An 'An ABZ of Love'

Today February 14 2018 is Valentine's Day

 Artist: Eiler Krag featuring in 'An ABZ of Love', 1963 by Inge and Sten Hegeler

लक्ष-दुर्लक्ष, झरा-लाईव्ह स्ट्रीमिंग, निसर्गात-खुराड्यात...Ward Sutton's The Luncheon on the Grass, 2016!

#TheLuncheonontheGrass2016

n plus one mag:

“For David Hume, increased conversation between men and women corresponded to “an increase of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together.” But Hume didn’t know about Gchat, which offers us so many opportunities for conversation that conversation becomes impossible. We are distracted from chatting by chatting itself.”

John Harris:

“ In the book, (Nicholas) Carr looks back on such human inventions as the map, the clock and the typewriter, and how much they influenced our essential modes of thought (among the people whose writing was changed by the latter were Friedrich Nietszche and TS Eliot). By the same token, he argues that the internet's "cacophony of stimuli" and "crazy quilt" of information have given rise to "cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning" – in contrast to the age of the book, when intelligent humans were encouraged to be contemplative and imaginative...”

Jonathan Franzen, ‘Freedom: A Novel ‘, 2010:

“...“This was what was keeping me awake at night,” Walter said. “This fragmentation. Because it’s the same problem everywhere. It’s like the internet, or cable TV—there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.”...”

 
Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) has poked an occasional fun at some great art. An example could be found here: The Persistence of Memory. Vasant Sarwate style!

Here is a similar effort that made me laugh and introspect.

'The Luncheon on the Grass' , 1863

Artist: Édouard Manet

courtesy: Wikipedia 

Wikipedia says about Manet's masterpiece:

"The painting features a nude woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men. Her body is starkly lit and she stares directly at the viewer. The two men, dressed as young dandies, seem to be engaged in conversation, ignoring the woman. In front of them, the woman's clothes, a basket of fruit, and a round loaf of bread are displayed, as in a still life. In the background a lightly clad woman bathes in a stream. Too large in comparison with the figures in the foreground, she seems to float above them. The roughly painted background lacks depth – giving the viewer the impression that the scene is not taking place outdoors, but in a studio..."

Artist: Ward Sutton, 2016

Now watch Sutton's master-parody: 

 The two men, dressed as young dandies, and the nude woman are all ignoring each other...In the background a lightly clad woman is NOT bathing in a stream but perhaps busy is live streaming  something....the scene is probably not taking place outdoors...and if it is, one of the persons is certainly trying to catch Pokemons...  

चार्ल्स डार्विनचे हिरो अलेक्झांडर व्हॉन हुम्बोल्डटना क्रूर ब्रिटिशांनी भारतात कसे पाऊल टाकू दिले नाही... Alexander von Humboldt Longed for India

When Alexander von Humboldt was told that a tree from India was named after him -

Humboldtia laurifolia: ‘isn’t that fabulous!!’

Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, October 2015:
"...“In eight days of reading books, one couldn’t learn as much as what he gives you in an hour,” Goethe said of Humboldt, whom he counted as a good friend. When Darwin finished his own Humboldtian travelogue, “The Voyage of the Beagle,” he nervously sent his hero a copy. “You have an excellent future ahead of you,” the older man reassured him...."

Nathaniel Rich, NYRB, October 2015:

"Humboldt’s hog-nosed skunk, the Humboldt penguin, the Humboldt squid, and more than a hundred other animal species; Humboldt’s Lily, Humboldt’s Schomburgkia, and three hundred other plant species; the minerals Humboldtit, Humboldtilith, and Humboldtin; Humboldt Limestone, Humboldt Oolite, the Humboldt Formation, the Humboldt Current; Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt; Mont Humboldt, Humboldt Mountain, Humboldt Peak, and Humboldt ranges in China, South Africa, and Antarctica; Humboldt Falls, Humboldt Glacier, Humboldt Bay, the Humboldt River, the Humboldt Sink, the Humboldt Salt Marsh; four Humboldt counties and thirteen Humboldt towns in North America alone, the Humboldt crater and Mare Humboldtianum on the moon, and asteroid 54 Alexandra, orbiting the sun.

The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is all around us. Yet he is invisible. “Alexander von Humboldt has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world,” writes Andrea Wulf in her thrilling new biography. “It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.” Wulf’s book is as much a history of those ideas as it is of the man. The man may be lost but his ideas have never been more alive...."

 
वि दा सावरकर, १९०३: "... फुलबाग मला हाय पारखा झाला..."

