Journey of A Cartoon Caption

The world of cartoons and their captions can be so intriguing (and funny).

Read an earlier take on them , dated July 27 20111, here "Shallow People Demand Variety. Even in Cartoon Captions.

Now see the picture below.

Artist: Tom Cheney, The New Yorker

This was Cartoon Caption Contest, No.281 in the magazine.

Famous film critic Roger Ebert wrote a winning caption to this:

"I'm not going to say the word I'm thinking of."

 Dangerous Minds informed in May 2014:

"...Canadian prankster Morgan El-Kabong and his partner in cultural sabotage Bonnie Brekelmans have created the Tumblr page “New YorkerHigh Class Soap,” a collection of New Yorker cartoons (plus one “Garfield”) détourned with literal translations of Asian adult film titles, to goddamn hilarious effect..."

Asian adult film titles as captions!

If you have seen a really funny film 'Zack and Miri Make a Porno', 2008, you would appreciate the effort that goes into naming an adult film and how important the title is.
  
 The cartoon above gets this caption:

"Getting into school bus full of blonde girls by design"

Now I tried to find out a little more about the film.

Part of its description runs as follows:

"...A school bus full of blondes is bound to attract attention in Japan. There would be some men who would want an even closer look. These manage to get themselves on the bus and what happens to them is a lesson in….. how lucky they were..."

Will Your World End in Wheat or Rice?

Today October 10 2014 is 77th Birth Anniversary of my rice-manipulated mother.

Richard Klein:

"...Broadly put, neo-Epicureans suppose not only that you are what you eat, but that you think what you eat. Take German idealism, says Nietzsche. It has the leaden consistency and gaseous redolence of a diet thick with potatoes. Italian thought, one might add, is marked by the slippery texture and doughy blandness of pasta. Jewish metaphysics has the astringency and smoky intensity of briny pickles and cured fish. The indistinctness of Buddhist thought resembles white rice..."

Jared Diamond:

"Today just three high-carbohydrate plants –wheat, rice, and corn– provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life."

Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’, 2014:

“…The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometers of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage...”

 
It was not wheat but rice that manipulated my Konkan-born Chitpavan-brahmin mother and her family. Thanks to her,  rice is my favourite food too.

Curd-rice (दहीभात) is  my ultimate comfort food. Some times even just a thought of eating it is quite soothing!

When we lived in Miraj, I felt little shy to admit it because rice-eating then was considered 'sissy' in Western Maharashtra. Eating jowar (Sorghum) bread was considered manly.

Later in life I realised, rice is eaten far more than jowar across the world and a lot of guys who eat them are as tough as they come.

It was interesting to read Anthony Bourdain on the subject of rice culture.

"...His love of the simple beauty of rice culture is a deep one. He loves Vietnam and Cambodia, for instance. He’s even gone so far as to have sit-downs with former Vietcong and Khmer Rouge Cambodians.

“This weekend I’m heading off for Vietnam. Love it. First love. It’s f--king beautiful. Any rice culture is beautiful.”

Any rice culture?

“It’s super-intricate. Just the irrigation systems, the level of cooperation with your neighbors. You need to manipulate the water levels, every little thing. Rice has something magical about it. Rice is an explanation for everything.” It dawned on me that “rice culture” embodies his celebration of communal work one finds all the way back in Kitchen Confidential..." 

('Anthony Bourdain’s Theory on the Foodie Revolution', Smithsonian Magazine, July 2014)

Does that explain a lot of why South India is distinct from the West? Why haven't I  read anything like this in Marathi on the subject of  rice culture?

Artist: Leo Cullum, The New Yorker, 25 November 1991

Remove Outsiders from the Ajanta Murals!

A young photogenic leader was thundering in Marathi at an election rally..the crescendo of "down with outsiders" in his speech had reached skies over Aurangabad- just 100 km from Ajanta- as I surfed the TV channels on October 2 2014.

On October 3 2014, I read William Dalrymple's article in The New York Review of Books dated October 23 2014.

courtesy: Charles and Josette Lenars/Corbis

"...The early rock-cut cave monasteries of western India also predate almost all the extant texts of Buddhism (written beginning in 100 BC but mostly surviving in much later copies), and all we know about them comes from the Sanskrit and Pali inscriptions left on the rock walls by the monks, their patrons, and devotees. By then the great monasteries of ancient India appear to have been as powerful as those in medieval Europe, and often had their own mints and owned landed estates, some of which were worked by slaves.
The second century BC was a period of great expansion of international trade, and these monasteries, remote as they may seem now, were originally built on the great trade routes of their time. The valleys they crown once saw the frequent passage of caravans bringing luxury goods—ebony, teak, and sandalwood, ivory and translucent Indian textiles, pepper and cinnamon—to the coast where they would then be shipped, usually by Jewish and Greek middlemen, to the Red Sea and thence to Rome.
The inscriptions show how surprisingly middle-class and mercantile early Buddhism was, and it is clear that the patrons of these early monks were often traders or their bankers. More surprising still, some of them designate themselves as Yavanas—“foreigners,” probably Greeks. As Walter Spink’s pupil Pia Brancaccio has pointed out, the Ajanta murals

portray a prosperous and multicultural environment filled with people wearing golden jewels and…enjoying imported goods. Even the pigments used in the paintings indicate international trade connections—the blue, for example, was obtained from lapis lazuli imported from Iran or Afghanistan…. Recognizable among the crowds are many foreigners, easy to spot because of their different clothes, hairdos, and in some cases even skin colors…. Foreign figures appear so commonly in the murals that they must surely have been part of the social scene at the time..."

