Username and Password?....तो तूंच हटकलेंस 'कोण' म्हणून

Today March 20 2013 is 57th death anniversary of B S Mardhekar (बा सी मर्ढेकर)...sometimes it's hard to imagine someone with his command of Marathi was writing in that language not too many years ago...

Graham Greene:
"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."

Very early in his short career,  BSM (1909-1956) knew he was a good poet, a special talent perhaps, or maybe even more.

Why do I say that?

"गेलॉ विदूषक जरी ठरुनी सुहास,
दान्ते-नि-शेक्सपिअर-संगत आसपास
कोठे तरी स्वमरणोत्तर भाग्यकाली-!
हाही विचार न कमी मज शांतिदायी."

[poem no 15, "शिशिरागम" ("shishiragam") from "मर्ढेकरांची कविता" ("Mardhekaranchi Kavita"), 1959-1977; courtesy: राघव बाळ मर्ढेकर (Raghav Bal Mardhekar)]

("Even if I pass on as a grinning joker,
company of Dante and Shakespeare in proximity
somewhere in my good fortune after my death-!
even this thought is no less consoling")

Remember, in 'Shishiragam' collection,  BSM is NOT the poet we now know. There, he comes across as some one following his idol Madhav Julian  (माधव जूलियन) or English romantic poets he studied and later taught.

But then he is already thinking of life after death spent in the neighborhood of Dante and Shakespeare! It's like after playing just one season of Ranji trophy cricket with some success, you seek the company of Don  Bradman and Garry Sobers in your afterlife!

If you do that you are either a pompous fool or you must be really good and confident about your creative future. For me, Mardhekar was the latter.

What might have happened when rather young BSM met his maker?

Artist: Arnie Levin, The New Yorker, May 29 2000

courtesy: the artist, the magazine and  Bob Mankoff's blog

(Now, user name and password are confidential. No one is supposed to ask them to you, especially  very openly. But then where's the problem if it's perhaps the last time you will ever need them?)

Mardhekar was perhaps ushered in without this formality and shown his dwelling next to Dante and Shakespeare! I hope so.

Or was he?

"आलो क्षणिचा विसावा म्हणून;
टेकले पाय:
तो तूंच हटकलेंस 'कोण' म्हणून
आणि मनांतले शिणलेले हेतू
शेण झाले"

[the last and unnumbered poem of the section 'Kanheen Kavita' from 'Mardhekaranchee Kavita', 1959/1977 ('कांही कविता', 'मर्ढेकरांची कविता')]

("I came to rest momentarily;
touched down feet:
At once you confronted with "who"
and the tired aspirations in the mind
turned to shit")

Is "who" in the poem above refers to "Username and password?"

Empower the the Election Commission to Ban the Nonelected Expression!

SIMON CRITCHLEY:

"...When asked by Lysias the pharmacist if he believed in the gods, Diogenes the Cynic  replied, “How can I help believing in them when I see a god-forsaken wretch like you?” When he was asked what was the right time to marry, he said, “For a young man not yet, for an old man never at all.” When asked what was the most beautiful thing in the world, Diogenes replied, “Freedom of speech.” Sadly, it remains one of the most dangerous..."

अखिल भारतीय मराठी साहित्य संमेलनाचे अध्यक्ष डॉ. नागनाथ कोत्तापल्ले, March 13 2013, Loksatta:

"...सत्ताधारी माणसांचे शिक्षणापासून व्यापारापर्यंत सर्वच बाजूने सर्वच क्षेत्रामध्ये आक्रमण झाल्याने सामान्य माणसाची कोंडी झाली असून सामान्याला त्याचा आवाज राहिला नाही. त्यातून निर्माण झालेल्या भयप्रद अवस्थेमुळे साहित्य व वृत्तपत्रसृष्टीचा खूप मोठा संकोच होतो आहे. बौद्धिक विश्वाचा असा संकोच होणे, ही समाजाला भूषणावह गोष्ट नाही..."

Almost all the political parties in India are against some expression or the other-   by artists or ordinary citizens like me, who are nobody. Artists get police protection and media attention. I am left to fend for myself.

The expressions include cartoons, paintings, books, plays, speeches, thoughts, cinema, blog-post, FB post, Twitter post...

