चांदोबाचे आपल्यावरचे ऋण....Our Debt to Chandamama

(नोव्हेंबर २०१८मध्ये लिहलेली फेसबुक वरची पोस्ट..... चांदोबा ह्या पूर्वी ह्या ब्लॉग वर अनेक वेळा आलेला आहे, वानगीदाखल ह्या तीन पोस्ट पहा एक, दोन, तीन..... )

लहानपणी (१९६८-६९ च्या पुढे) घरी विकत घेऊन किंवा बाहेर कुठेतरी , 'चांदोबा' मासिक नेहमी पाहण्यात यायचे.... (माझ्या वडिलांना चांदोबा अजिबात आवडत नसे त्यामुळे आम्ही तो कधी नियमित विकत किंवा वर्गणी लावून घेतला नाही. मात्र किशोर मासिक launch झाल्यावर त्याचे पहिल्या अंकापासून  काही वर्षे आम्ही वर्गणीदार होतो.)....

चांदोबा हे त्याच्या काळात (म्हणजे कित्येक वर्षे) मराठीतील सर्वात जास्त लोकप्रिय मासिक असावे....बाबुराव अर्नाळकर, एस एम काशीकर , गुरुनाथ नाईक इत्यादी यांच्या रहस्य कथांच्या कित्येक पट चांदोबा खपत आणि वाचला जात असावा .... कित्येक साक्षर, नवसाक्षर लोक (प्रौढ, वृद्ध, तरुण, बाल, स्त्री, पुरुष, transgender, सर्व जात, धर्म ,गरीब, श्रीमंत) एकच पुस्तक वाचायचे: चांदोबा!..... चांदोबा (वर्तमानपत्रा सारखा) वाचुन घेतला जात असल्याचे सुद्धा मी पहिले आहे.....talk about audio books!

आणि मजा पहा, हे मासिक चेन्नाई मध्ये तयार आणि वितरीत व्हायचे.... आणि ते जवळजवळ सगळे अनुवादित असायचे .....(कै. वि स खांडेकर हे नाव तमिळनाडूत लोकांना तामीळ माणसाचे नाव वाटायचे इतके खांडेकर तिकडे माहित होते आणि इकडे चांदोबा इथला होऊन राज्य करत होता)....कोण म्हणते मराठीत अनुवाद लोकप्रिय नाहीत?.....

आणि त्यामुळे त्यातील चित्रे नेहमी थोडी गंमतशीर वाटत...मी लहानपणी मिरजेला, म्हणजे कर्नाटकाच्या सीमेवर जरी रहात असलो तरी तसे कपडे घातलेले , केशभूषा असलेले, दागिने घातलेले स्त्री-पुरुष मला कधी दिसायचे नाहीत! माझी आई काहीशी दीनानाथ दलालांच्या चित्रातल्या स्त्रियांसारखी दिसायची, चांदोबातल्या स्त्रियांसारखी नाही....चांदोबातील पुराणातील पात्रे सुद्धा राजा रविवर्मांच्या चित्रांहुन (जी अनेक आमच्या जवळच्या दत्ताच्या देवळात लावलेली होती) वेगळी वाटत....

पण कधी मद्रास कडचा सिनेमा बघितला, उदा: तीन बहुरानियां, १९६८, की वाटायच हलता चांदोबा बघतोय .... पण त्या स्त्रीया आकर्षक मात्र वाटायच्या... हे चांदोबाच्या कलाकारांचे यश होते....

१९८१साली ज्यावेळी मी मद्रास ला शिकायला गेलो त्यावेळी गिंडीहून दोन-तीन बसेस बदलून चांदोबाच्या ऑफिस च्या बाहेर पर्यंत वडापलानीला जाऊन आलो .....(मद्रास मध्ये चांदोबातल्यासारखे स्त्री पुरुष दिसायला लागले होतेच!)

चांदोबा आता इतिहासजमा झालेला आहे... मराठीतील पोषाखी समीक्षक वृंद त्याचे महाराष्ट्रावरचे सांस्कृतिक (आणि थोडे सामाजिक सुद्धा) ऋण कधीच मान्य करणार नाही...

