In Search of Lost Food...उदाहरणार्थ अठरा धान्यांचे कडबोळे

Patrick McGuinness, The Telegraph, November 19 2013:

"...Past, present and future are not checkpoints, but porous membranes where one tense washes into another.
Time is ruthless and deadly, living is all loss, and the paradox of memory is that it gives you back what you had on condition that you know it has been lost. To regain it, you need to know it has gone; to remake the world, you need first to understand that it has ended. HG Wells had published The Time Machine in 1895. Proust showed that we are the Time Machines, though we are rarely at the controls..."

Isaiah Berlin quoted by Dileep Padgaonkar in The Times of India, October 28 2013:

"...“Indians want to be treated as a new exotic culture, whose poets are the best in the world, whose novelists outshine Proust” he tells a correspondent, whereas, in fact, they are “half-baked and exhausting”: there is “no intellectual bite, no firmness, no toughness at all”. And he concludes on this note: “If real social justice and rationalisation ever come to India it will be through some spellbinder whom people won’t bother to resist and under whose spell they will enjoy falling.”..."

Whatever else you take from the quotes above, Marcel Proust is a literary benchmark and year 2013 is 100th anniversary of arguably one of the greatest (and the longest?) novels of all time: Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time'.  


It is in seven volumes, running 4215 pages! I own one volume and haven't read even a page from it.

(The earlier English translation of the book was titled  'Remembrance of Things Past' )

Artist: Edward Frascino, The New Yorker, 1 April 1972 

(Here is an example, dated October 18 2007, from this blog, of a cartoonist targeting Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' for its length, 1225 pages.)

Proust is little known to Marathi speaking world, including me. I haven't read him either in French or English. I don't think he is available in Marathi.

And I don't know if I will ever know him too but when I can't read a book I try to read about it. 

I liked what Ian Jack had to say in 'The Guardian' in November 2013: "What of all the vanished foods we can never taste again?":

"Marcel Proust's narrator took a little piece of sponge cake and dipped it into a spoonful of tea. "No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me," Proust wrote in Swann's Way, as translated by CK Scott Moncrieff. The extraordinary thing was an involuntary memory. We know how the story goes, though Proust takes his time in telling it. Many sentences follow, and then: "The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane." Out of this sensation comes the "vast structure of recollection" that taste and smell alone can provide "when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered … "
But what if the tastes and smells of the previous age no longer existed?..."

There are quite a few food items (almost) no longer available to a typical Marathi middle class person.

Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar's (1871-1934 श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर)  book 'Sudamyache Pohe'  (सुदाम्याचे पोहे) - for me one of the greatest prose in Marathi- was first published in 1910. 

It has a wonderfully funny essay : 'Pandutatyanchi Nirjali Ekadashi' (पांडुतात्यांची निर्जळी एकादशी)- 'Pandutatya's water-less fasting day'.

It makes merciless fun of what all some Marathi speaking middle-class (most of them Brahmins) people ate (and still do) on the fasting day in the name of religion. 

courtesy: 'सुदाम्याचे  निवडलेले पोहे' (abridged 'sudamyache pohe'), Varada Prakashan (वरदा प्रकाशन)

After reading the essay, I realised that quite a few fit-for-fasting delicacies listed there- captured in the quotation above-  have never been tasted, or even seen,  by me and probably never will be.
  
The title of the book, at the time of its first publication, was "Arthat Athara Dhanyanche Kadbole"  (अर्थात अठरा धान्यांचे कडबोळे).  I loosely translate it as "meaning pretzel / cracker made from eighteen grains"....Have I tasted or seen such a snack ever? NO!

[The third edition, published in 1923, and later editions of the book came with the subtitle of 'Arthat Sahitya Battishi' (अर्थात साहित्य बत्तिशी)]

                                                          Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar

courtesy: 'Bahurupi' (बहुरूपी), 1957 by Chintaman Ganesh Kolhatkar (चिंतामण गणेश कोल्हटकर)

In 60 Years: Fahrenheit 451 to Fahrenheit 1600!

Wikipedia describes 'Fahrenheit 451', 1953 by Ray Bradbury as a dystopian novel that " presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found."