Wikipedia informs:

"Political parties that wish to contest local, state or national elections are required to be registered by the Election Commission of India (EC). In order to gain recognition in a state, the party must have had political activity for at least five continuous years, and send at least 4% of the state's quota to the Lok Sabha (India's Lower house), or 3.33% of members to that Legislative Assembly of that state..."

If so, why not empower the EC of India to ban any expression that is not acceptable to even one political party.

That is, we can have a transparent online process where a recognized political party raises an objection to a particular expression...TV channels get the live feed of that...They start running the story if it's TRP- worthy...Democracy at its best....political parties represent people....elections and media are the backbones of any democracy...the EC gets the final vote on the subject..

Jonathan Jones writes on his Art Blog in The Guardian 'Dirty old masters: should the EU ban pornographic paintings?':

"...Europe's greatest art has long been an aid to, and celebration of, sexual fantasy. Will a ban on porn affect our art heritage?...Europe's great artists were making pornography long before the invention of the camera, let alone the internet. In my new book The Loves of the Artists, I argue that sexual gratification – of both the viewers of art, and artists themselves – was a fundamental drive of high European culture in the age of the old masters. Paintings were used as sexual stimuli, as visual lovers' guides, as aids to fantasy. This was considered one of the most serious uses of art by no less a thinker than Leonardo da Vinci, who claimed images are better than words because pictures can directly arouse the senses. He was proud that he once painted a Madonna so sexy the owner asked for all its religious trappings to be removed, out of shame for the inappropriate lust it inspired. His painting of St John the Baptist is similarly ambiguous...."

The Venus of Urbino by Titian.

Photograph: Nicola Lorusso/Alinari Archives/Corbis , The Guardian

Many Indians were/are  well familiar with the sentiments expressed above:

"Paintings were used as sexual stimuli, as visual lovers' guides, as aids to fantasy. This was considered one of the most serious uses of art by no less a thinker than Leonardo da Vinci, who claimed images are better than words because pictures can directly arouse the senses."

I fell ill in Kolkata in 1991 supposedly by amebiosis...its water they said, its weather some others. Some advised to go to "the West" for change of water and weather.

We went to  Khajuraho coinciding with the annual dance festival there. 

But the flesh and blood were no match for the stone. Not only I was cured in a day, I was massively turned on by what I saw on the temple walls there. I was back...(I won't go further than this to protect my wife's privacy.)

Today,  as I suffer from high blood pressure, I wonder where I should go to "snap out of it"! Khajuraho does not sound right but who knows!

'A temple relief at Khajuraho features a couple in a sexual embrace with a man and a woman masturbating to either side.'

courtesy: Wikipedia and Mr. Henry Flower

Illegal Let, then Sublet and then Pay not even a Halfpenny of Rent!

Since we started laying rice-grain, ground glucose biscuits and clean water saucer on our terrace, we have been visited by many birds. We have now counted a few generations of sparrows. And I recognize at least two crows. (I wish I were as healthy as them!)

In one of the most beautiful essays I have read, George Orwell writes:

"Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of
London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I  have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road.  There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent"

('Some Thoughts on the Common Toad', 1946)

 Artist: David Sipress, The New Yorker, November 2012

If Tukaram Was Alive Today

WELCOME BACK
MISTER TUKARAM!
WE'VE MADE A LIST
OF 'MODERN'
THINGS FOR YOU
 TO DO

*GO TO M-TOWN (ask The Pune Times for the directions to reach there)

*USE TWITTER (or Facebook)

*BE A JUDGE ON 'SA RE GA MA PA' (or a dance contest featuring Marathi Bollywood hottie)

*WRITE FOR AN 8-PM-MARATHI TV SERIAL (or write a screenplay of blockbuster Marathi movie based in your times featuring the practice of sati or any such regressive social practice against which you might have railed all your life.)

*WRITE A COLUMN FOR A WEEKEND EDITION OF A MARATHI DAILY WITH A TITLE SUCH AS 'KAUTUKA' (कौतुक) [or write for  two-dozen 2013 'Diwali anks'. Sorry, you are too late to make it to 'Lalit' poetry special.]

CAN'T I WRITE
ABHANGS? I LIKE
WRITING ABHANGS...

