.

"...दिवसा सूर्याचे तेजामुळे गोळे दिसत नसत. या मुळे लोक फार ख़राब होत असत. रात्रौ स्पष्ट चेंडुफळीचे खेलाप्रो। ते लाल दिसत..."

("...during the day because of Sun's brightness shells couldn't be seen. Many people used to suffer because of that. In the night, they looked distinctly, like in a game of cricket, red...")

Looks like it was a day-night cricket match!

Appealing against the bad light or against the unfairness of the British Raj was as hopeless as in the picture below.

Eventually Jhansi fell. British forces plundered it. Godse's description of the Empire's cruelty is heartwrenching.


Artist: Mike Williams, June 1 1977, Punch Magazine

Caption reads: 'We'd like to appeal against the light.'

Please visit http://www.punchcartoons.com for more fun.

Batman in Marathi: Wagle. Nikhil Wagle.

I miss Marathi version of Phantom: Vetal वेताळ. Read more about it here.

I don't think Batman has ever has been translated in Marathi. Not that lovingly anyway.

If I were to attempt it, I would translate 'Batman' in Marathi as 'Wagle'; in Devanagari: 'वागळे'.

Mr.Bal Thackeray's newspaper 'Saamna' derisively called Nikhil Wagle, the editor of a Marathi news-channel IBN-Lokmat आयबीएन-लोकमत , 'vatwaghaLe' (वटवाघळे).

It's a pun on Wagle's name. In Marathi, 'vatwaghaLe' means bats. It becomes a taunt because in popular Marathi culture bats don't get much respect.

Now they should.

I don't like majority of Indian electronic media and print media. I particularly dislike journalism of Wagle's boss: Rajdeep Sardesai and Times Now's Arnab Goswami. (I often imagine how Jon Stewart would have handled these two if he were in India.)

But I admire the courage of Nikhil Wagle. It reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi's Satyagrahis.

By saying this, perhaps I am thrusting too much of greatness on him. However, like the protagonist of R K Narayan's "The Guide", he deserves it in the end.

(By the way, taking financial risks, Wagle has published some excellent Marathi books.)

Wagle is brave. Like Raju-the-guide. Like Batman.

But I don't understand why IBN-Lokmat's tagline reads "चला, जग जिंकूया!!!" ("Come, let us conquer the world!!!".) What has journalism even to remotely do with 'conquering of the world'?

(Even a publication like 'The Economist' would go for a tagline like: "Come, let US conquer the world!!!")!

But now that I find Batman-like quality in Wagle, maybe the tagline makes sense. He really wants to conquer the world.



Artist: Danny Shanahan, The New Yorker, June 12 1995

My caption:

"I do love you, but I love you as a Shiv Sena fighter."

And my son has watched a lot of Sanjay Raut, Shirish Parkar, Abu Azmi, Vinayak Mete...

विनोबा भावे Vinoba Bhave:

"सबंध ज्ञानेश्वरीमध्ये तुम्हाला एकही कठोर शब्द सापडणार नाही...आमच्या साहित्याच्या उगमस्थानी इतके मार्दव आहे ही फार मोठी आनंदाची गोष्ट आहे..."

"You will not find a single hard word in the entire Dnyaneshwari...such tenderness lies at the beginning of our literature is a matter of great happiness..."

(विनोबा सारस्वत "Vinoba Saraswat" edited by राम शेवाळकर Ram Shewalkar 1987)

My 15 year old son and I watched, on Nov 20 2009, the violence that took place in IBN-Lokmat's, Mumbai studio and its aftermath.

On Nov 21, he put up his worst ever behaviour with his mother.

Was it just a coincidence?

Roger Scruton says:

"...It has been known for 20 or more years that television induces mental disorders, such as enhanced aggression, shortened attention span and reduced ability to communicate, and that these disorders involve an even greater social cost than the obesity and lethargy that are TV’s normal physical side-effects. Research by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Kubey has shown that television is also addictive, setting up pathways to pleasure that demand constant reinforcement. As a threat to the nation’s health, it stands far higher than alcohol, drugs or tobacco, and the worry is that it may be too late to do anything about it, since the addiction is all but universal...

...When children are distracted by a flickering screen from the earliest age and never encouraged to explore the real world, they will not develop the capacity to communicate with other humans, or to cope with the stresses of real encounters. They will take the short way out, which is not the way of communication but of aggression...

