मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, April 09, 2024

Akash Mallige and Bakul...बुचाची आणि बकुळीची फुले

 A few years ago, before COVID epidemic, when I used to walk on the road outside our housing society, during monsoon, walking in the morning became interesting because it gave me an opportunity to go past Millingtonia hortensis, tree jasmine or Indian cork tree (आकाशनिंब, बुचाचे झाड) in a nearby society and pick up just one or two flowers from hundreds that would be lying on the ground and smell them all the way to the home.

Now of course walking on roads in our area, even in the morning is hazardous...

My wife's cousin Rohan sends me a picture on WA occasionally when there is a shower of  Latak chandani/ Akash Mallige / बुचाची फुले on the road adjacent to his house. 

Looking at that picture, I could smell Akash Mallige (what a beautiful word in Kannada for it, contrast that with a horror of a Marathi word for it).


दुर्गा भागवत:
"... शिवाय बकुळी, सुरंगीप्रमाणे सुकले तरी त्याचा सुवास कायमच असतो. डोक्यात घातले तर दिवस दिवस केसांना त्याचा वास लागलेला असतो..."  आणि बकुळीची फुले
 
(पृष्ठ २३, ऋतुचक्र, 'चैत्रसखा वैशाख', १९५६/२००२)
 
पु ल देशपांडे यांनी त्यांच्या 'रवींद्रनाथ : तीन व्याख्याने' या पुस्तकात रवींद्रनाथ यांना उद्धृत केले आहे : 
 
'बकुलगन्धे बन्या एलो दखिन हावाय स्त्रोते' (As southerly started blowing, fragrance of Bakul flooded the woods)
 
सध्या माझी धाकटी बहीण सांगली जिल्ह्यात मे २०२३ मध्ये गेली होती.  तिथे तिच्या विश्रामबागच्या एका मैत्रिणीच्या सोसायटी जवळील बकुळीच्या फुलांचा फोटो काढून तो तिने माझ्या भावाला आणि मला लगेच पाठवला, इतके बकुळीचे आणि आमचे जवळचे नाते आहे. 
 
मिरजेला आम्ही राहत असताना (१९६१-१९८५) आमच्या घरापासून ५० मीटर अंतरावर बकुळीचे मोठे झाड होते आणि आम्ही तिन्ही भावंडे आयुष्यातील काही वर्षेतरी त्याची रस्त्यावर पडलेली (केंव्हा केंव्हा तर अगदी घाणीच्या जवळ ती असत, तो काळ open defecation चा होता) फुले गोळा करून आईला आणत असू , मग आई किंवा बहीण त्याचे छोटे छोटे गजरे करत (केंव्हातरी मी सुद्धा केले आहेत). 
 
त्याचा मंद वास सतत आजूबाजूला असे. 
 
ज्यावेळी मर्ढेकर म्हणतात :
 
 "... जवळुनि गेलिस पेरित अपुल्या/ मंद पावलांमधल्या गंधा"... त्यांच्या मनात नक्कीच बकुळ किंवा बुच असणार...
 

 

Saturday, April 06, 2024

Who are Those Two Hundred Families of India in 2024?

 I am reading Barbara W. Tuchman's "The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914", 1966. 

There are many things that can be said about the book, the first that has struck me is the land holdings of the wealthy in Britain at the end of 19th century. 

"...In the “brilliant and powerful body,” as Winston Churchill called it, of the two hundred great families who had been governing England for generations, everyone knew or was related to everyone else. Since superiority and comfortable circumstances imposed on the nobility and gentry a duty to reproduce themselves, they were given to large families, five or six children being usual, seven or eight not uncommon, and nine or more not unknown. The Duke of Abercorn, father of Lord George Hamilton in Salisbury’s Government, had six sons and seven daughters; the fourth Baron Lyttelton, Gladstone’s brother-in-law and father of Alfred Lyttelton, had eight sons and four daughters; the Duke of Argyll, Secretary for India under Gladstone, had twelve children. As a result of the marriages of so many siblings, and of the numerous second marriages, everyone was related to a dozen other families. People who met each other every day, at each other’s homes, at race meetings and hunts, at Cowes, for the Regatta, at the Royal Academy, at court and in Parliament, were more often than not meeting their second cousins or brother-in-law’s uncle or stepfather’s sister or aunt’s nephew on the other side. When a prime minister formed a government it was not nepotism but almost unavoidable that some of his Cabinet should be related to him or to each other. In the Cabinet of 1895 Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary for War, was married to a sister of Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary for India, and Lansdowne’s daughter was married to the nephew and heir of the Duke of Devonshire, who was Lord President of the Council.

The country’s rulers, said one, “knew each other intimately quite apart from Westminster.” They had been at school together and at one of the two favored colleges, Christ Church at Oxford or Trinity College at Cambridge..."