WELL...
I SUPPOSE SO.
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO...


Read the above after soaking in this wonderful picture:

Artist: Tom Gauld, November 26 2012

Sarang Chapalgaonkar... Who? केल नीट म्हणजे बराबर मझा येतो ...

"When the spring arrives
And I sit outside, working,
I am never bored.
With a chisel in hand
I can raise flowers from stones."  

(A Japanese Haiku quoted by the late N J Nanporia in his article on Japan in The Times of India dated around 1980)

Steve Rose, The Guardian, February 28 2013:

"...^"Indian films have this obsession with hygienic clean spaces, even though the country's not so clean," says Anurag Kashyap. "They're either shot in the studios or shot in London, in America, in Switzerland – clean places. Everywhere except India." By contrast, Kashyap's latest movie, Gangs Of Wasseypur, seems determined to show the India you don't see in the movies. Wasseypur is a nondescript industrial town in Bihar, India's poorest region. And rather than drugs or casinos, these gangs are fighting for control of coal mines and scrap metal. It was filmed on bustling streets and industrial wastelands, even – since one of the movie's central clans are butchers by trade – an abattoir. "That was difficult," Kashyap recalls. "The smell was so bad. While we were shooting, 60 buffaloes and a camel got slaughtered before our eyes. I don't think any of us could eat meat for a month."..."

Sarang Chapalgaonkar (सारंग चपळगावकर),  for me Sarang-mama,  is dead. He died on December 20 2012. He was my wife's mother's maternal uncle (मामा).

He was an interesting, handsome  man...He was a groupie of  Pune city's one biographer V N Natu ('आधीच पुणे  गुलजार'  वि. ना. नातू.....Btw- I really like Natu's book)...Knowing my tastes, he strongly recommended to me Hari Narayan Apte's (हरि नारायण आपटे) book 'Madhali Sthiti' (मधली स्थिती). I have still not able to get hold of the book.

We could talk for hours on many subjects. Once he told me how the Dalits were not allowed to construct houses in a certain direction of the Pune city because the wind blew from that direction into the city!

He spent his entire working life- from 1942 for 39 years-  in Indian (central) railways. A few years go, he wrote a book- "Tikit Please" (तिकीट प्लीज)- based on his experiences there. It was only for private circulation.

It turned out to be a wonderful book. I finished it in one sitting. A lot of the then celebrities make guest-appearances in the book. Among them are Manohar Malgaonkar (मनोहर माळगावकर),  Bal Gandharva (बालगंधर्व)...

Mr. Malgaonkar presented him with his autographed book and Balgandharva treated him with great  sensitivity and affection . The latter experience made Sarang-mama cry and reading that made me cry! Another instance of Balgandharva's greatness.

But the best thing about the book comes in its foreword by the author:

"टी सी म्हणून साधारण वाटणाऱ्या नोकरीत मी अत्यंत स्वाभीमानाने व समाधानाने दिवस काढले. त्या नोकरीचा मला अद्याप अभिमान वाटतो."

("I spent days with dignity and satisfaction working in an ordinary sounding job like ticket-checker. I still feel proud of that job.")

How rarely I get to read such a sentiment in a native Indian language.

Reminded me of following set of dialogues:

",,,उषा: तुम्हांला सगळ्याचाच मझा वाटतो.

काकाजी: पाहिलं नीट म्हणजे बराबर मझा दिसतो. इंदूर स्टेशनात एकदा एक भंगी दोन लंब्या झाडू घेऊन कचरा काढीत होता. उषा, अरे ऐश्या झाडू फिरवीत होता, की तुझ्या सतीशला बॅट देखील फिरवता येणार नाही तशी."

("...Usha: You think everything is fun.

Kakaji: If you look carefully, you notice fun alright. At Indore station once a street-sweeper was sweeping using two long brooms. Usha, the way he was brandishing broom, your Satish would't be able to wave even a (cricket) bat.")

['Tujhe Ahe Tujapashi', 1957 (तुझें आहे तुजपाशीं) by P L Deshpande (पु ल देशपांडे)]

So many books remain unwritten in Marathi....

