Was Lord Krishna's Panchjanya a Matchless Cone (Conus cedonulli)?

(Today is my mother's 73rd birth anniversary. Thank you, Aai for those wonderful story telling sessions at dinner times. Mahabharata never became boring because of you more than Vyasa!)

I was always fascinated by reading of conch shells that were blown in the battles described in Mahabharata. They seemed to be an important weapon like a mount or a bow.

Thankfully, in real life, I heard them only in temples and a couple of homes.

When did they travel from slaughter-grounds to sanctum-sanctorums?

Are they mentioned in the ancient literature describing battles from outside India?

Each conch had a distinct sound. Like Louis Armstrong's horn sounds different from that of Miles Davis.

"...Krishna blew His conch, Paanchajanya;
Arjuna blew his conch, Devadatta;
And Bheema, the doer of formidable deeds,
Blew (his) big conch, Paundra.

The son of Kunti, King Yudhishthira,
Blew (his conch) Anantavijaya,
While Nakula and Sahadeva
Blew Sughosha and Manipushpaka conches, respectively..."

If you read Marathi, read a page from Vinoba Bhave's विनोबा भावे lyrical Geetai गीताई:


(double click on the picture to get a larger view)

[btw- As on January 2009, Geetai has sold 38,57,000 copies!]

Interestingly, I have never come across conches in battlefields of Ramayana. I wonder why.

Alas, there are no pictures of conch shells from those days.

CORNELIA DEAN has written a wonderful essay on seashells for The New York Times July 12 2010.



courtesy: “The Book of Shells” by M. G. Harasewych and Fabio Moretzsohn

Matchless Cone (Conus cedonulli) was one of the rarest shells in the 18th century. In 1796 a specimen brought more than six times as much as a painting by Vermeer that was sold at the same auction. It is still considered rare to uncommon, and it is prized by collectors for its beautiful pattern. With the advent of scuba diving, it is now found more often. All cone shells are venomous and should be handled with care when alive. The venom of C. cedonulli is not fatal to humans, but its sting may still be painful.

Hope my ancestor was like Uganda's Moses Kipsiro

Should India spend tax payers' money on organising 'expensive' international sports events?

I don't know but I will never forgive Indian media because they tried to kill general public's interest in CWG 2010.

Who in the position of considerable power, in either government or private sector including media, in India is not corrupt? Very few.

History of India is replete with the corruption of its rulers and the civil servants. (Read a post on the subject here.)

Along with this, we have "senseless opportunism and termite greed of the ‘cultured’ strata" (D D Kosambi) and their own filthy logic to justify it.

Therefore, media should have pursued whatever they wanted to without affecting the spirit of games.

But I will not allow this malaise- corruption and media- to kill my interest in life. And hence I am following CWG2010 with as much interest as recently held events like WC football in SA and WC field hockey in Delhi.

My big pay day arrived soon, on the evening on October 6 2010, in the form of men's 5,000m final.

It was run in muggy Delhi evening. It broke no record. And yet I will find it almost impossible to forget it.

These 1.5K, 5K and 10K meter runs are like great games of chess. Read relevant sections from David Wallechinsky's "The Complete Book Of The Olympics".

Kipsiro and Kenya's Kipchoge produced a spectacular final lap where I thought one of them might die.

It was Moses Kipsiro who came out on top.

I kept watching Kipsiro after the race. He made no sound. No triumphalism. He didn't even smile. He just kept jogging along. His face showed almost no feelings. Perhaps like a yogi.


Artist: Peter Arno, The New Yorker, December 10 1927

I: "Hope some one like Moses Kipsiro was my direct ancestor."

p.s. 'Naughty' Peter Arno is easily one of the greatest cartoonists of 20th century. You will find a few of his cartoons on this blog.

I often wonder what pictures he would have drawn in this, for more "naked", century.

Peter, we miss you.