Wednesday, April 03, 2024

जॉर्ज ओरवेल यांची उंची माझ्याहून जास्त होती ते बरे झाले!...Heights of George Orwell and Vivekananda

Michael Ledger-Lomas, “Against boiled cabbage”, LRB, February 2023:

"...Who loved Vivekananda? Women, mostly. Historians often associate the 19th-century feminisation of religion with the defensive consolidation of Christianity and its missions abroad. But Harris shows that women like Bull and Farmer were vital to the search for a universal faith. Vivekananda’s hold over them was close to erotic, connected to his bulging eyes, exotic garb and outsized aura, which encouraged his admirers to think he was six foot two (not, as he really was, five foot eight)...."

 Colin Burrow, October 5 2023, LRB:

"What a difference six inches can make. George Orwell was shot in the neck on 20 May 1937 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head. If that had happened, what would the world think of him now?

We wouldn’t have the word ‘Orwellian’ in the OED’s sense, ‘characteristic or suggestive of the writings of George Orwell, esp. of the totalitarian state depicted in his dystopian account of the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)’, since Nineteen Eighty-Four lay twelve years in the future...."

 


Illustration by German artist, Kurt Hilscher (1904-1980), for the German translation of 1984, by George Orwell

Sunday, March 31, 2024

The calculator is dead; long live the calculator.

 

James Vincent, Oct 5, 2023, LRB: 
"...In 1970, when the men aboard Apollo 13, barrelling through space at thousands of miles per hour, gave their laconic report to ground control, ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem,’ Nasa summoned engineers with analogue slide rules, not digital computers, to guide the crew safely back to Earth. And the astronauts themselves were equipped with the same tool, a five-inch metal slide rule, so consistent in its design over the centuries that a mathematician from the 1600s would have been able to use it without much trouble...."
 
“You are not always going to have a calculator in your pocket!”
- lying 90s teachers
courtesy; on X, World of Engineering @engineers_feed
·
When I entered engineering in 1977, calculators had burst on the scene. They were CASIO make LED calculators powered by pen cells, made in Taiwan/ ASEAN country, and smuggled...But since they were not allowed in any written examination, most of us had also bought slide rule at a princely price of Rs. 100+. Needless to say I never learned to use slide-rule in my life...I decided to sacrifice some marks by deciding to use log tables, if calculator was not permitted. 
 
Soon rules started changing and as is the case in India slowly and weirdly...calculators were allowed but of certain specifications, that is - not very complex models were permitted. Not all examinations allowed use of them etc. That was 1978-79.
 
It interesting to see how socialist "garibi-hatao" India was struggling, refusing to use calculators full scale, calculators were NOT manufactured in India, larger economy was crawling, inflation was raging with no good jobs in the system....
 
Capitalist India would be making millions of calculators for the world, creating thousands of jobs. Alas we were proud to be poor and afraid of CIA!
 
In 1980-81, computer programming was introduced as a non-credit subject and we were taught Fortran language without a single programmable calculator on the campus, let alone a computer, on table top, by a teacher who always thought he was the smartest teacher on the block and spoke English without fully opening his mouth to give an impression that he came from England.

These thoughts came to my mind when I saw publication of "Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator" by Keith Houston in 2023.
 
Belinda Lanks writes in WSJ on August 21 2023: 
"...In a book that’s long on technical details and short on compelling anecdotes, Mr. Houston’s profile of Herzstark is a notable highlight. As a salesman for his family’s factory manufacturing unwieldy calculators, Herzstark heard his customers’ calls for a truly portable machine. Not long after Herzstark hatched the idea for one, however, German troops annexed Austria. As the son of a Jewish father and Christian mother, Herzstark was sent to Buchenwald. There he supervised a factory of inmates fabricating rocket parts and repairing looted calculating machines. As Herzstark later recounted, his manager urged him to pursue his Curta side project, promising: “If it is really worth something, then we will give it to the Fuhrer as a present after we win the war. Then, surely, you will be made an Aryan.” When Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945, Herzstark took his blueprints with him and eventually produced the Curta. It was a palm-size engineering marvel but a commercial failure...
 
...The pocket calculator’s heyday would be brief compared with that of the slide rule it replaced. Even scientific calculators grew cheaper and profit margins waned. HP, despite Mr. Wozniak’s pleas to build a personal computer, refused to take the risk, only to see calculators absorbed into PCs, palmtops and, finally, smartphones. The pocket calculator sublimed, becoming “everywhere and nowhere at once,” Mr. Houston writes. “The calculator is dead; long live the calculator.” " 
 

 

Thursday, March 28, 2024

मिरजेला असताना (१९६१-१९८१) माझ्या खिशात... Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Hua Hsu, “What’s in Your Pockets? : For the past five hundred years, their evolution has reflected attitudes about privacy and decorum, gender and power, and what it means to be cool.”, The New Yorker, Sept 18 2023: "...Maybe what you’re hiding is your own anxiety. “Pockets give you something to do with your hands,” Carlson writes, and “that can be a boon when you find yourself at some gathering and realize that your hands are likely to betray your nervousness.” Symbolically, many of us aspire after pockets that are fat, not flat. Yet a bulging pocket quickly tips toward the unsightly—the outline of an iPhone in a pair of skinny jeans—or even the concupiscent. “Is that a gun in your pocket,” Mae West asked in “Sextette,” “or are you just happy to see me?”..."

 POCKETS: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close, by Hannah Carlson हे पुस्तक सप्टेंबर २०२३ मध्ये प्रसिद्ध झाले. 

