And I Do Not Really Want to Understand...

According to Wikipedia,  Jonas Mekas is called the godfather of American avant-garde cinema.

Watch an excerpt from his 2000 film, "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty." on YouTube here. It runs for only 2 min 29 sec.


"I have never been able, really, to figure out where my life begins and where it ends. I have never, never been able to figure it all out, what it's all about, what it all means. So when I began now to put all these rolls of film together, to string them together, the first idea was to keep them chronological. But then I gave up and I just began splicing them together by chance the way that I found them on the shelf.

Because I really don't know where any piece of my life really belongs, so let it be. Let it go. Just by pure chance, disorder.

There is some current, some kind of order in it, order of its own, which I do not really understand same as I never understood life around me.

The real life, as they say. Or the real people. I never understood them. I still do not understand them. And I do not really want to understand them."

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."