B S Mardhekar, Now there are Old Embers on New Corpses in Korean War

TOM NAGORSKI: "...When it came to war, Gen. MacArthur was merciless. As the battle for the North soured, MacArthur ordered an aerial bombardment to strike every possible "installation, factory, city and village" in the North. Cities across North Korea were reduced to ashes; hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. Mr. Cumings asks why, when the conduct of World War II (the firebombing of Dresden, say) or Vietnam (My Lai) has been so thoroughly examined, U.S. tactics in Korea have merited so little attention. No one knows or remembers "that we carpet-bombed the North for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties."..." (WSJ, July 27 2010)

Thanks to Bruce Cumings's new book "The Korean War: A History", the “forgotten war”- the one that has still not ended because it ended in an armistice, rather than a full peace treaty- is under a bit of spotlight.

The Korean war (1950–1953) rarely figures in Marathi literature.

B S Mardhekar’s (बा. सी. मर्ढेकर) few poems must be an exception because he was a poet with global sensibilities.

"अजून येतो वास फुलांना" (Still fragrance emanates from flowers) first published in February 1951, written probably in Trichy / Tiruchchirappalli, is one of them.

Third stanza:

"भूकंपाचा इकडे धक्का
पलीकडे अन् युध्द- नगारे;
चहूंकडे अन् एकच गिल्ला,
जुन्या शवांवर नवे निखारे."

(Here a shake of a tremour
That side war-drums;
all around one hell of racket,
new embers on old corpses.")

Tremour here is the Assam one of August 15 1950. War drums belong to Korea.

7th stanza too refers to the war:

"जगून थोडें अखेर मरणें
उघडझांप ही डोळ्यांचीच;
अंधारांतुन राडाराचा
किरण चालला सलत पुढेंच."

(To die after living a while
Like blinking of eyes;
through darkness radar's
ray moves ahead cutting.)

[some of this is based on M V Dhond's 'Tarīhi Yeto Wasa Phulānnā' (म. वा. धोंड, 'तरीहि येतो वास फुलांना')]

Korean war is still not over. In March 2010, North Korea allegedly torpedoed a South Korean naval corvette, costing 46 lives.

Old embers on new corpses?

नव्या शवांवर जुने निखारे?


Artist: Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, August 26
1950

Sixty years later, the picture above remains relevant. Just replace Europe with Iraq and Korea with Afghanistan. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace?

Jayant Narlikar writes a sceptical essay. Sort of. In English.

This post is a sequel. Read part I dated August 30 2010 here.

There I asked "Will Jayant Narlikar One Day Write Marathi Sceptical Essays?".

Not because of me but he did...On Sept 22 2010...Sort of...In English.

Read it here.

We know Fred Hoyle, Narlikar's Guru, who coined the phrase "Big Bang", was himself its most high profile critic.

Now, Narlikar too has attacked it in such a spirited manner that I was startled by its vigour.

Sample some of it:

"...Today, objectivity is under threat because of huge funds that frontier level science requires to test its theories. A classic example is the Big Bang theory which states that the universe originated in a big explosion.

This theory is currently believed and a lot of money is being spent in research furthering this doctrine. The original version of the theory proposed that after its explosive creation, the expansion of the universe slows down because of its own gravitational attraction. It also predicted how its present rate of expansion is related to its present density of matter. However, observations showed that the expansion is accelerating instead of slowing down, that the density of matter it needs to have is several times the density of matter actually observed, and this extra unseen (dark) matter cannot be the “normal” form of matter that we see around us. With these major discrepancies, the model should have been abandoned.

Instead, it is argued that there is a dark energy that repels rather than attracts and that the universe is predominantly made of some abnormal form of matter the likes of which has not been found in the terrestrial laboratory or in the cosmos. There is no independent evidence for these beliefs and their sole objective is to keep the Big Bang model alive..."

This is a very serious charge: Sole objective of dark energy/ matter is to keep the Big Bang model alive.

DENNIS OVERBYE wrote on June 3 2008 in NYT: "...A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling.

“That is how shocking this was,” Dr. Livio said.

It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

“The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J..."

Dark Energey and Dark Matter also are two of the most Popular Topics on the website of Scientific American.

