When Albert Camus Meets Sisyphus...

"The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy".

courtesy: Existential Comics

Persians basically did not have a Home, except in their Literature, especially their Poetry...इराण मधील राष्ट्रवादाला पोषक ठरली म्हणून तर पर्शियन नको झाली नसेल ना?

 * अलिकडे नमकीन हा १९८२ सालचा सिनेमा बघताना , खालील संवाद ऐकला :

"... अम्मा- ये (बकरी) मारती रहती है छोटी वाली को सौतेली की तरह, बेग़ैरत

चिंकी – वो (बेग़रत) क्या होता है ? तुम कभी कभी अजीब ‘शब्द’ बोलती हो अम्मा

अम्मा -शब्द ?  मतलब लफ्ज़ ?

चिंकी -वो (लफ्ज़) क्या होता है  ?

अम्मा -मुई ज़बान ही ख़राब हो गई ज़माने की .एक हमारा वक़्त था जबां से तहज़ीब का पता चलता था...."

श्री. गुलझार यांना हिंदीतील एक सुंदर शब्द  'शब्द' सुद्धा  सहन होत नाही!

*

 पृष्ठ २१, '... इं कसरा मुहाफिजते वतन खुद लाजिम', "शक्तिसौष्ठव", दत्तात्रय गणेश गोडसे, १९७२ 

 * एरवी मराठी भाषिक पण उर्दू भाषा समजणाऱ्या किंवा बोलणाऱ्या काही लोकांना एक प्रकारचा अहंगंड यायचे कारण काय? 

विकिपीडिया सांगतो: Urdu was chosen as the language of East India Company rule across northern India in 1837 when the Company chose it to replace Persian, the court language of the Indo-Islamic empires. 

हे तर त्याचे एक कारण नव्हे? कारण तसाच प्रकार नंतर इंग्लिश बाबत झाला आणि ब्राउन साहिब भारतभर निर्माण झाले!

Richard Eaton, 'India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765', 2020:  "...Persian in India would experience a fate similar to that of Sanskrit, though somewhat later and for very different reasons. Critical to this process was the reception of Europe’s ‘one nation, one language’ ideology in nineteenth-century Iran and India, and the rise of nationalist movements in both countries. In Iran, Persian was vigorously promoted as that country’s national language, for which purpose classical poets such as Firdausi were appropriated as proto-national Iranian poets. This seriously compromised Persian’s former status as a transregional, cosmopolitan medium, thereby eroding an historic cultural bridge between India and Iran..."

(मी म्हणतो इराण मधील राष्ट्रवादाला पोषक ठरली म्हणून तर इंग्रजांना कदाचित पर्शियन नको झाली नसेल ना?) 

"... as Delhi’s economic and political importance continued to decline after the mid eighteenth century, many of the city’s poets migrated to the empire’s former provinces – Bengal, Bihar, Awadh, Punjab, Hyderabad – where they acquired students wishing to emulate the new metropolitan poetic style called rekhtah. Written in Persian script and appropriating Persian literary models, this new style was composed in the vernacular dialect of the Delhi region and evoked the lustre of the Mughals’ remembered, glorious past. In particular, it was associated with the prestige of the imperial Mughal camp, or urdu, by which name the language would be known...." 

* Setu Madhavrao Pagdi (सेतु माधवराव पगडी) quotes Ghalib on the subject of Farsi in his excellent book "Mirza Ghalib Aani Tyachya Urdua Gazala", 1958 ('मिर्ज़ा ग़ालिब आणि त्याच्या उर्दू गज़ला'):

 

"फारसी बीन ताबबीनी नक्शहाये रंगारंग

बगुज़्रर अज़ मजमुए उर्दुके बरंगे मन अस्त"

 

("if you wish to experience the real juice of my poetry then read my Farsi poetry; why read juiceless Urdu poetry")

 

* तारेक फताह (Tarek Fatah) तर म्हणतात उर्दू ही पाकिस्तानातील भाषा नसून, भारतातून आलेली भाषा आहे आणि पाकिस्तानी लोकांनी तिच्यामुळे आपल्या मातृभाषेचे, स्वतःचे आणि राष्ट्राचे मोठे नुकसान करून घेतले आहे... ते म्हणतात पंजाबी, सिंधी, (पूर्वी) बांगला अशी- त्या जमिनीतील- भाषा पाकिस्तानची राष्ट्रभाषा असायला पाहिजे होती.

 

 खालच्या अवतरणात आलेला पर्शियन लोकांचे आणि त्यांच्या काव्याचे वैशिष्ट्य तर मी कुठेच आधी वाचले नव्हते... हे उर्दू बाबत तर खरे नाहीच नाही... 