Has there been a great Marathi book by a nurse? By a house-maid? By an under taker at crematorium?  By autopsy (post-mortem) conductors? By a butcher? By a person engaged in manual scavenging? By an auto-rickshaw or a tonga driver? By an ST bus conductor? By a postman? By a dangerous-chemical factory worker? By MSEDCL worker exposed to high-voltage live wires? By a coal-engine train driver?.....What 'Marathi' or language do they use on the job?

And I am not talking about some howling rebel (विद्रोही) books, not the kind whose authors are now 'parallel' celebrities making monthly/quarterly appearances on TV channels anchored by 'socialist' anchors,  but written matter-of-factly, making people appreciate: Despite all the likely misery of the job, I did it with quiet dignity and satisfaction and my job was perhaps as important as that of an IT professional or a journalist or a priest or a publisher or an artist or a doctor or an architect or a teacher or a lawyer or an ad-man or an actor or a writer or a builder or a politician or a broker or a pilot or a cricketer or Miss Beauty-queen or a TV anchor...

Tukaram, Richard Feynman, Helen E Hokinson: We Are Only An Atom

John Gray:

"When people look to religion for the meaning of life, they eventually find mystery. When they look to science for meaning they end up in mere incoherence."

Brian Greene:

" In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that distant galaxies are all rushing away from us. And the best explanation for this cosmic exodus came directly from general relativity: much as poppy seeds in a muffin that’s baking move apart as the dough swells, galaxies move apart as the space in which they’re embedded expands. Hubble’s observations thus established that there was no need for a cosmological constant; the universe is not static."

 courtesy: 'Feynman' by Jim Ottaviani (Author), Leland Myrick (Illustrator)

Richard Feynman has said:

"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied."

 When I read it, I immediately thought of Tukaram (तुकाराम):
 
"अणुरेणियां थोकडा ।
तुका आकाशाएवढा ॥१॥"

( midget like atom-molecule
Tuka is sky-like)


Tukaram of course did not know about the atomic hypothesis, as we know it today, but isn't he saying something equally profound here?


Maybe he is  telling us how small atoms-molecules make the big sky.

Maybe he is telling us how we can grow from being a lowly dwarf to a leviathan like the sky.

Maybe he is telling us we are sometimes like an atom-molecule while other times like the sky.

Maybe he is telling us that the universe is not static.

Maybe he is telling us that when your perspective changes things look different.

Maybe he is telling us about the feeling of awe that comes from understanding the beauty of nature. (Mr. Feynman describes it thus: ...It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe —)

 Artist: Helen E Hokinson (1893-1949), The New Yorker, July 12 1930

Hey, Best Actress or Nominee, What is Your Erotic Capital?

JOANNE LIPMAN, The New York Times, October 23 2009:

"The truth is, women haven’t come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward…

… The conversation online about women, as about so many other topics, degenerated from silly and snarky to just plain ugly — and it seeped into the mainstream.

Recently, before a TV appearance, I did an Internet search on one of the interviewers so I could learn more about her — and got a full page of results about her breasts. .."

Catherine Hakim:

"The meritocratic capitalist values of the Western world invite us to admire people who exploit their human capital for personal gain. I can see no reason at all why people who exploit their erotic capital for its full value should not be equally admired."

I watched the Oscars partly on the morning of February 25 2013 and partly on the same evening.

It was OK.  I had not seen it for last couple of years.

I was quite surprised by 'bluntness' of Seth MacFarlane's song “WeSaw Your Boobs”. It was funny. But it seems to have enraged a few.

picture courtesy:  Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and CBS News 

Amy Davidson says in The New Yorker:

"...“We Saw Your Boobs” was as a song-and-dance routine in which MacFarlane and some grinning guys named actresses in the audience and the movies in which their breasts were visible. That’s about it. What made it worse was that most of the movies mentioned, if not all (“Gia”), were pretty great—“Silkwood,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Monster,” “The Accused,” “Iris”—and not exactly teen-exploitation pictures. The women were not showing their bodies to amuse Seth MacFarlane but, rather, to do their job..."

I completely agree with Ms. Davidson but Seth is still right and funny: We did see (some of) those- and not all of them pretty-  boobs anyway!

A few months ago, I  saw 'The Reader' (2008) starring Kate Winslet, who incidentally features longest in Mr. MacFarlane's song. 