Narlikar's claim might put off a prospective young Physics researcher. She may think that the entire discipline is a kind of 'pseudo-science'.

She would be further put off reading Alexander Waugh's recent attack on Stephen Hawking's latest book in The Spectator:

"If Hawking were really serious about answering the ‘ultimate questions of life’ he should have realised long ago that mathematics and geometry are not the right tools for the task....Stephen Hawking has written a short, occasionally facetious, but generally reliable and informative history of classical and quantum mechanics. That is all. That he has adverted to it as an answer to the ultimate question of life is both annoying and inaccurate, but no doubt commercially sensible. Richard Feynman, the American physicist on whose work Hawking bases much of his own theory, wrote: ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ Nothing has changed since Feynman’s death in 1988, and although Hawking may have a far deeper knowledge of quantum mechanics than anyone else on this planet, he still doesn’t understand it. With a little less chutzpah he might also have realised that things of which we cannot see the bottom are not necessarily profound."

However, I welcome the scepticism in Narlikar's essay because I feel it will likely lead us to more truthful science.


Artist: Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, August 14 1965

Madam, It is NOT all right with our Dr. Jayant Narlikar.

So it was really about Hindi speaking cowherds!

Lord Krishna whose birth anniversary, Krishna Janmashtami (कृष्ण जन्माष्टमी), is celebrated in Maharashtra with some gusto was a Hindi speaking cowherd.

This post is a sequel. Read part I here.

It was based on a newsitem in Marathi newspaper Pudhari dated July 14 2010. There the headline read: "Nuisance of Rajasthani red cows in Ambegaon".

It sounded like an ecological disaster such as the extermination of sparrows in China in 1950's. Were Rajasthani red cows Invasive species?

Reading Pudhari on Sept 27, I realised, as suspected, that it was not about cows at all. It was all about cowherds!

Now headline reads: "Vandalism of non-native cowherds".


Pudhari (पुढारी) September 27 2010

Where will this insider-outsider fight take us? Like caste census, will there be a "sider" census in India?

The Persistence of Memory. Vasant Sarwate style!

The late J G Ballard called the late Salvador Dali the greatest painter of the 20th century.

About following painting, Ballard says:

"...Dalí's masterpiece and, I believe, the greatest painting of the 20th century is The Persistence of Memory, a tiny painting not much larger than the postcard version, containing the age of Freud, Kafka and Einstein in its image of soft watches, an embryo and a beach of fused sand. The ghost of Freud presides over the uterine fantasies that set the stage for the adult traumas to come, while insects incarnate the self-loathing of Kafka's Metamorphosis and its hero turned into a beetle. The soft watches belong to a realm where clock time is no longer valid and relativity rules in Einstein's self-warping continuum.

What monster would grow from this sleeping embryo? It may be the long eyelashes, but there is something feminine and almost coquettish about this little figure, and I see the painting as the 20th century's Mona Lisa, a psychoanalytic take on the mysterious Gioconda smile. If the Mona Lisa, as someone said, looks as if she has just dined on her husband, then Dalí's embryo looks as if she dreams of feasting on her mother..."


Artist: Salvador Dali, 'The Persistence of Memory', 1931

When I was growing up, smuggling was a very popular profession in India. Watch any number of Hindi films of the period.

I remember my shock and disbelief on hearing about a young and handsome son of a very famous Brahmin family in Miraj being a gold smuggler.

Gold was not the only commodity that was popular among them. Watches came close second. Seiko, Riko(?), Casio were some of the popular brands. (Even in September 2003- Smuggled watches account for between 50 and 75 per cent of annual sales in the country.)

Surely when watches were smuggled via sea route some consignments didn't reach the shore safely. In those cases, watches swam, the way oil from the recent oil-spill did, to arrive.

One of the first things I noticed in Mumbai, where Sarwate lives, was how even in very plush residential areas clothes- even undergarments- were dried hanging outside an apartment. I wonder if there also was an odd embryo lurking!

Now see below what Vasant Sarwate creates.