Chitravarnika and her father Shaktiteja from the series Vikram Vetal

Chandamama, 2007

Artist: सिवासंकरन (शंकर)

चांदोबाचे इतर प्रसिद्ध कलावंत होते: केसवा राव,  वीरा राघवन (चित्रा), वापा, बाशा (राझी), गांधी, महेश, आचार्य

....ही 'आपली' अमेरिका ....Republican Presidents From March 1861 - December 2018

'आपली' कारण आपले कित्येक नातेवाईक, नातेवाईकांचे नातेवाईक, मित्र-मैत्रिणींचे नातेवाईक, ओळखीच्या माणसांचे नातेवाईक, मुलांचे मित्र-मैत्रिणी , टीव्ही वर दिसणाऱ्या लोकांचे नातेवाईक, अनोळखी माणसांचे नातेवाईक, होणाऱ्या नातेवाईकांचे नातेवाईक तिथे असतात आणि त्यातल्या बहुतेकांना भारतात परत यायच नसत.... तेंव्हा ती लोक आपली असतील तर त्यांचा देश पण आपला झालाच!

Artist: Andy Thomas, c 2018

लिंकन (पाठमोरे) आणि आयसेनहावर (लिंकन यांच्या समोर बसलेले) सोडेले तर उर्वरित जगाने चित्राकडे पाहून चळाचळा कापावे आणि कापता कापता प्रचंड हसावे अशी परिस्थिती आहे.... ....

ह्या चित्राकडे मी एक कॅप्शन नसलेले कार्टून म्हणून पण पाहतोय आणि त्याला काय कॅप्शन जोडता येईल याचा विचार करतोय....

टेडी रूसवेल्ट : "एब आणि आइक तुम्ही थोडे गप्प बसा आणि ऐका ... डॉलर ते आण्विक हत्यारे असे कुठलेही मार्ग वापरून असं साम्राज्य निर्माण करू की जगाला वाटेल याच्या तुलनेत रोमन, मंगोल, आणि ब्रिटिश साम्राज्य हे लुटुपुटुचे खेळ होते.... आणि विरोधी डेमोक्रॅट्स आपल्याला  यामध्ये नक्की साथ देतील.... "

'काला पानी'ची साठ वर्षे...Kala Pani@60

#KalaPaniAt60
#KalaPaniofRajKhoslaAt60

डिसेंबर ११ १९५८ रोजी, ६०वर्षांपूर्वी, राज खोसलांचा 'काला पानी' (Kala Pani) प्रदर्शित झाला.

या सिनेमासाठी फिल्मफेअर अवॉर्ड्स देव आनंद , नलिनी जयवंतना मिळोत,  पण मला फक्त लक्षात राहतात मधुबाला.... 'Achcha Ji Main Haari Chalo Maan Jaao' गाण म्हणणाऱ्या...

This is what Shammi Kapoor said about Madhubala:

"...I must admit, in spite of knowing that Madhu was already in love, I could not resist falling madly in love with her. No one can blame me for it. Even today, after meeting so many women and having had relationships with God knows how many, I can swear that I have never seen a more beautiful woman. Add to that her sharp intellect, maturity, poise and sensitivity. She was awesome....

...Becoming very nostalgic about Madhubala, he wondered, “Why women like Madhubala don’t happen anymore?” After a pause, “When I think of her even now, after six decades, my heart misses a beat. My God, what beauty, what presence. After another pause, he had said, “I think life was a bit harsh on her. She didn’t deserve to go through all that she did...."

 (Courtesy: The Hindu and Rauf Ahmed ) 

Madubala died at the age of just 36.

सौजन्य : नवकेतन फिल्म्स

वसंत सरवटेंचे खमेर रूज साठी कार्टून .....Khmer Rouge Leaders Found Guilty

 FT reported on November 16 2018:

"....A Cambodian tribunal found senior ex-Khmer Rouge commanders guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, in a historic accounting for mass atrocities carried out by the regime in 1975-79.

Nuon Chea, 92, and Khieu Samphan, 87, were convicted on Friday for their roles in a range of crimes including torture and killings at security centres and “killing field” execution sites, forced marriage and rape, and genocide against members of the country’s ethnic Cham and Vietnamese minorities...."

'१९७५-७९' हे आणि ९२ व ८७ आकडे वाचून मला पहिल्यांदा सरवटेंचे खालील कार्टून आठवले.....