The movie is ordinary, forgettable and stands out largely for Ms. Winslet's nudity and her sexually explicit scenes with a  mid-teenager.  So how can one say that movie is strictly NOT  a "teen-exploitation"...It reminded me of "Mera Naam Joker", 1970 and 'Summer of '42", 1971...both films, by the way, much better than 'The Reader'.

I wonder why KW was given the Academy Award for Best Actress for that film.

A book by Catherine Hakim 'Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital' was published in 2011.

Book description on Amazon.com says: 

"...Catherine Hakim's groundbreaking book reveals how erotic capital is just as influential in life as how rich, clever, educated or well-connected we are. Drawing on hard evidence, she illustrates how this potent force develops from an early age, with attractive children assumed to be intelligent, competent and good. She examines how women and men learn to exploit it throughout their lives, how it differs across cultures and how it affects all spheres of activity, from dating and mating to politics, business, film, music, the arts and sport. She also explores why erotic capital is growing in importance in today's highly sexualised culture and yet, ironically, as a 'feminine' virtue, remains sidelined. "Honey Money" is a call for us to recognize the economic and social value of erotic capital, and truly acknowledge beauty and pleasure. This will not only change the role of women in society, getting them a better deal in both public and private life - it could also revolutionize our power structures, big business, the sex industry, government, marriage, education and almost everything we do."

The author Ms. Hakim wrote in an article in 2010:

"Erotic capital goes beyond beauty to include sex appeal, charm and social skills, physical fitness and liveliness, sexual competence and skills in self-presentation, such as face-painting, hairstyles, clothing and all the other arts of self-adornment. Most studies capture only one facet of it: photographs measure beauty or sex appeal, psychologists measure confidence and social skills, sex researchers ask about seduction skills and numbers of partners. Yet women have long excelled at such arts: that’s why they tend to be more dressed up than men at parties. They make more effort to develop the “soft skills” of charm, empathy, persuasion, deploying emotional intelligence and “emotional labour.” Indeed, the final element of erotic capital is unique to women: bearing children. In some cultures, fertility is an essential element of women’s erotic power. And even though female fertility is less important in northern Europe (where families are smaller) women’s dominant position in this market has been reinforced in recent decades by a much-lamented phenomenon: the sexualisation of culture...Like it or not, erotic capital is now as valued as economic and human capital. As Chairman Mao advised—walk on two legs."

ERIC WILSON said in The New York Times September 12, 2008:

 “No one blinked at the Marc Jacobs fashion show last week when the model Freja Beha Erichsen appeared in a sheer black top that revealed that she was wearing a nipple ring. No one blushed at the Chris Benz show when Sasha Luss and Ekat Kiseleva posed in see-through camisoles. No one seemed particularly hot or bothered that Ali Stephens’s breasts were clearly visible through her dress when she walked for Derek Lam. No one was outraged that Francisco Costa showed a transparent raincoat at Calvin Klein with nothing but a thong underneath.

Peek-a-boo was the biggest trend at the New York Fashion Week that ended on Friday,

…But nudity, like fashion, has lost much of its power to shock.

We have become so desensitized to images of naked celebrities, sex tapes and Internet pornography that designers are hard-pressed to create anything that seems really transgressive.” 

Yes, nudity might have lost its power to shock but who knows how it works on Oscar juries!

An iconic shot of the late Ms. Elizabeth Taylor splashing in the ocean, from the set of 'Suddenly, Last Summer' (1959). (Ms. Taylor received nomination  for the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role.)

© Sunset Boulevard/Corbis.

Setsuko Hara 原 節子: A Japanese Nutan नूतन... Touch of Melancholy...Sigh

Today February 23 2013 is 22nd Death Anniversary of Nutan

After seeing a Setsuko Hara film, the novelist Endo Shusaku wrote "We would sigh or let out a great breath from the depths of our hearts, for what we felt was precisely this: Can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?"

In year 2012, I saw two Japanese films  'Late Spring', 1949 and 'Tokyo Story', 1954. Both masterpieces by Yasujiro Ozu, both starring Setsuko Hara.

Watching them was like reading G A Kulkarni's (जी ए कुलकर्णी) 'Kairi' ( कैरी)  one more time. Such tenderness, such lyricality, such beauty, such simplicity and yet very little sentimentality...While I have known GA's story for more than thirty years, where was 'Tokyo Story'?