...But that is not how television is used. It is a constant flickering presence that competes for attention with all the necessary goings-on of everyday life. Over the years, as its impact has stalled, it has had recourse to ever more vulgar colours, ever grosser language and ever more mesmerising facial close-ups..."

Authors of Superfreakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner argue:

"...Our claim is that children who grew up watching a lot of TV, even the most innocuous family- friendly shows, were more likely to engage in crime when they got older..."

My son is not very familiar with Dnyaneshwari but has watched not just "the most innocuous family-friendly shows" but a lot of Sanjay Raut, Shirish Parkar, Abu Azmi, Vinayak Mete...


'Sorry about the language when I came home last night, Mum — it was just the drink talking.'

courtesy: Spectator

Was it the drink talking or TV?

Sachin Tendulkar is the Greatest Sportsman ever NOW!

Friedrich Nietzsche: "We mine the past for myths to buttress our present."

Michael Crichton: "Because the past is the only alternative to the corporate present."

Margaret Visser: “Gratitude is always a matter of paying attention, of deliberately beholding and appreciating the other.”

ROD LIDDLE:

"This is the generation (born between 1955 and 1985), which has bequeathed to the world reality television, the cult of the celebrity, first-person confessional journalism and the mass hysterical emoting at the funerals of people they have never met, let alone known. I suppose, if we were to grope for a reason, we might say that it was the first generation for a very long time which lived without the depredations of war and thus the prospect of imminent death; which threw off the notion of a higher authority than itself and was schooled in the art of self-expression rather than the acquisition of knowledge."

In Indian context, we could say: it was the first generation for a very long time which lived without the fear of hunger and thus the prospect of death by starvation.

The past week belonged to media frenzy on completion of twenty years by Sachin Tendulkar in international cricket. (I still vividly remember his first day.)

They say Sachin Tendulkar is very humble despite being the richest cricketer in the history of the game.

Maybe he is.

But humility is not just about how you treat your servants, the words you choose or your body language.

It is also about how you show respect for the absent, for the past.

Last week news television (led by The Times of India's and Times NOW's Boria Majumdar) showed no respect to the absent or the past.

Michael Crichton sums up neatly:

"...Jennifer had no interest in the past; she was one of the new generation that understood that gripping television was NOW, events happening NOW, a flow of images in a perpetual unending electronic present. Context by its very nature required something more than NOW, and her interest did not go beyond NOW. Nor, she thought, did anyone else's. The past was dead and gone. Who cared what you ate yesterday? What you did yesterday? What was immediate and compelling was NOW.

And television at its best was NOW..."

(Airframe, 1996)

When anchor after anchor kept telling Tendulkar how he was the greatest of them all, I never heard Tendulkar saying that perhaps Don Bradman, Garry Sobers, Sunil Gavaskar, Wasim Akram or Kapil Dev and a few more were greater cricketers than him.

...that Dhyan Chand and Viswanathan Anand were the greatest sportsmen India produced.

...that since his debut in November 1989, India has not won either an ODI world-cup or a tournament like Benson & Hedges World Championship of Cricket.

...that India has still not beaten Australia and South Africa, in a test series, on their own turfs, and although India beat West Indies in a Test series on his watch, he was not part of that squad. (He was a member of the Test teams that beat Pakistan-first time in history of Indian cricket- and England on their own soils.)

...that back then there were no helmets and fancy protective gears and/or batsmen played on uncovered wickets and/or bowlers followed back-foot no-ball rule.

...that since there were no ODI's earlier, the interviewer should compare another cricket player's first-class record against his own first-class record. Also please note that Jack Hobbs was cricket's most prolific batsman because, in 29 years, he scored 61,237 first-class runs and 197 centuries.

...that his predecessors found motivation to compete fiercely and risk their lives (remember Nari Contractor or Jimmy Amarnath or neighbour Eknath Solkar at forward-short-leg without helmet?) even though there was hardly any money to be made by playing.

He should have said any/all of this even if he didn't mean it.

Instead his expressions reminded me of the late Om Prakash from a scene in 'Chupke Chupke'(1975) where Dharmendra praises him, comparing him to 'naya dulha' Amitabh Bachchan.

I understand that Tendulkar doesn't have a gift of gab like Sunil Gavaskar but he surely could have tried.

Read here how Gary Lineker appreciates Diego Maradona.

Read here how Michael Atherton bids farewell to Muttiah Muralitharan.

Read Sunil Gavaskar's book "Idols".