Old Lady: “Had you written a leader in 1982? He has come with an arrest warrant. For doing the writing that provoked people’s passions…”
  

Artist: Vasant Sarwate, 1993

गाहा सत्तसई (गाथा सप्तशती)चे पुनर्निर्माते स आ उर्फ भाऊसाहेब जोगळेकर....S A Jogalekar of Gathasaptasati

James C. Scott , ‘Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States ‘, 2017:

“...That states would have come to dominate the archaeological and historical record is no mystery. For us—that is to say Homo sapiens—accustomed to thinking in units of one or a few lifetimes, the permanence of the state and its administered space seems an inescapable constant of our condition. Aside from the utter hegemony of the state form today, a great deal of archaeology and history throughout the world is state-sponsored and often amounts to a narcissistic exercise in self-portraiture. Compounding this institutional bias is the archaeological tradition, until quite recently, of excavation and analysis of major historical ruins. Thus if you built, monumentally, in stone and left your debris conveniently in a single place, you were likely to be “discovered” and to dominate the pages of ancient history. If, on the other hand, you built with wood, bamboo, or reeds, you were much less likely to appear in the archaeological record. And if you were hunter-gatherers or nomads, however numerous, spreading your biodegradable trash thinly across the landscape, you were likely to vanish entirely from the archaeological record.

Once written documents—say, hieroglyphics or cuneiform—appear in the historical record, the bias becomes even more pronounced. These are invariably state-centric texts: taxes, work units, tribute lists, royal genealogies, founding myths, laws. There are no contending voices, and efforts to read such texts against the grain are both heroic and exceptionally difficult.The larger the state archives left behind, generally speaking, the more pages devoted to that historical kingdom and its self-portrait....”

ह्या प्रतिपादनाला (argument) एखादीच गोष्ट अपवाद असेल. सुदैवाने ती महाराष्ट्राची आहे..... 


सातवाहन काळात (इ.स.पू. २३० ते इ.स. २२०) दगडांची अनेक सुंदर कामे घडली जी अजून जिवंत आहेत... पण स्कॉट म्हणतात तसे सामान्यांनी स्वतः साठी बांधलेले काहीच शिल्लक नाही. पण लेखनामुळे bias pronounce न होता उलट गाहा सत्तसई सारखे लेखन होऊन सामान्यांचे जीवन, त्यांची भाषा, त्यांची कला अजून जिवंत आहे.

 

स. आ. जोगळेकर ह्यांनी संपादिलेल्या गाहा सत्तसईत (हाल सातवाहनाची गाथा सप्तशती, १९५६) गाथांचा मराठी अनुवादही दिला आहे.

 सौजन्य : वाङ्मय शोभा , मार्च १९६३

courtesy: Penguin Classics and the artist(s)

देव कसा असतो?....B S Mardhekar@109

#BSMardhekar109
#बासीमर्ढेकर१०९

बा सी मर्ढेकर:
"राव, सांगतां देव कुणाला,
शहाजोग जो शहामृगासम;
बोंबील तळलों सुके उन्हांत,
आणि होतसे हड्डी नरम.

छान शेकतें जगणें येथें
जगणारांच्या हें अंगाला;
निदान ढेकर करपट आणूं
द्या तुमच्या त्या शहामृगाला !"

(#४३, कांही कविता, १९५९/१९७७)

Artist: Liana Finck,The New Yorker, November 2015

Kismet of Gyan Mukherjee and Omar Tahan

 #KismetManofFate

Amazon.com is releasing 'Kismet, Man of Fate' by A. David Lews (Author), Tyler Chin-Tanner (Editor), Noel Tuazon;Rob Croonenborghs (Illustrator) today.

Kismet the first identified Muslim superhero first made appearance in 1944. And I wondered if the name was in any way inspired by one of the most successful (blockbuster) Hindi film ‘Kismet’ that was released in 1943.

 courtesy: Wikipedia

Ye Must Have Faith....The Centenary Year of Max Planck's Nobel

#MaxPlanckNobel100
2018 is centenary year of Max Planck's Nobel prize in physics

Albert Einstein writing to Mrs. Planck after Planck’s death : 
“Now your husband has finished his days after he achieved greatness and experienced much bitterness. His gaze was fixed on the eternal things, and yet he took an active part in all that was human and he lived in the temporal sphere. How different and better the human world would be if there were more such unique people among the leaders. So it seems not to be, as the noble characters in every time and every place must remain isolated without being able to influence the events around them. 
The hours that I spent in your home, and the many conversations that I conducted in private with the wonderful man will for the rest of my life belong to my beautiful memories. It cannot change the fact that a tragic event tore us apart.

In today’s loneliness, may you find comfort in that you have brought sun and harmony into the life of this revered man. From a distance, I share with you the pain of parting."