I am glad I did not 'meet' Ms. Hara at a more impressionable age unlike Ms. Nutan. If I had, I would have madly fallen in love with her, would have lost the sleep for a few days.

Ms. Hara's partnership with  Mr. Ozu reminds me of Nutan's partnership with Bimal Roy.

Setsuko Hara, in Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece 'Tokyo Story'

Photograph courtesy: the distributor of the film or  the publisher of the film.

In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anari, 1959

Image courtesy: Wikipedia

Ms. Hara foreswore the acting profession in 1963 and became a Greta Garbo-like figure. Nutan never did anything like that but she too remained an enigma for me.

They both- June borne- look stunning on B&W screen. While they are there, I look at nothing else. I also notice  a touch of melancholy that goes with an incredible amount of beauty. 

That's what makes them special.

Once In 200 Years: Lizzy Bennet Sultry, Full-lipped, Tanned Hottie

Brooke Allen:

"For no filmed version of an Austen novel is really satisfactory: Of all 19th-century novelists, she dwells the least on the physical surfaces that are the essence of the cinematic art." 


Howard Jacobson:

"If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of. Life governed by the rules of respectability and fear? Life rounded at the edges with all the horror turned away from? Life seen whole and steadily with all the breakages and shaking taken out? I don't mean to set up false dichotomies. I would never say of those great writers whose work clearly falls outside the category of non-redemptive, even anathematising black-heartedness I am championing that they make us "feel good". Jane Austen's vision is a fraction from being a despairing one, her final chapters are dispensations of kindness, like the fifth acts of Shakespeare's comedies, in which we are spared bleakness by a hair's breadth, though we feel its presence all around."

The world is celebrating 200th birth anniversary of  'Pride and Prejudice', a novel by Jane Austen.

As is always true of most of such celebrations in the West, there is a lot of passion and there is a lot of commerce.

The New York Times on February 13 2013 gives us a glimpse of the way the covers of Austen's book have changed over the years. View it here.

It is such a delight but also made me wonder if I had seen anything like this in Marathi. I haven't.

Janine Barchas says in the article:

"Let’s just be honest about our superficiality. Even when it comes to the high-­minded business of literature, people do judge books by their covers. Perhaps that’s why Amazon produces glossy mock “covers” for its disembodied e-books, to be inspected and decided upon alongside the traditional print offerings.
Book covers may be especially important when it comes to the classics. After all, many of us have a general sense of, if not a thorough familiarity with, the contents within. Perhaps more than anything else, these covers show what matters to prospective buyers. Two centuries of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” are particularly revealing about the novel’s broad and sustained popular reach..."

In Marathi we can surely do such a study for a lot of saint-poet literature.  

courtesy:  Marvel's 'Pride and Prejudice'

"In 2009, Marvel tried to turn young women into comic book readers by issuing “Pride and Prejudice” as a graphic novel. The cover art plays down — even disguises — the book’s sexy interior. On the outside, a primly presented Keira Knightley look-alike, drawn by Sonny Liew, graces a spoof of Seventeen magazine. Inside, the illustrator Hugo Petrus characterizes Lizzy Bennet as a sultry, full-lipped, tanned hottie."

I wonder if Amar Chitra Katha has any plans to create a comic book based on P & P. If they do, which Indian hottie will it be? Vidya Balan, Priyanka Chopra, Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor...

India To Become Shining City Upon a Hill. Again!

Harsh Mander, The Hindu, March 9 2013:

"Depleting water tables and a shift from farming for food to cash crops have transformed thriving villages into wastelands...The Indian countryside has become, transformed into this wasteland of near-terminal despair and increasingly impossible survival, by new technologies, forced integration with globalised markets, and an uncaring state. For a sector which employs 51 per cent workers, contributes 14 per cent of GDP, the state invests as little as five per cent of total public expenditures. No wonder that tens of thousands of farmers each year drink pesticide or hang themselves; and millions of the young flee,  when they can, wherever they can."

