G A Kulkarni, Walter de la Mare: Fellow Travellers...सहप्रवासी

 Today July 10 2013 is 90th Birth Anniversary of G A Kulkarni (जी ए कुलकर्णी).
 
Owen Barfield:
 
"Walter de la Mare questioned everything, including - or rather above all - the things that everyone round him had become quite sure about. But he rarely or never stayed for an answer. He just went on writing with an unfettered mind unfettered poetry."

Walter de la Mare:


"Life's mere ordinary day-to-day - its thoughts, talk, doings - wither and die out of the mind like leaves from a tree. Year after year a similar crop recurs, and that goes too. It is mere debris, it perishes. But these other anomalies survive, even through the cold of age."



Henry David Thoreau:

"It is the stars as not known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows."

I love Walter de la Mare (1873-1956). (Does he remind me of Balkavi बालकवी 1890-1918?)

G A Kulkarni  'introduced' me to him by quoting him in some of his moving epigraphs and later I 'chased' him through Google and Wikipedia. 


I am not sure if I got to study any of his poems in my school curriculum although Wikipedia states "He is probably best remembered for his works for children."

Illustrator: Dame Eileen Mayo From 'Broomsticks' by Walter de la Mare  

courtesy: brain pickings

I have read two-three books of collection of G A's letters-containing letters written by him and to him. 

G A mentions many Western writers (and not many Indians) and I was hoping to see more of Walter de la Mare there but couldn't see it. I have a sneaking suspicion that,  in those letters,  GA has spoken the least about the authors that influenced him most!

These days John Gay is one of my favourite authors and I was delighted to listen to his BBC Radio 4 podcast on Walter de la Mare and the prevailing creed of scientific materialism. You may download the podcast "The Limits of Materialism" dated May 3 2013 from here. 

For me, this was like visiting a place  where three rivers meet (त्रिवेणी संगम) accidentally: 
GA, Gray and Mare!  (T S Eliot, W H Auden and Graham Greene too were fans of Mr. de la Mare.) 

Reading Gray's article, I felt GA not just loved Mare's poetry but was also influenced by his prose. 

Sample this: 

"...Entitled Winter, the story describes a few moments in a churchyard late on a cold January afternoon in which nothing very definite seems to happen. The church wasn't particularly striking. The traveller who tells the tale describes pausing after long hours of walking in "a mere half-acre of gravestones huddling under their tower, in the bare glare of a winter's day".

With the sky above a bright blue void, the church stood on a hill surrounded by brilliant fields of newly fallen snow. Nothing moved, and no sound broke the frozen hush.
"In surroundings like these, in any vast vacant quiet," the traveller wrote, "the senses play uncommonly queer tricks with their possessor."..."

If you have read GA's 'Ramalkhuna' (रमलखुणा) , 1975 containing 'Pravasi' (प्रवासी) and 'Iskilar' (इस्किलार), you may agree with me.  

Artist: Richard Decker, The New Yorker, July 18 1936

(I love the spirit of travel expressed- "not to mind where we go as long as we go"- in the cartoon above by one of my favourite cartoonists. 

Btw- GA liked Vasant Sarwate's वसंत सरवटे pictures. I wonder if he would have liked this one.)

 Here is a very small selection from Mare's poetry:

 "But the music is lost and the words are gone
Of the song I sang as I sat alone,
Ages and ages have fallen on me -
On the wood and the pool and the elder tree." 

("A Song of Enchantment")

 "When I lie where shades of darkness

Shall no more assail mine eyes,

Nor the rain make lamentation

When the wind sighs;

How will fare the world whose wonder

Was the very proof of me?

Memory fades, must the remembered

Perishing be?"

("Fare Well")

Mess of a Leader...संपादकीयाचा राडा

Zhou Enlai (1898-1976), the first Premier of the People's Republic of China,  on the success of the 1789 French Revolution:


"It's too early to tell." 

The Economist, Special Holiday Double Issue, December 17 2011:

"Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past."

Nicholas Taleb:

"....journalism may be the greatest plague we face today- as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification...

...To be competent, a journalist should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of information he is providing…Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist.”




Francis Fukuyama, WSJ, June 28 2013:

"The new middle class is not just a challenge for authoritarian regimes or new democracies. No established democracy should believe it can rest on its laurels, simply because it holds elections and has leaders who do well in opinion polls. The technologically empowered middle class will be highly demanding of their politicians across the board"



This refers to the leader in Marathi daily Loksatta (लोकसत्ता) on July 4 2013. If you read Marathi, read it here.

