माझ्या आणि रामाच्या नात्या बद्दल...Ram and I

 

माझ्या आणि रामाच्या नात्या बद्दल खालील उताऱ्यापेक्षा जास्त चांगले लिहता येणार नाही...

श्रीनिवास विनायक कुलकर्णी, 'आम्ही वानरांच्या फौजा', "डोह", १९६५:

 

"... थोरली आई कुणाकुणाच्या नावाचा एक घास तोंडात भरवी. पानातच हळुवारपणे हात धुवी. आपल्याजवळच्या दुलईत गुरगटून घेई. अंगभरच्या गुंगीवर मऊ हात फिरवी. प्रेमाने थोपटी आणि अंधुकसे सांगत राही:

 

"बरं का, आपली आणि त्या मोठ्ठ्या कुणाची प्रत्येक जन्मी गाठभेट होते आहे...तो गोकुळात कृष्ण म्हणून आला तेव्हा आपण गोपाळांच्या मेळ्यात होतो...तो रामराजा होता त्या वेळी आपण त्याच्या वानरांच्या फौजांत होतो...

 

तुम्ही अवतरले गोकुळी, आम्ही गोपाळांच्या मेळी

तुम्ही होते रामराजा, आम्ही वानरांच्या फौजा..."

 

 कलाकार: औंध संस्थानाचे राजे- भवानराव श्रीनिवासराव पंत प्रतिनिधी (१८६८-१९५१)

 

 

 

नेहमीच मी त्या वानरांच्या फौजेत असतो...

Marathas, Malik Ambar and Mughal Emperor Jahangir's Fantasies in Early 17th Century

शहाजी राजे, मलिक अंबर, (संत एकनाथ आणि इतर) यांच्या मध्ययुगीन महाराष्ट्राचा आणि पर्यायाने भारताचा इतिहास हा कसा जागतिक इतिहास आहे, याचे एक अतिशय कलात्मकतेने सादर केलेले उदाहरण म्हणजे हे सोबतचे Abu’l-Hasan यांनी जहांगीर बादशहाचे १६१६ साली काढलेले चित्र आहे...

 

रिचर्ड ईटन त्याबद्दल आपल्या "India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765", 2019 पुस्तकात लिहतात...

 

"... One of the most arresting portraits commissioned by Jahangir is the deeply allegorical painting of himself standing on a globe that rests on the horns of a bull, which in turn stands on a great fish – symbols of kingship drawn from Hindu lore. All around the emperor are seen images representing his highest aspirations. Cherubs in the sky offer him a sword and arrows. To one side is an elaborate crown above a roundel in which is inscribed his own name and those of each of his royal ancestors reaching back to Timur. Above the crown flutters a bird of paradise. To the emperor’s other side is a golden scale of justice hanging from a chain with golden bells. The chain is suspended between the globe and a javelin, against which rests a musket. In the centre of the painting, wearing a white turban, a crimson gown and impeccably white slippers, is Jahangir himself, drawing a reverse-curved bow and aiming his arrow at the severed head of his most hated enemy, Malik Ambar (d. 1626), which rests on the tip of the javelin. Perched on Ambar’s bare head is an owl, a symbol of darkness. All around the head are inscriptions that speak of the emperor’s contempt for Malik Ambar – ‘The head of the night-coloured servant has become the house of the owl’; ‘Ambar the owl, which fled the light, has been driven from the world by your [Jahangir’s] enemy-smiting arrow."

 

हे चित्र जहांगिराची निव्वळ फँटसी आहे , स्वप्न आहे.... हे चित्र १६१६ साली काढण्यात आले हा योगायोग नाही! कारण... त्यावर्षी मराठे आणि अफ्रिकी यांनी मोगलांना जेरीस आणले होते...

 

"The painting was completed c.1616, another bad year in a series of bad years for Mughal military operations in the Deccan. From the start of his reign, Jahangir had sent army after army south to fulfil his father’s dream of annexing the plateau to the empire. Between 1608 and 1612 he launched four major invasions led by his best generals, but all were repulsed by armies loyal to Ahmadnagar, one of the three remaining major sultanates of the plateau. Although the kingdom’s Nizam Shahi house was headed by a series of weak, puppet sultans and the capital of Ahmadnagar was occupied by Mughal forces, the state was kept alive by two powerful groups: Maratha warrior lineages and the so-called Habshis – natives of east Africa recruited as military slaves. Malik Ambar, a disciplined leader and master tactician, was a member of the latter group. His career is important, not just because he and his Deccan forces managed to check India’s mightiest armies for two decades, but also for what it reveals about the place of Africans in Indian history, and about military slavery itself...."

 

आणि म्हणून मग मलिक अंबर चा पराकोटीचा द्वेष (त्याच्या तुटलेल्या मुंडक्यावरचे घुबड पहा)आणि हिंदूंधर्मातील कल्पना वापरत त्याच्या क्रूरपणे केलेल्या हत्येची कल्पनारम्यता...

 

मलिक अंबर वयाच्या ७७व्या वर्षी १६२६ साली शांतपणे, बहुदा आपल्या स्वतःच्या बिछान्यात वारले...

 

टीपा :

 

१) In the 3rd century BC, Hellenistic astronomy established the roughly spherical shape of Earth as a physical fact and calculated the Earth's circumference. This knowledge was gradually adopted throughout the Old World during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. By about the 5th century AD, the siddhanta astronomy texts of South Asia, particularly of Aryabhata, assume a spherical Earth as they develop mathematical methods for quantitative astronomy for calendar and time keeping.