अँड्रिया वूल्फ (Andrea Wulf) यांच्या  'The Invention of Nature:  Alexander von Humboldt's New World', २०१५ पुस्तकाची सर्वत्र प्रशंसा झाली.

हुम्बोल्डट यांच्या बद्दल मी १९व्या शतकातील मराठी लेखनात काहीच वाचल नाहीय. (१९व्याच काय, आत्तापर्यंत नाहीय, पण ते माझे अज्ञान असू शकते.)  पण वूल्फ यांच्या पुस्तकात हुम्बोल्डट यांनी भारतात येण्यासाठी, १९व्या शतकाच्या पहिल्या भागात, कितीवेळा आणि कितीतऱ्हेचे प्रयन्त केले याचे सविस्तर वर्णन आहे.

हुम्बोल्डट भारतात यायला तडपत होते - अक्षरशः 'सागरा प्राण तळमळला' याची आठवण यावी इतपत. शेवटी रशियातून खुष्कीच्या मार्गाने यायची पण त्यांची तयारी होती. (त्यामुळे ब्रिटिश आणखी संशयी झाले असणार हे अलाहिदा.)

"... While SIMÓN BOLÍVAR fought bloody battles to break the colonial chains, Humboldt was trying to convince the British to let him travel to India. In order to complete his Naturgemälde of the world, Humboldt wanted to investigate the Himalaya to collect the data he needed to compare the two majestic mountain ranges. No scientist had ever climbed the Himalaya. Since the British had arrived on the subcontinent, it hadn’t even occurred to them to measure these magnificent mountains, Humboldt said. They had just ‘thoughtlessly looked at them without even asking themselves how high these colossal Himalaya were’. Humboldt intended to determine heights, understand geological features and examine plant distribution there – just as he had in the Andes...."

पण ब्रिटिशांनी त्यांना कधीही परवानगी दिली नाही.  अँड्रिया वूल्फ लिहतात:

"... The first volume of the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain had been published in English in 1811, and Humboldt’s fierce attack on Spanish colonialism had not gone unnoticed in London. What were they to think of a man who talked of the ‘cruelty of the Europeans’? It can’t have helped that Humboldt, in his constant effort to find correlations, had many times compared Spanish rule in Latin America with that of the British in India. The history of conquest in South America and India, Humboldt wrote in the Political Essay of New Spain, was an ‘unequal struggle’, or – again pointing at Britain – the South Americans and ‘Hindoos’, he accused, ‘have long groaned under a civil and military despotism’. Reading these remarks can’t have enamoured the directors of the East India Company to Humboldt’s travel plans...."

त्या विरहामुळे हुम्बोल्डटना  रडू यायचे आणि आपल्याला वेड लागेल  का अशी भीती वाटायची.

"... In London, Humboldt was introduced to botanists, explorers, artists and thinkers. He met Captain William Bligh (of the infamous mutiny on the Bounty), and Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on his first voyage around the world, and by now the president of the Royal Society, the most important scientific forum in Britain. Humboldt admired the beguiling paintings and sketches that William Hodges, the artist who had joined Cook’s second voyage, had brought back. Wherever Humboldt turned, new worlds were conjured up. Even in the early mornings, the first things he saw when he opened his eyes were the framed engravings of the East India Company ships that decorated the bedroom walls in his lodgings. Humboldt often wept when he saw these painful reminders of his unfulfilled dreams. ‘There is a drive in me,’ he wrote, ‘that often makes me feel as if I’m losing my mind.’..."

'Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt', 1806 

Artist:  Friedrich Georg Weitsch

courtesy : Wikimedia Commons

स्मशानांवरही 'हाऊस फुल्ल' चे फलक झळकू लागले...1918 Flu Pandemic @100

#1918flupandemicat100

'The first victim diagnosed with the new strain of flu' was, Wikipedia informs, on Monday, March 11, 1918'. The pandemic went on to kill 3 to 5% of world population. As many as 17 million died in India, about 5% of India's population at the time.

W. H. Auden:

"...Unendowed with wealth or pity,

Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city..."