He imagines what could be a reaction of viewing public in 1970's and 1980's to Dali's painting.


(double-click on the picture to get a larger view)

Caption reads: "just some smuggled stuff thrown in water! Being dried..."

Artist: Vasant Sarwate, Year-?, sourced from his book "The Best of Sarwate" editor: Avadhoot Paralkar, Lokvangmay Gruh 2008

वसंत सरवटे "सरवोत्तम सरवटे" संपादक: अवधूत परळकर, लोकवाङ्मय गृह 2008

p.s I had forgot about this cartoon of Sarwate. When I was showing him a book containing Dali's paintings once at our place, he spoke about it.

Damn, Why didn't I smoke? Because I like that in a Man. And a Woman

Anthony Daniels: "Back in the old days, intellectuals used to smoke. Indeed, anyone who didn’t smoke couldn’t be a real intellectual, and a cigarette, held at an angle on the lower lip by dried saliva, added immense depth to anyone’s thought. It’s not surprising, then, that old philosophy books tend to smell like ashtrays..."

The Times of India headline on Sept 16 2010: "Antibiotics in most honey brands: study"

I regret not to have ever smoked. Every time I see an old English or Hindi film, I notice people smoking with so much style that I envy them.

Even an idiot gets a personality smoking.

The other day I was watching C.I.D. (Hindi film, 1956).

When Dev Anand playing police inspector informs his boss K N Singh that he has found a cigarette butt discarded possibly by the murder suspect, Singh- all style- retorts: "In Bombay there live forty lac people and perhaps ten lac of them smoke."


‘You have a lighter — I like that in a man.’

courtesy: Spectator, July 2010

And if I had taken up smoking, I surely wouldn't have cared about surgeon general's warning- "skull and bones" besides a dead body- because, not just honey, but most of the stuff I now consume- air, water, milk, fruits especially mangoes, green vegetables is so polluted anyway. (I know because they taste so different from what they did during my childhood.)

Talk of fresh air: Although my base was Doom Dooma, Assam, I used to travel often between Kolkata and Dibrugarh from 1989-1991. When I went to Kolkata, I often got unwell. On my return to Assam, as my pickup car took a left turn from the airport towards our way to Doom Dooma, just one long deep breath in that air used to cure me of all nagging coughs and colds.


Artists: Brant Parker (1920–2007) and Johnny Hart (1931–2007), Jeff Parker

R G Gadkari's Sindhu, A Hitchcock's Blondes

I read Ram Ganesh Gadkari's (1885-1919) (राम गणेश गडकरी) "Ekach Pyala" (एकच प्याला) when in school.

I had mixed feelings. I was deeply stirred by its melodrama and use of Marathi but I also felt it was a tearjerker. (Read a related post on Ekach Pyala here.)

Play's protagonist Sindhu सिन्धु made a deep impression on me. But I wasn't attracted to her. I thought she was like many middle-class, largely Brahmin, women I came across in Miraj.

There was one very fair skinned, twenty plus, sharp-featured, five-yard saree-wearing Chitpavan Brahmin woman who passed by our house almost every day.

Wherever, any time of the day, she saw cow dung lying on a street, she stopped in her tracks, lifted it in her right palm, positioned that palm over her right shoulder, dung facing sky, and carried it to her house.

I thought Gadkari's Sindhu was like her except the length of saree as Sindhu surely wore nine-yard one.

How wrong I was!

I realised it when I read M. V. Dhond's (म. वा. धोंड) 'Chandra Chavathicha', 1987 (चंद्र चवथिचा; In English- "Fourth Day Moon").

Dhond uncovers, what Gadkari doesn't do overtly, attractiveness of Gadkari's Sindhu.

For instance after a long separation from her husband Sudhakar, Sindhu, whose marriage is not that old, is looking forward to mating with him. She is humming a suggestive song to herself.

In short: Sex is on her mind.

Dhond reasons that the 'fourth day' also implies the last day of a woman's monthly menstruation cycle, when having suffered variously, including even lack of bath, on account of prevailing social customs, women looked forward to a reunion with their husbands.