२) चित्र जून २०२३ मध्ये न्यूयॉर्क, अमेरिकेतील प्रसिद्ध मेट संग्रहालयात आहे. पहा  Met Museum

 

 

Strugggle with Sleep

 

Florian Illies, '1913: The Year Before the Storm', 2012:

 

"On 13 November, Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s great novel In Search of Lost Time, is published. After the book was turned down not only by the Fasquelle and Oldenbourg publishing houses and the Nouvelle Revue Française but also by André Gide, the then editor at Gallimard, Proust had the book published by Grasset at his own expense. No sooner does he hold the first copy in his hands than his chauffeur and lover Alfred Agostinelli splits up with him. Everyone else falls for the author. Rilke reads the book only a few days after its publication. It begins with the golden words ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ – ‘For a long time I went to bed early’ – and in saying this, Proust touched the nerve of an exhausted avant-garde who, from Kafka to Joyce, from Musil to Thomas Mann, boasted in their diaries whenever they managed to go to bed before midnight. Going to bed early – to the ever weary pioneers of the modern age it seemed like the bravest struggle against depression, drinking, senseless distraction and the advance of time."

 

 artist: P C Vey

Fire- What Do You Do After You Invent It? And How to Turn it Off?

 

 

On left: Robert Kraus (1925-2001), The New Yorker,  30 July 1960

On right: Kaamran Hafeez

Jasmine, Susila, The English Teacher and William Morris

 R. K. Narayan, The English Teacher, 1945:

"...I was walking down our lone street late at night, enveloped in the fragrance of the jasmine and rose garland, slung on my arm. ‘For whom am I carrying this jasmine home?’ I asked myself. Susila would treasure a garland for two whole days, cutting up and sticking masses of it in her hair morning and evening. ‘Carrying a garland to a lonely house – a dreadful job,’ I told myself.

I fumbled with the key in the dark, opened the door and switched on the light. I hung up the garland on a nail and kicked up the roll of bedding. The fragrance permeated the whole house. I sprinkled a little water on the flowers to keep them fresh, put out the light and lay down to sleep.

The garland hung by the nail right over my head. The few drops of water which I sprinkled on the flowers seemed to have quickened in them a new life. Their essences came forth into the dark night as I lay in bed, bringing a new vigour with them. The atmosphere became surcharged with strange spiritual forces. Their delicate aroma filled every particle of the air, and as I let my mind float in the ecstasy, gradually perceptions and senses deepened. Oblivion crept over me like a cloud. The past, present and the future welded into one...

 

 ...‘Susila! Susila!’ I cried. ‘You here!’ ‘Yes, I’m here, have always been here.’ I sat up leaning on my pillow. ‘Why do you disturb yourself?’ she asked.

‘I am making a place for you,’ I said, edging away a little. I looked her up and down and said: ‘How well you look!’ Her complexion had a golden glow, her eyes sparkled with a new light, her sari shimmered with blue interwoven with ‘light’ as she had termed it …‘How beautiful!’ I said looking at it. ‘Yes, I always wear this when I come to you. I know you like it very much,’ she said. I gazed on her face. There was an overwhelming fragrance of jasmine surrounding her. ‘Still jasmine-scented!’ I commented.

‘Oh wait,’ I said and got up. I picked up the garland from the nail and returned to bed. I held it to her. ‘For you as ever. I somehow feared you wouldn’t take it …’ She received it with a smile, cut off a piece of it and stuck it in a curve on the back of her head. She turned her head and asked: ‘Is this all right?’

‘Wonderful,’ I said, smelling it.

A cock crew. The first purple of the dawn came through our window, and faintly touched the walls of our room. ‘Dawn!’ she whispered and rose to her feet.

We stood at the window, gazing on a slender, red streak over the eastern rim of the earth. A cool breeze lapped our faces. The boundaries of our personalities suddenly dissolved. It was a moment of rare, immutable joy – a moment for which one feels grateful to Life and Death."

 

(please note in case you don't...Susila has been dead for a while)

 

 'Jasmin' wallpaper by William Morris (1834 ~ 1896)

 

 

Gregor Samsa's Mother and School

Franz Kafka, 'The Metamorphosis', 1915:

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes...."

 

James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice @ 90

James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice @ 90

गणेश कोल्हटकर, झार आणि ब्रिटिशांना वाटणारी भीती...Ganesh Kohatkar, the Khyber Pass Railway and Prince Nicholas II of Russia

 

An obsession with protecting the North-West Frontier (now in Pakistan) with Afghanistan from invasion led to the construction of several ‘strategic’ railways, including the Khyber Pass Railway which opened in 1925. They proved to be hopeless commercially and were little used since no invasion attempt was ever made, except by the Japanese from the east in World War Two.

('Railways and the Raj: how the age of steam transformed India', 2017 by Christian Wolmar) 

Brits were almost obsessed with the possible invasion of India from Afghanistan. This obsession led to at least one hilarious situation in Maharashtra. Prince Nicholas II of Russia visited India in 1890. A humour writer (Ganesh Kolhatkar) fabricated Nicholas II’s imaginary but lost diary and started publishing the contents from it, stating he was in possession of it. The British did not get the joke and mistook it as real and the writer was interrogated by the senior officials of the Raj!

मार्लिन डिट्रीच ....Marlene Dietrich@120

#MarleneDietrich120

George Hurrell's Marlene Dietrich 1937

Ben Cosgrove:

Hollywood glamour. The very notion is so familiar, and the images that most perfectly illustrate the concept are so readily conjured, that most movie fans are unaware that one man — a single photographer — is largely responsible for the look and feel of the classic film-glamour ideal. That man, a native Kentuckian named George Hurrell (1904-1992), pretty much single-handedly invented the Hollywood glamour portrait, shaping for all time the public image of many of the movies’ greatest legends — while defining the visual vernacular of the Golden Age of Hollywood itself.