...Jewish, Greek, Read Sea, Rome, Iran, Afghanistan...dance of the then almost entire human civilization...

 "Foreign figures appear so commonly in the murals that they must surely have been part of the social scene at the time"
 

Everything I Know About Being Human...

Today October 4 is World Animal Day

Artist: William Haefeli, The New Yorker, November 2013

आयुष्य उतरणीलाच नव्हे, तर घसरणीला लागले आहे...M V Dhond@100

Tomorrow October 4 2014 is 100th Birth Anniversary of M V Dhond (म वा धोंड)

P B Shelley:

"Oh, world, farewell!

Listen to the passing bell.

It tells that thou and I must part

With a light and heavy heart."

Thomas Babington Macaulay:

 "...There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner, but there are one or two whose deaths would break my heart. The more I see of the world, and the more numerous my acquaintance becomes, the narrower and more exclusive my affection grows,..."

 

For me, the late  Dhond was one of those 'Macaulay's ten people'. Or was he the 'one or two'?

( Dhond appears in multiple entries on this blog. You may find all of them on the FB page I maintain on him. Find the page here.)

Although we spoke on phone and corresponded by letters, I never met him in person and therefore I am free to imagine him the way I may.

He was NOT agnostic but atheist, just like Shelley quoted at the top. So after  his death, I wondered where he was gone.

Here are the two postcards among a few more letters he sent me. Note the moving line in the letter dated December 15 2001:

"आयुष्य उतरणीलाच नव्हे, तर घसरणीला लागले आहे ." (The life has started not just descending but slipping away.)

After reading this line, I read a line in Shelley's poem, quoted above, as "Listen to the passing hell."

Drawing More Fruits and Vegetables

World Vegetarian Day is observed annually on October 1.

 

Artist: P C Vey, The New Yorker, July 3 2000

Speck Upon Which the Sun Never Sets Survives

Henry James:  

"Where empire civilized the British, it will further barbarize us (USA)."

John Gray:   
“Humans thrive in conditions that morality condemns. The peace and prosperity of one generation stand on the injustices of earlier generations; the delicate sensibilities of liberal societies are fruits of war and empire.”

Arthur Herman. ‘How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It’, 2001:

“…By 1758, Horace Walpole, the son of the former prime minister, had to admit “Scotland is the most accomplished nation in Europe.” Voltaire agreed: “It is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilization.” A central European observer stated that “it is now an incontestable fact that the principal authors who have adorned the British literature in these latter times, or do honour to it in the present days, have received their birth and education in Scotland.” It was as neat an example of reverse cultural imperialism as one can find, and David Hume expressed his pleasure with it in the form of a paradox:

Is it not strange that at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliament, our independent Government . . . are unhappy in our accent and . . . speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of, is it not strange, I say, that in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguished for Literature in Europe?..”

  

Martin Kettle, The Guardian, September 19 2014: 
 "...Independence campaigners will feel gutted this morning. But they came within a whisker of ending the United Kingdom on Thursday. One day, perhaps soon, they will surely be back."

 

 Scotland has decided to stay in the union. Just the union, no longer the empire!

When I first read the old saying "The sun never sets on the British empire", I was amused by the audacity of the person who coined it.



The exact day when the sun stopped setting on the empire was probably sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s, when the first Australianterritories were added.

Rebecca Onion writes in Slate:

“…Mitch Fraas, curator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections, recently sent me this image and GIF of a moveable toy distributed by the Children’s Encyclopedia in Britain in the early twentieth century. The toy, which doubles as an ad for the encyclopedia, takes the old saying “The sun never sets on the British empire” and represents it physically, through the medium of a spinning wheel.

The Children’s Encyclopedia, one of the first such projects directed exclusively at young people, was first sold in Britain as a serial in 1908..."

courtesy: Mitch Fraas and Slate’s history blog The Vault

Read some of the words there:

"We live on a little island which seems hardly more than a speck on the map of the world. Yet from our little kingdom has grown en empire greater than any other empire there has been. One-fifth of the  whole earth and one-fifth of its peoples live under the British flag..."

...And a few more years after 1947, it was said that "the sun doesn't rise on the British empire for days"! 

But the sun still never sets upon the British empire.

Randall Munroe explains in The Guardian, September 9 2014:

"...Britain has 14 overseas territories, the direct remnants of empire...The sun never sets on all 14 British territories at once (or even 13, if you don’t count the British Antarctic Territory). However, if the UK loses one tiny territory, it will experience its first empire-wide sunset in over two centuries. Every night, around midnight GMT, the sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn’t rise over the British Indian Ocean territory until after 1am. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the sun.

The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty. The islands became notorious when a third of the adult male population, including the mayor, were convicted of child sexual abuse.

As awful as the islands may be, they remain part of the British empire, and unless they are kicked out, the two-century-long British daylight will continue."