 

Azar Nafisi: 

"... My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home. Citing the poet Ferdowsi and how, after the Arab invasion of Persia, he rescued and redefined his nation’s identity and culture through writing the epic of Persian mythology and history in his Book of Kings, my father would say, We have no other home but this, pointing to the invisible book, this, he would repeat is our home, always, for you and your brother, and your children and your children’s children...."

(foreword, 'Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings' , by Abolqasem Ferdowsi, translated by Dick Davis 2006)  

Folio of Shanameh by Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Delhi archery, (1620), National Museum Delhi, India

The Story Expresses Universal Conflicts Within Human Beings....Adam and Eve

John Gray writes on September 9 2017:

"...Throughout much of its long life, the story of Adam and Eve was understood to be a myth – and myths can have many meanings. Third- and fourth-century Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi in Egypt portray Eve – later condemned for staining all humankind with original sin – as the hero of the story, wiser and more courageous than Adam, while showing the serpent as a liberator offering the first humans freedom from the rule of a jealous God....

...What is most striking about the story is its capacity to express contradictory attitudes to the experience of being human. This is not because those who have told and retold it have been confused. The story expresses universal conflicts within human beings, rendered into a vernacular language of monotheism. The power of this inexhaustible myth comes from it not having any univocal meaning. Yet in recent times the Genesis story has come to be regarded as an erroneous theory of human origins invented before humanity received the modern scientific revelation. Reviving a simple-minded 19th-century philosophy, contemporary campaigners against religion dismiss the Genesis story along with all other myths as rudimentary exercises in scientific theorising....

...The claim to be based in science is one of the defining features of modern myths. After the collapse of European imperial power, the pseudo-Darwinian mythology that propped up colonialism fell into disrepute. But it was soon followed by other myths claiming a basis in social science. A progressive mythology developed that viewed racism and imperialism as exclusively Western vices and the flaws and conflicts of post-colonial states entirely as consequences of colonial rule. These myths were channelled through theories of modernisation, which posited a future fundamentally different from anything that existed in the past.

Like the story of Adam and Eve in Christian orthodoxy, modern myths claim to be objective truths. If we read the story as it was read in subtler times by scholars such as Philo, however, it teaches us that human beings become myth-makers when the increase of knowledge threatens to thwart their need for meaning. If science reveals a world without any overarching purpose or direction – as Darwin’s theory of natural selection does – science is distorted to promote a vision of evolution that satisfies the demand for narrative coherence.

This is what happened when Darwinism was appropriated by racists, and later by humanists such as Julian Huxley who reinterpreted the aimless process of evolution as the spiralling advance of intelligence in the cosmos.

With their babble about a godlike humanity taking charge of its future evolution, today’s campaigners against religion do much the same. Since living without myths is unendurable, these rationalists cover themselves with fig leaves of cod-science, close their eyes and return to a state of happy blindness. As part of its unfathomable richness, the story of Adam and Eve reveals the nature of myth itself"

Artist: Lucas Cranach (1472-1663),  'Adam and Eve', 1526

Geoff Dyer has an interesting take on this picture:
"...It could be a nice picture – if the wily serpent and the people were removed. The artist Pavel Maria Smejkal did something like this in his series Fatescapes, digitally erasing the defining events from famous photographs by Capa and others so that there was just the innocent background. Do that here and we get a kind of flash-forward to the way that Eden will look after A and E have been shown the door...."
(The Guardian, September 2011)

“Which is better—to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and get kicked out or to stick around here with nothing to talk about?” 

Artist: Tom Toro, The New Yorker, December 2016

...We Decided We’re Going to Give in to Everything You Want at All Times

Today November 14 2021 is Children's Day

Artist: B E Kaplan, The New Yorker, April 2018

जमेल तेथे तळटीपांचे पैंजण घाला...Annotate the Artists

 बा सी मर्ढेकर:

"शब्दांवर थोडी हुकमत असली आणि लय तोंडवळणी पडली म्हणजे कविता लिहिणं फारसं कठीण नसतं. त्यापलीकडे काही पुढील लिखाणांत आहे किंवा नाही हे वाचकच ठरविणार. त्यांच मत अनुकूल पडल नाही तर लेखकाने योग्य तो बोध घ्यावा. पण 'भूमिके'चा टोप चढवून आणि तळटीपांचे पैंजण घालून नकटीला शारदेच सोंग घ्यायला लावण ह़ा त्यावर तोडगा खास नाही." 

(पृष्ठ: १२०, 'कांही कवितांचे' प्रास्ताविक, मर्ढेकरांची कविता, १९५९-१९७७)

ह्या भूमिकेला दुसर एक अस्तर आहे, आणि ते म्हणजे, मर्ढेकरांचे आवडते टी एस इलियट यांनी त्यांच्या सर्वात महत्वाच्या कवितेला "तळटीपांचे पैंजण" (annotation) घातले होते... 