D D Kosambi:

"The subtle mystic philosophies, torturous religions, ornate literature, monuments teeming with intricate sculpture and delicate music of India all derive from the same historical process that produced the famished apathy of the villager, senseless opportunism and termite greed of the ‘cultured’ strata, sullen, uncoordinated discontent among the workers, general demoralization, misery, squalor and degrading superstition. The one is the result of the other, one is the expression of the other…it is necessary to understand that history is not a sequence of haphazard events but is made by human beings in the satisfaction of daily needs."

John Kay in Financial Times, November 20 2012:

"...Reports of his tax policies suggest that Shah Jahan may have appropriated as much as 40 per cent of what we now call gross domestic product to support a lifestyle of exceptional ostentation and self-indulgence. He was overthrown by his son, who was exasperated by his father’s penchant for monumental building, anxious to maximise his own share of the loot and concerned by the scale of the levies on the population. But it was all too late. The Mogul empire was in irretrievable decline.

The activities of Shah Jahan epitomise rent-seeking – the accumulation of a fortune not by creating wealth through serving customers better but by the appropriation of such wealth after it has already been created by other people. Both are routes to personal enrichment and the tension between them has been a dominant theme of economic history..."

Henry Miller:

"To most men the past is never yesterday, or five minutes ago, but distant, misty epochs some of which are glorious and others abominable, Each one reconstructs the past according to his temperament and experience. We read history to corroborate our own views, not to learn what scholars think to be true. About the future there is as little agreement as bout the past, I’ve noticed. We stand in relation to the past very much like the cow in the meadow — endlessly chewing the cud. It is not something finished and done with, as we sometimes fondly imagine, but something alive, constantly changing, and perpetually with us. But the future too is with us perpetually, and alive and constantly changing."

Anirudh Deshpande, EPW, February 16 2013:

"The persistence of an unjust society based on profit, class, caste, race and patriarchy highlights the need to study history, because of its abiding ideological importance. The history of society will remain a history of ideological contest despite the end of ideology proclaimed by globalisation."

रा भा पाटणकर :

"शिवाजीने रयतेच्या भल्यासाठी केलेल्या गोष्टी सर्वश्रुत आहेत. पण तरीही तेथील सामान्य रयत सुखात होती असे म्हणता येणार  नाही ."

(पृष्ठ 56, 'अपूर्ण  क्रांती',  1999)

William Dalrymple (WD)  wrote an essay on India for New Statesman on Oct 11 2012. Read it here. 

For most part, it is a severe indictment of today's India and makes sad reading. 

However, towards the end the essay stunningly turns around:

"In the longer view of history, India has only recently come to be seen as a poor country. As early as Roman times there was a dramatic drain of western gold to India; during the reign of Nero, the Pandyan kings even sent an embassy to Rome to discuss the latter’s balance of payments problems. A thousand years later it was India’s extraordinary wealth that drew in the merchant adventurers of the East India Company. They came to India not as part of some Tudor aid project, but instead as part of a desperate effort to cash in on the riches of the Mughal empire, then one of the two wealthiest polities in the world. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Mughal city of Lahore is revealed to Adam after the Fall as a future wonder of God’s creation: by the 17th century, Lahore had grown richer than Constantinople, and with its two million inhabitants it dwarfed London and Paris combined. It was, in terms of rapid growth, prosperity and opportunities, the Gurgaon of its day.

What eastern Europeans are to modern Brit­ain – economic migrants in search of a better life – the Jacobeans were to Mughal India. It was only after the arrival of the various colonial powers that India came to be perceived as poor. What is happening today is merely India’s slow return to its natural place at the forefront of the world economy. History is on its side."

It feels good to read all this but I really wonder if this all is true.

Is India slowly returning to its natural place at the forefront of the world economy? Is history indeed on its side


In recent months, I have kept reading and re-reading  a wonderful, small book in Marathi  'Maharashtrachi Kulkatha' (महाराष्ट्राची कुळकथा), 2011- 'the ancestral-story of Maharashtra'-   by Dr. Madhukar Keshav Dhavalikar (मधुकर केशव ढवळीकर) . It's just 148 pages long and attractively priced at INR 140. It has no index and some minor errors have crept in.

Although the book's primary focus is Maharashtra it often talks about the whole of India. To my delight, the book is richly illustrated.

Although Dr. Dhavaliker respects D D Kosambi a lot, my reading of the book suggests that he very much is his own man.