I was fascinated by this. Now, Sindhu started to look like many attractive middle-aged married women one comes across.

It reminded me of Hitchcock's presentation of his blondes Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren.

Why?

Hitchcock: You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We're after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they're in the bedroom.

Truffaut: What intrigues you is the paradox between the inner fire and the cool surface.

Hitchcock: Definitely...Do you know why? Because sex should not be advertised...because without the element of surprise the scenes become meaningless. There's no possibility to discover sex.

[Interview: Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Tuffaut (Aug/1962)]


Kim Novak, "Vertigo"


Artist: Raja Ravi Varma, "Lady in the Moon Light"

Is she Gadkari's Sindhu? And is that the fourth day moon?

Does Marathi have any Third Culture?

TREVOR BUTTERWORTH: "...It is also refreshing, and possibly redemptive, to be reminded of a time when scientists composed poetry—as Charles Darwin's polymathic grandfather, Erasmus, did praise of steel—and when the idea that agronomy and geology and metallurgy were as vital and as exciting as any of the arts." (WSJ, July 30 2010)

W H Auden (imagining what the Athenian might say about the West): "Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization; but why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God, priests who are unconcerned with politics, politicians who only know other politicians."

Marcus Chown: I started by asking (Carl)Sagan what he preferred: science or science fiction? Without hesitation, he replied: "Science." I asked him why. "Because science is stranger than science fiction."

The late G D Madgulkar's (ग. दि. माडगूळकर) [1919-1977] Marathi essay titled "Hello, Mr. Death" (हेलो मिस्टर डेथ)-or something similar- became a big hit. It described his near death experience.

Now Madgulkar was a very good lyricist but I always thought the essay was all baloney.

The Times of India May 31 2010:

"Afterlife episode or just a brain tick?: Patients who have had a near-death experience often report walking towards a bright light, or a feeling that they are floating above their body - a sensation that has long been interpreted as a religious vision and confirmation of afterlife. Experts now claim it's a surge of electrical activity triggered by the brain in the moments before death, apparent from a study of the brainwaves of dying patients..."

I have read about poet Vinda Karandikar (विंदा करंदीकर) talking about his wife dying peacefully. Is there anything like 'peaceful death'?

ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG: "Will We Ever Arrive at the Good Death?

...What we're addicted to, it seems, is the belief that we can micromanage death. We tend to think of a ''good death'' as one that we can control, making decisions about how much intervention we want, how much pain relief, whether it's in the home or the hospital, who will be by our sides. We even sometimes try to make decisions about what we will die from. This can be valuable, as when a cancer patient with little hope of survival, like Goldie Gold back in mid-July, rejects debilitating chemotherapy. But often, our best-laid plans can go awry. Dying is awfully hard to choreograph..." (NYT, Aug 7 2005)

Such writing gets away without any critical scrutiny in Marathi because it has largely lacked what C P Snow defines as The Third Culture.

Snow's thesis was that the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society — the sciences and the humanities — was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.

Are Marathi artists afraid if they stride two cultures they would spread themselves too thin? Like Leonardo da Vinci from the picture below who strode them all!


Artist: Warren Miller, The New Yorker, May 7 1966

Now, We Don't want Hindi Speaking Cows!

Sadly now defunct but delightful Marathi periodical 'Amrut' (अमृत) used to have two interesting columns.

One was called 'Mudrarakshasacha Vinod' (मुद्राराक्षसाचा विनोद) (humour arising out of an error in printing) and the other was 'upasanpaadakaachyaa dulakyaa' (उपसंपादकाच्या डुलक्या) (winking of a sub-editor of a newspaper).

They were kind of Jay Leno's "Headlines" on "The Tonight Show".

The following is neither.

But I was still really amused by the tone of following news item from Pudhari (पुढारी) July 14 2010.

Its headline reads in English: "Nuisance of Rajasthani red cows in Ambegaon".



What next Maharashtra? Going after Russian speaking Siberian Cranes?