Brandon R. Brown, 'Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War', 2015:

"...Planck was born into an 1858 that employed candlelight and horse-drawn carriages, but he came to hear radio-transmitted symphonies and watch airplanes crisscross the sky. He joined a physics in the nineteenth century that was reportedly nearing completion. There was as yet no Planck’s constant to stand between a scientist and the pursuit of exact knowledge. The atom was unlikely, light a pure wave, and energy indivisible. Time and space stood absolute and inflexible before our rulers and clocks. Physics was a far flung outpost of science then, with a tiny clan. Germans jokingly confused it with forestry. But as Max Planck reached his last years, physicists stood like shamans for a nuclear age. Their ideas flashed and echoed around the globe..."

Max Planck: 
 "Anyone who has seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realises that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words, ‘Ye must have faith'." 

 
 

courtesy: Wikimedia 

Manjit Kumar, 'Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality', 2007:

"...The photograph of those gathered at the fifth Solvay conference on ‘Electrons and Photons’, held in Brussels from 24 to 29 October 1927, encapsulates the story of the most dramatic period in the history of physics. With seventeen of the 29 invited eventually earning a Nobel Prize, the conference was one of the most spectacular meetings of minds ever held. It marked the end of a golden age of physics, an era of scientific creativity unparalleled since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century led by Galileo and Newton.

Paul Ehrenfest is standing, slightly hunched forward, in the back row, third from the left. There are nine seated in the front row. Eight men and one woman; six have Nobel Prizes in either physics or chemistry. The woman has two, one for physics awarded in 1903 and another for chemistry in 1911. Her name: Marie Curie. In the centre, the place of honour, sits another Nobel laureate, the most celebrated scientist since the age of Newton: Albert Einstein. Looking straight ahead, gripping the chair with his right hand, he seems ill at ease. Is it the winged collar and tie that are causing him discomfort, or what he has heard during the preceding week? At the end of the second row, on the right, is Niels Bohr, looking relaxed with a half-whimsical smile. It had been a good conference for him. Nevertheless, Bohr would be returning to Denmark disappointed that he had failed to convince Einstein to adopt his ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of what quantum mechanics revealed about the nature of reality.

Instead of yielding, Einstein had spent the week attempting to show that quantum mechanics was inconsistent, that Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation was flawed. Einstein said years later that ‘this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts’.

It was Max Planck, sitting on Marie Curie’s right, holding his hat and cigar, who discovered the quantum. In 1900 he was forced to accept that the energy of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation could only be emitted or absorbed by matter in bits, bundled up in various sizes. ‘quantum’ was the name Planck gave to an individual packet of energy, with ‘quanta’ being the plural. The quantum of energy was a radical break with the long-established idea that energy was emitted or absorbed continuously, like water flowing from a tap. In the everyday world of the macroscopic where the physics of Newton ruled supreme, water could drip from a tap, but energy was not exchanged in droplets of varying size. However, the atomic and subatomic level of reality was the domain of the quantum..."

Mamamon!...Buy Nothing Day

Today November 23 2018 is Buy Nothing Day (BND), an international day of protest against consumerism.

Artist: John Riordan, Capital City, 2013 inspired by 'Prophetic Books' of William Blake

Thanksgiving: Alternative Ahalya Myth!

Today November 22 2018 is Thanksgiving day.

Wikipedia informs: “...The Puranas introduce themes that are echoed in later works, including the deception of the unsuspecting Ahalya by Indra's devious disguise as Gautama in his absence. The Padma Purana states that after Gautama leaves for his ritual bath, Indra masquerades as Gautama and asks Ahalya to satisfy him. Ahalya, engrossed in worship, rejects him, considering it inappropriate to have sex at the cost of neglecting the gods. Indra reminds her that her first duty is to serve him. Finally Ahalya gives in, but Gautama learns of Indra's deception through his supernatural powers and returns to the ashram. A similar account is found in the Brahma Purana. At times, Indra takes the form of a cock that crows to dispatch Gautama for his morning ablutions, as in the 18th-century Telugu rendition of the tale by the warrior-poet Venkata Krishnappa Nayaka of the Madurai Nayak Dynasty...

...According to the Brahma Vaivarta Purana, Gautama curses Indra to bear a thousand vulvae, which will turn to eyes when he worships the sun-god Surya. Ahalya, though innocent, is turned to stone for sixty thousand years and destined to be redeemed only by Rama's touch..."

Artist: Zachary Kanin, The New Yorker, November 2015