The book is based entirely on the archeological evidence and treats any other evidence- such as found in literature and art- with suspicion.

Dr. Dhavalikar argues that India's economic prosperity started around 600 BC and  lasted up to 4th century CE. The decline started right after that.

On page 145, MKD says:

"... गुप्तकालीन आणि गुप्तोत्तर काळात जे संस्कृत आणि प्राकृत  वाङ्गमय मोठया प्रमाणावर  निर्माण झाले, त्यात आपल्या प्राचीन  नगरांच्या वैभवाची राजे-रजवाड्यांची जी  रंजक वर्णने आहेत,  त्यांवरून सर्व काही  आलबेल  होते अशी आपली गोड समजूत आहे. परंतु प्रत्यक्ष परिस्थिती खूपच  वेगळी होती.  कारण पुरात्ततत्त्वीय पुरावा या उलट आहे आणि त्यावर आपण विश्वास ठेवला पाहिजे. वारंवार पडणारे दुष्काळ हे भारताच्या आर्थिक अवनतीचे कारण आहे.  जोवर आपण त्यांवर मात करू शकत नाही, तोवर परिस्थितीत फारशी सुधारणा होणे शक्य नाही..."

(...engaging descriptions of the wealth of our old cities and kings and their palaces that is contained in the great amount of Sanskrit and Prakrit literature which was created during Gupta and post-Gupta period make us feel that everything was alright. But the actual reality was very different. That is because of the evidence that is found in archeology and we should trust it. Frequent droughts are the reason of India's economic decline and unless we overcome it, the conditions can never improve...)   


In today's India, most of the Indians live in 'economic decline' as most of them always  have since 4th century CE.

Even the existence of Ajanta caves does not prove economic prosperity.

"...आर्थिक स्थिती खालावलेली असताना अजिंठ्यासारख्या भव्य वास्तूंची  निर्मिती  कशी शक्य  याचे आश्चर्य   वाटणे साहजिकच आहे.  परंतु हा प्रकार भारतात पुढेही चालू राहिला..."

(...in the economic downturn the creation of a majestic structure like the Ajanta Caves may surprise. But such things kept happening in India even later...)


Dr. Dhavalikar ends the book on a sombre note as far as Maharashtra is concerned:

"...आजही एक मुंबईचे डोळे दिपवणारे  वैभव सोडले, तर महाराष्ट्राची काय  स्थिती आहे हे  सांगणे नको."

(...even today if eye-popping wealth of Mumbai is left alone, there is no point telling about the condition of Maharashtra.)

'Maharashtrachi Kulkatha' really excavates a live human- as in the picture below- rather than just  fossils!



Artist: Charles "Chas" Addams (1912-1988), The New Yorker, August 23 1941

(Mr. Addams was one of the greatest artists of  20th century. The picture is a testimony to that. I have seen a lot of humour around the subject of archeology but had never seen such an orthogonal thinking- bringing out our ancestor alive- as seen here. Look at the faces of all four of them!)
 
But after reading MKD's book I wonder where does the optimism of WD come from?

It surely doesn't come from the study of India's archeology. It can't come from India's current largely disastrous ecological situation.

Therefore, is he lacing his history with feel-goodness because he wants to pitch his books to the young English specking economically better-off Indians?


Or will the rest of the world fall apart so badly that India will 'once again'  become 'shining city upon a hill'? 


WD told The Times of India on December 7 2012:

"While we've seen wonderful long-form journalism, the only other guy really writing narrative non-fiction is Ramachandra Guha. He's working brilliantly with modern political history but despite universities chock-a-block with brilliant historians here, none of them seems to be writing for a general audience. There's no Indian equivalent of say, Simon Schama. Where are the Indian versions of Niall Ferguson, Linda Colley or Maya Jassanof? Meanwhile though, it`s lovely to have the field to myself. I've no complaints."

I wonder how WD makes such a claim that 'the only other guy' is Ramachandra Guha.

Is he familiar with history writing for general audience in Indian languages? Has he heard of the Marathi book or its author I have mentioned in this post? Does he know that Vishwas Patil's (विश्वास पाटील) - and of a few others before him- Marathi books on historical subjects have sold probably as much as some of his and Guha's?