 
चिंतामण गणेश कोल्हटकर (श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकरांच्या नाटकाचा प्रयोग बसवताना ,  पावसाळा  १९१८, मुक्काम मुंबई): "... पूर्णांशाच्या फलप्राप्तीसाठी नव्या नाटकाचा प्रयोग करण्याच्या तयारीत आम्ही गुंतलो असता परमेश्वरी योजनेची नव्या प्रयोगाची सिद्धता होऊन चुकली होती. तीही एक यशस्वी दुःखांतिकाच होती. त्या नव्या नाटकाचे नाव होते 'इन्पल्युएंझा. त्याचे तंत्र अगदी नवीन होते. या परमेश्वरी दुःखान्तिकेची लोकप्रियता इतकी पराकोटीला पोहोचली, की स्मशानांवरही 'हाऊस फुल्ल' चे फलक झळकू लागले. प्रतिदिनी बाराशे-तेराशे माणूस मृत्युमुखी पडू लागले. नवागतांना जागा देण्यासाठी अर्धेमुर्धे दहन झालेले देह ढोसून समुद्रात लोटून द्यावे लागत. हल्लकल्लोळ उडाला. सर्वांच्या तोंडचे पाणी पळाले..."
(पृष्ठ: १३३, 'बहुरूपी', १९५७)

सेतु माधवराव पगडी: ".... १९१८ची इन्फ्लुएंझा साथ मला चांगलीच आठवते. स्मशानाकडे जाणारी वाट आमच्या घरावरून असे. रोज पाच पंचवीस तरी प्रेते घरावरून जात. आम्ही मुले घाबरून जात असू... "
(पृष्ठ २८, 'जीवनसेतु', १९६९)"

Gravin Francis, London Review of Books, January 25 2018:
"... Although there was no effective treatment for the virus, aspirin was taken by the tonne (its German manufacturer, Bayer, was suspected of spreading flu through its pills); aspirin poisoning possibly killed some who would otherwise have survived. Across the world communities adapted traditional remedies: in China, public sweat baths, opium and herbal extracts; in India, hill tribes moulded figures out of flour and water, and waved them over the sick...

...The virus is currently held in a high-security facility in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2016, around 1.7 million people died from tuberculosis, around a million from HIV/Aids, and around half a million from malaria. Computer modelling suggests that if the 1918 H1N1 virus were to break out of the facility in Atlanta it would cause around thirty million deaths."

 
माझ्या लहानपणा पासून फ्लू हा  शब्द किरकोळ थंडीतापाला वापरला जातो पण मी ही पोस्ट लिहू शकलो कारण माझे दोन्हीकडचे आज्जी आजोबा १९१८च्या फ्लू मध्ये बळी पडले नाहीत! एकतृतीयांशाहून जास्त भारतीयांना त्याची लागण झाली होती आणि,  विकिपीडियाच्या म्हणण्या प्रमाणे, १.७ कोटी लोक त्यात बळी पडले.  आज तशी भयंकर लागण झाली तर भारताच्या लोकसंख्येच्या ५% , म्हणजे साधारण ६.६ कोटी लोक दगावू शकतात!

Shashi Tharoor:

"... During the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, 125 million cases of ‘flu were recorded (more than a third of the population), and India’s fatality rate was higher than any Western country’s: 12.5 million people died. As the American statesman (and three-time Democratic presidential candidate) William Jennings Bryan pointed out, many Britons were referring to the deaths caused by plague as ‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’. It was ironic, said Bryan, that British rule was sought to be justified on the grounds that ‘it keeps the people from killing each other, and the plague praised because it removes those whom the Government has saved from slaughter!’.

Arguably, epidemics existed before colonialism as well, and cannot be said to have been caused or worsened by colonial policy; so they are not comparable, for the purposes of my argument, with famines. But their persistence, and the tragically high human toll they exacted remain a severe indictment of the indifference to Indian suffering of those who ran the British Raj. This is all the more true because ‘marked improvements in public health’ are often cited by defenders of British rule in India. There is not a great deal of evidence for this claim, which rests largely on the introduction of quinine as an anti-malarial drug (though its principal use was in the tonics with which the British in jungle outposts drowned and justified their gin), public programmes of vaccination against smallpox (so inadequate that it was only well after Independence that a free India eradicated this scourge from the country) and improvements in water supplies (done so ineffectually, in fact, that cholera and other waterborne diseases persisted throughout the Raj). It is also telling that there were no great hospitals established by the Raj anywhere in the country: strikingly, every one of the major modern medical establishments of British India was established by the generosity of Indian benefactors, even if, for understandable reasons, these Indian donors often named their hospitals after British colonial grandees...."

 ('An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India', 2016)

ज्या सांगली जिल्ह्यात मी बालपण घालवले , त्यात कॉलेज , नदीवरचा पूल 'साहेबाच्या' नावान आहे पण कुठल हॉस्पिटल नाही. ज्या हॉस्पिटलचे आम्ही कुटुंबीय कृतज्ञ आहोत, ज्यात लक्ष्मीबाई टिळकांनी नोकरी करायचा प्रयत्न केला, ते कनेडीयन/ अमेरिकन मिशनराच्या (वानलेस) नावाने आहे.

Artist: Peter C Vey, The New Yorker, January 2018