 

"...The first person to annotate a poem by T.S. Eliot was T.S. Eliot. His notes on The Waste Land (1922) were composed partly so that his 433-line poem could be issued by his American publishers Boni & Liveright as a book, and partly, as he recalled in ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (1956), ‘with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism’...."

 

आता मर्ढेकर म्हणायला मोकळे होते- इलियटने केले पण मी ते कधीच करणार नाही...

 

असो , कोणाचेही , विशेषतः पब्लिक डोमेन मध्ये आलेल्या, कोणत्याही कवी/लेखकाचे लेखन annotate करावे या मताचा मी आहे... 

D, J. Taylor says in The TLS, June 4 2021:

"Why annotate Orwell’s novels? One compelling answer is that we now have the freedom to do so. Orwell died in January 1950, meaning that all six of them came out of copyright in the UK at the start of this year. Transatlantic reprint programmes, based on the ninety-five-years- from-first-publication rule, will have to wait until as late as 2029. Here in Britain, on the other hand, a vault guarded by the seneschals of Messrs Penguin Random House and its predecessor firms these past seventy years has just creaked open, and any old aspiring editor or zealous footnoter can go and wander about inside.

Another is that, in terms of the period detail which can weigh down the most evergreen classic, Orwell’s fiction is beginning to show its age. This is especially true of the four prewar novels, Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939), each of which comes stuffed with references to Woodbines and De Reszkes (brands of cigarettes), the Boots Circulating Library, Express Dairies, gorblimey hats (a kind of First World War-era forage cap) and Dr Palmer (William Palmer, 1824–56, the celebrated “Rugeley Poisoner”)...."

 Helena Bonham Carter and Richard E. Grant in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1997|© Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

80 Years Ago....Gene Tierney on LIFE cover

Gene Tierney poses for LIFE magazine November 10, 1941

Constantin Alajálov'a Cartoon of How Much Americans Consume

Jared Diamond:

“The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.”

Artist: Constantin Alajálov,  Saturday Evening Post. November, 1954

या चित्राच्या प्रकाशनाला १०वर्षे उलटून गेल्यावर, १९६०च्या दशकातील मिरजेतील मध्यमवर्गीयांची घरे मला आठवतात.

अगदी एखादा अपवाद सोडल्यास, ह्या चित्राच्या १/३२ गोष्टी त्या घरांत असत....अजूनही बऱ्याच घरांत असतात...

पेल ब्लू डॉट दिसण्याइतका राहायला चांगला असता तर?...Can We Live On Pale Blue Dot?

Artist: Lars Kenseth, The New Yorker, October 2019

Is The Place Big Enough for Two Cliches?

Artist: the late Leo Cullum, The New Yorker

I feel two cliches are, 1. Linguistic, Fish out of water 2. Cartoon cliche, subject of marooned on an island

Triceratop and Empire of Things

Frank Trentmann, ‘Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First’, 2016: 

“We live surrounded by things. A typical German owns 10,000 objects. In Los Angeles, a middle-class garage often no longer houses a car but several hundred boxes of stuff. The United Kingdom in 2013 was home to 6 billion items of clothing, roughly a hundred per adult; a quarter of these never leave the wardrobe. Of course, people always had things, and used them not only to survive but for ritual, display and fun. But the possessions in a pre-modern village or an indigenous tribe pale when placed next to the growing mountain of things in advanced societies like ours. This change in accumulation involved a historic shift in humans’ relations with things. In contrast to the pre-modern village, where most goods were passed on and arrived as gifts or with the wedding trousseau, things in modern societies are mainly bought in the marketplace. And they pass through our lives more quickly.

In the last few hundred years, the acquisition, flow and use of things – in short, consumption – has become a defining feature of our lives. It would be a mistake to think people at any time have had a single identity, but there have been periods when certain roles have been dominant, defining a society and its culture. In Europe, the High Middle Ages saw the rise of a ‘chivalrous society’ of knights and serfs. The Reformation pitched one faith against another. In the nineteenth century, a commercial society gave way to an industrial class society of capitalists and wage workers. Work remains important today, but it defines us far less than in the heyday of the factory and the trade union. Instead of warriors or workers, we are more than ever before consumers. In the rich world – and in the developing world increasingly, too – identities, politics, the economy and the environment are crucially shaped by what and how we consume. Taste, appearance and lifestyle define who we are (or want to be) and how others see us...”

“I thought it would be cool to have one, but now I just use it for storage.” 

Artist: Drew Dernavich, The New Yorker, August 2016