 I read it twice to make some sense out of it. I could not.

My confusion first started with the word used in the title: 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनरावांचा राडा' (Mess of Messrs Reactions)

I did not know there was a word like 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनराव' (Reaction-rao) in English/ Marathi. Was it 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनीराव' (Reactionary-rao)? When I saw the web address, it reads  "mess of reactionaries". So it indeed was 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनरीरावांचा राडा'!.

I feel there is a lot of difference between  'रिअ‍ॅक्शनराव' (Messrs Reactions) and 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनरीराव'  (Messrs Reactionaries). The former would refer to the people who react and the latter to the people who are reactionary.

( Btw- I also wonder why Marathi word for reactionary- प्रतिगामी- not used.  If it were, it would read 'प्रतिगामीरावांचा राडा')


Let me now turn to the contents of the piece. It confused me more even after replacing 'reactions' with 'reactionaries'.

The leader starts with :

"राजकीय व्यवस्थेत सामील न होता तिच्याविषयी घृणा बाळगत ट्विटर, फेसबुक आदी माध्यमांव्दारे बदलाची अपेक्षा ठेवणारा वर्ग ठोस पर्यायही देत नाही हे धोकादायक आहे. व्यवस्थेचा फायदा घेत ती झीडकारण्याची भाषा करणाऱ्या रिअ‍ॅक्शनरावांना कोणतेही राजकीय अधिष्ठान नाही हेच जगभरातील अलीकडच्या उठावांचे समान सूत्र आहे."

(It's dangerous that a class, without offering a solid alternative, expects a change in  the political system it hates without participating in it, using media such as Twitter and Facebook. The recent uprisings across the world have the same thread: 'Messrs Reactionaries' who while exploiting the system use the language of discarding it have no political base.)

Is it an attack on the mostly middle-class people who think they can usher in a revolution or an alternative system using tools like Twitter and Facebook? Is it also an attack on recent uprisings and such movements? Does the newspaper imply that 'reactionaries' use social media to instigate not-fully-thought-through uprisings against the establishment?

Reactionary is by a definition 'an extreme conservative; an opponent of progress or liberalism'.

Therefore, you can call  these people- who either take part in such uprisings or accompanying social media movements- anything but reactionaries!

On the contrary,  these people are progressivists (those who favor progress toward better conditions in government and society)! Some of them  may be extremely naive even arrogant but they aren't reactionaries and some may just be responding to their wife's- I assume- nagging- "Why don't you start something?"- as in the picture below.

Artist: Robert J Day, The New Yorker, July 16 1932


As The Economist quote at the top says, there is nothing new about social media. We always had social media and also the smart people to leverage it to precipitate a revolution. Therefore, why blame 'new' social media?

In any case,  as Chris Lehmann explains below, they only played a marginal role in Egypt in 2011?

 "Social networking mattered in Egypt, but the root causes of the uprising were scarcity, official corruption and social conflict, none of which fit the cyber-utopian narrative or flatter America’s technological vanity. The original scheduled protests of January 25 arose out of a past effort to organize an anti-Mubarak general strike, and it was the spread of the protests to the less wired workers in Egypt’s long-pinched labor economy that helped furnish the telling last blows to the Mubarak order. According to many reports from Cairo, the protests continued to gain momentum not from tweets or Facebook posts but instead from the direct spectacle of the populace congregating, We the People style, in Tahrir Square. Most Egyptians were following events on state television, which was parroting the official propaganda approved by the Mubarak regime, holding that the protests were the handiwork of foreign agitators. Not being regular blog readers, ordinary Egyptians went into the streets and saw that the state media were lying, that the protesters were their neighbors, their family members, their co-workers. The effort to coax a new political order into being grew from the power of popular witness, filtered through the evidence of citizens’ own eyes and ears."

(Note- TV did not help the change-seekers!)

Even then there were many skeptical about happenings there.

Toby Wilkinson wrote in WSJ in February 2011:

"But there is a final lesson from ancient Egyptian history that those urging regime change should heed. Today, tanks stand guard beside the Pyramids of Giza, the grandest symbols of authoritarian rule ever built. The pyramids sum up the unbridled confidence of ancient Egypt at the height of its power. The pyramid-builders must have assumed that the glories of pharaonic civilization would last forever. What brought the Age of the Pyramid to an end in 2175 B.C. was not war, invasion, or pestilence, but a political vacuum following the demise of a long-lived ruler. Factionalism and paralysis beset the Egyptian government, the economy collapsed and the country was plunged into a protracted civil war.
Egyptian history has a depressing habit of repeating itself. Let us all hope that, in this last respect, it does not."