Read Garry Kasparov's series of books "My Great Predecessors".

Listen to Kumar Gandharva's tribute to Bal Gandharva: "Mala umajalele Bal Gandharva".

Graham Greene on how he compares with the past masters:

"Well, there is no such thing as success. The priest can't hope to become a saint- or else it's an illusory dream which vanishes with time; the writer can't hope to write a book equal those of Tolstoy, Dickens or Balzac. He might have dared to believe in the possibility at the outset, but his books always carry a flaw somewhere."

('The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene', Marie-Francoise Allain,1981)


‘Own up, Narcissus, you’re responsible for this graffiti, aren’t you?’

Courtesy: Spectator

Why did Marathi speaking two Girishes take Oaths in Sanskrit?

"...ज्ञानेश्वरापास्नं तुकरामापर्यन्तचा काळ म्हणजे मराठीनं ऐसपैस पसरलेले पाय. आता ही भाषा जवळ जवळ काहीही पेलायला तयार झाली होती..."

अशोक शहाणे Ashok Shahane (नपेक्षा, Napeksha 2005)

("...In the period from Dnyaneshwar (1275-1296) to Tukaram (? -c1650) Marathi comfortably spread its legs. Now this language was ready to bear almost anything...")

Sheldon Pollock, EPW, 26th July 2008:

"...Sanskrit, for D D Kosambi, was a language that had lost all contact with the sensuous world of “real life” in ancient India (some lives being apparently more real than others); it was purely an instrument of elite power and “legitimisation” of power...

...As for the Sanskrit poets themselves, their work “necessarily” carried the stamp of parasitism and decay. This prohibited them from ever addressing “major problems of the individual spirit” or of humanity at large, and it condemned their works and biographies to near oblivion..."

Despite this, on November 10 2009, Girish Bapat & Girish Mahajan, two newly elected Maharashtra lawmakers, whose mother tongue is presumably Marathi, unlike that of Abu Azmi, chose to take their oaths of office in Sanskrit even when it was objected to-initially at least-by pro-tem speaker Ganpatrao Deshmukh. (Times of India)

Why?

Reviewing "THE HINDUS/ An Alternative History" by Wendy Doniger, PANKAJ MISHRA says:

"...In fact, most Indians in the 18th century knew no Sanskrit, the language exclusive to Brahmins. For centuries, they remained unaware of the hymns of the four Vedas or the idealist monism of the Upanishads that the German Romantics, American Transcendentalists and other early Indophiles solemnly supposed to be the very essence of Indian civilization...

...In “privileging” Sanskrit over local languages, she writes, they created what has proved to be an enduring impression of a “unified Hinduism.” And they found keen collaborators among upper-caste Indian scholars and translators. This British-Brahmin version of Hinduism — one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries — has continued to find many takers among semi-Westernized Hindus suffering from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the apparently more successful and organized religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam..."

Meanwhile, how is Marathi doing?

विनोबा भावे:

"...आपल्याकडे मराठीत जी भाषा रूढ झाली आहे ती अगदी प्रखर, हाणून पाडणारी, मारक, बोचक, दाहक, अशी आहे. आणि हे सर्व सुमारे ७0-८० वर्षातले अलीकडचे जे मराठी साहित्य आहे त्यामध्ये दिसून येते...जसा एखादा काचेचा पेला जमिनीवर आपटला म्हणजे त्याचे तुकडे तुकडे होतात. त्याप्रमाणे महाराष्ट्रामध्ये कोणत्याही प्रश्नाचे तुकडेच होतात. इथे शाबूद प्रश्न राहतच नाही...शब्दामध्येच सर्व असलेनसलेले भाव ओतून पराक्रमाच्या क्षेत्रामध्ये आम्ही फिके पडत चाललो आहोत..." (c 1950)

(विनोबा सारस्वत "Vinoba Saraswat" edited by राम शेवाळकर Ram Shewalkar 1987)


(Vinoba Bhave: "...the Marathi language that is established amongst us is strong, biting, knocking over, killing, hot and this is all reflected in the Marathi literature of last 70-80 years...the way a glass tumbler falls and breaks into splinters, any issue in Maharashtra splits into pieces. No issue remains intact here...By pouring all our feelings in only words, we are fading in the field of bravery...")

I wonder what Vinoba would have felt had he heard fanatics and rabble-rouser of Maharashtra in year 2009.


‘Of course, I use foul language. What other language is there?’

Courtesy: Spectator