मिरजेला असताना (१९६१-१९८१) माझ्या खिशात केंव्हा ना केंव्हा सापडल्या असत्या त्या गोष्टी:
 
सुटे पैसे, सायकलची किल्ली, शेंगदाणे, गूळ, बिस्किटे, चॉकलेट, रुमाल, आईने डब्यात दिलेले घावन, भडंग, पातळ पोह्याचा चिवडा, कणकेच्या/ गुळपीठ वड्या, भुईमुगाच्या शेंगा, फुटाणे , क्रिकेटचा बॉल, योयो , गारी गोट्या, विट्टी , फाउंटन पेन, बॉल पेन, पोस्टाची तिकिटे, कागद, खडू, टिकटिक (दोन बोटात धरून वाजवायचे पत्र्याचे खेळणे), फुटाणे, चुरमुरे, सिनेमाचे/ सर्कस चे तिकीट, बसचे तिकीट, पावत्या, नोटा, calculator... किंवा भोक, ज्यातून अनेक गोष्टी आणि वेळ निघून गेला...
 
(मिरजेचे वसंत व्याख्यान मालेचे आधारस्तंभ आणि आमचे एक-दोन वर्षांचे शाळेतील शिक्षक वसंतराव आगाशे हे एम ए च्या परीक्षेच्या आधी स्वच्छतागृहात गेले असताना , खाली बसताना, त्यांच्या खिशातील कागदाला एकत्र ठेवणारी टाचणी मांडीत घुसून त्यांचे ऑपरेशन करायला लागले, ते आयुष्यात कधीही एम ए झाले नाहीत!)
 
 
artist : Kenneth Mahood


Artist: Sharon Levy, 2020

Monday, March 25, 2024

भर्तृहरी यांचे नीतीशतक आणि ओपेनहायमर यांची ट्रिनिटी स्फोटा आधीची मनोवस्था...Did Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin Confuse Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya with Gita?

आपण ऐकत आलो आहोत आणि आता गाजलेल्या सिनेमात (सेक्सच्या नंतर असो वा चाचणी स्फोट पाहिल्यावर असो) पहिले सुद्धा असेल की ओपेनहायमर यांच्यावर गीतेचा प्रभाव किती होता ते, पण त्यांच्यावर अनेक संस्कृत पुस्तकांचा प्रभाव होता. 

Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin त्यांच्या 'American Prometheus: The Triumph & Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer', २००५ पुस्तकात म्हणतात;

"... With his facility for languages, it wasn’t long before Robert was reading the Bhagavad-Gita. “It is very easy and quite marvelous,” he wrote Frank. He told friends that this ancient Hindu text—“The Lord’s Song”—was “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” Ryder gave him a pink-covered copy of the book which found its way onto the bookshelf closest to his desk. Oppie took to passing out copies of the Gita as gifts to his friends...

One of his favorite Sanskrit texts was the Meghaduta, a poem that discusses the geography of love from the laps of naked women to the soaring mountains of the Himalayas. “The Meghaduta I read with Ryder,” he wrote Frank, “with delight, some ease, and great enchantment. . . .”

Bird & Sherwin पुस्तकात पुढे म्हणतात;

"... That evening, in an effort to relieve the tension, Oppie recited for Bush a stanza from the Gita that he had translated from the Sanskrit:

 In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains

On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

The good deeds a man has done before defend him..."

हे गीतेतील नसून  भर्तृहरी यांच्या नीतीशतकातले आहे!

 विकिपीडिया म्हणते:
"... Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quotation from Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya:

    In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,

    On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

    In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

    The good deeds a man has done before defend him."

वने रणे शत्रुजलाग्निमध्ये महार्णवे पर्वतमस्तके वा।
 
सुप्तं प्रमत्तं विषमस्थितं वा  रक्षन्ति पुण्यानि पुराकृतानि।।९७। 
 
( भर्तृहरी यांचे सार्थ नीतीशतक, पृष्ठ ४७)


कलाकार: वसंत सहस्रबुद्धे , वरदा प्रकाशन, १९९४-२०१०
 
It is very clear from following passage that Oppenheimer never confused Bhagavad Gita with Bhartrihari’s Three hundred poems.

In 1960s, "...Oppenheimer received a letter dated 1 February from The Christian Century, a non-denominational magazine, asking him to ‘jot down – almost on impulse’ a list of up to ten books ‘that most shaped your attitudes in your vocation and philosophy of life’. The list he sent them was as follows:

1. Les Fleurs du mal

2. Bhagavad Gita

3. Riemann’s Gesammelte mathematische Werke

4. Theaetetus

5. L’Éducation sentimentale

6. Divina Commedia

7. Bhartrihari’s Three hundred poems

8. ‘The Waste Land’

9. Faraday’s notebooks

10. Hamlet

As an exercise in polymathic showing off, the list is peerless. In just ten titles Oppenheimer has managed to include works of drama, fiction, poetry, mathematics, physics and Hinduism, written in a total of no fewer than six languages: Sanskrit, Greek, Italian, French, German and English..."

(Ray Monk, 'Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer', 2012)