If you accused Mr. Wilkinson of being a reactionary in 2011, you may now laud him as a visionary!

Does Loksatta expect people who start or instigate uprisings to fully think through their consequences and only after suggesting a solid alternative to the existing order? Has recorded history worked like that?

The late Jacques Barzun wrote in "From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present- 500 Years of Western Cultural Life", 2000:

"How a revolution erupts from a commonplace event—tidal wave from a ripple—is cause for endless astonishment. Neither Luther in 1517 nor the men who gathered at Versailles in 1789 intended at first what they produced at last. Even less did the Russian Liberals who made the revolution of 1917 foresee what followed. All were as ignorant as everybody else of how much was about to be destroyed. Nor could they guess what feverish feelings, what strange behavior ensue when revolution, great or short-lived, is in the air...

...A curious leveling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals, while others neglect their usual concerns—art, philosophy, scholarship—because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea. The welltodo and the "right-thinking," full of fear, come together to defend their possessions and habits. But counsels are divided and many see their young "taking the wrong side." The powers that be wonder and keep watch, with fleeting thoughts of advantage to be had from the confusion. Leaders of opinion try to put together some of the ideas
afloat into a position which they mean to fight for. They will reassure others, or preach boldness, and anyhow head the movement. Voices grow shrill, parties form and adopt names or are tagged with them in derision and contempt. Again and again comes the shock of broken friendships, broken families. As time goes on, "betraying the cause" is an incessant charge, and there are indeed turncoats. Authorities are bewildered,
heads of institutions try threats and concessions by turns, hoping the surge of subversion will collapse like previous ones. But none of this holds back that transfer of power and property which is the mark of revolution and which in the end establishes the Idea."

courtesy: Wikipedia 

Waits for Us All On a City Road With an IC Engine Beside HIm

The Hindu, July 1 2013:  

"It does not take new accident data from the National Crime Records Bureau to confirm that India’s roads, bursting at the seams with about 141 million motorised vehicles in 2012, are deadly. The Centre has been ignoring the shameful toll of death and disability for years, responding only with token measures. State governments mostly limit themselves to granting meagre compensation to the families of victims, instead of engaging in serious reform. That 139,091 lives were lost on the roads last year seems to be an insignificant statistic, given the extraordinary indifference among policymakers to a worsening public health disaster. There is even less attention paid to the burden of disability caused annually by crash injuries. Studies show that figure could be 15 to 20 times the number of deaths..."

 James Graham Ballard:

“I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.'' 

Every time I drive in Pune or hear about a crash, I think of Ballard's novel 'Crash', 1972 and George Miller's movie  'Mad Max 2', 1981.

If my 19th century ancestors, I often think, who never saw 20th century,  were to return today, they would be surprised most not by mobile phones, not by television /radio, not by inhouse plumbing and electricity, not by antibiotics, not by aeroplanes, not by computers but how difficult it has now become  for a pedestrian to walk on a road in Pune even between 6:30 AM to 10 PM.

This is what happened to a family, related to us from my my wife's side, because of an automobile accident: A young man having a pregnant wife meets with an accident near Chembur, Mumbai. He is riding  a motor bike. He does not die. He goes into coma.  He wakes up from coma but never fully recovers. His parents sell off almost all their assets treating him and go broke. His sister shelters them in another city. His wife and kid leave him. His parents die. Bedridden he, looked after by his sister and her family, survives.

I haven't read or heard a more tragic middle-class tale than this.  

G A Kulkarni's ( जी ए कुलकर्णी) stories and letters have angry gods,  old abandoned water-wells, shortage of food,  abject poverty, diseases, lakes covered with moss, black magic, lightnings but no crashing automobiles. Lucky him! And us!!

J G Ballard says about his creation:  "Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to appease death, to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby, like [Francis] Bacon's headless figure in his herringbone jacket, who sits patiently at a table with a machine gun beside him."
 
For Indians like me, he waits impatiently for us all on a chaotic, noisy, familiar city road with an IC engine beside him.

Artist: Unknown to me