451 Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper self-ignites and hence the title of the book.
 

 courtesy: Wikipedia


Today if we have to burn all the books, you have to also burn e-books and e-readers. "Firemen" need higher temperature than 451 F to burn them. That temperature supposedly is 1600 F !

Artist: Harry Bliss

 please visit  www.harrybliss.com  for more such pictures

My Sister was in Mother's Womb. ..ललितच्या मुखपृष्ठाची प्रसुती

The only Diwali issue of Marathi magazine I read (thumb through really) is Lalit (ललित) and that too because I subscribe to it.

Not that I am against Diwali numbers but I am too lazy to join a circulating library and I don't feel like buying any of them because I rather buy a Marathi / English book instead. 

On the afternoon of November 12 2013, I  received my copy of Lalit dated November 2013 and realised that it indeed was not carrying Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) drawn cover, for the first time after Diwali 1964.

It was just a confirmation because Sarwate himself had informed me this on November 8 2013 on phone.

I did not know that 'ललित', as an adjective in Hindi, translates as pictorial (चित्रमय). Lalit magazine indeed was 'pictorial' because it proudly carried Sarwate on its cover at least once a year. 

If you wish to enjoy a few of the past covers done by Sarwate, please visit the given links.

2012:  Lalit, 2012 

2011: Lalit, 2011

2010: Lalit, 2010

2009: Lalit, 2009 

2008:  Lalit, 2008 

2007:  Lalit, 2007 



This is the first Lalit Diwali cover Sarwate drew in 1964.  I was four, my brother was two and my sister was in my mother's womb!

The small plant he started watering is still alive. It's a fantastic news in a brutal world of Marathi periodicals because many of Lalit's sisters who were around then have perished.

Passing of Diwali and Feelings of Matryoshka Doll

Philip Larkin,  'Aubade', 1977:

"...
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
..."


Diwali 2013 is now history. 

Containers that stored Diwali snacks up to the brim are emptying fast. Even 'Sunil Gavaskar'  'shankarrpale'  (शंकरपाळे) (called so because they come to 'bat first' and go out last) are on their last leg.

And no matter what, it leaves a sense of emptiness behind. It has always done so for me. It perhaps taught me, very early in life,  without using any words, that you couldn't hang onto to anything.

 I began to understand a little about Larkin's  "the sure extinction" much later.

"A matryoshka doll, also known as Russian nesting/nested doll, refers to a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other." (Wikipedia)

Artist: Geoff Thompson, The Spectator, UK, September 2013

(I have always loved Mr. Thompson's work and you will find a few more example of it on this blog.)

Chess Itself Will Always Win

In one of the greatest sports events India has hosted, Vishwanathan Anand,  an Indian and his nation's greatest sportsperson along with Major Dhyanchand,  will try to defend his title against Magnus Carlsen, a Norwegian, from today November 9 2013, in Chennai...

                                                       ...Let the best 'ian' win!

Michael Chabon:

"Apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any two men"

Stephen Moss:

"Novels and films about the game, especially Nabokov's The Luzhin Defence, have focused on eccentrics, leading to a popular assumption that all chess players are bonkers. But Kasparov takes a more prosaic view. "Exceptional cases like these ... make it easy to ignore the vast majority of chess players who are entirely unexceptional apart from their capacity to play chess well." Just because there are some mad chess players doesn't mean all chess players are mad"
 
Andrew Robinson, 'Satyajit Ray / The Inner Yey', 1989/ 2004:

"...The most awkward problem remained, however: how to make cinematically interesting the act of chess-playing and the relationship of the nawabs’ game to the larger political one. For months Ray wrestled with this and with his dislike of the King’s character. ‘You see, the problem was to interweave the main story with Wajid and the British and the whole business of annexation’, he wrote to Saeed Jaffrey (Mir) in May 1976, seven months before shooting began. ‘Also, to establish the idea of obsession –which is basic to the development of the story – with a game which is basically abstract and intellectual. If it had been gambling, there’d be no problem. But the beauty of the story lies in the parallel that Prem Chand draws between the game and the moves of the crafty Raj leading to the “capture” of the King.'..."

Chess has appeared on this blog a few times earlier. Most volubly on December 19 2007 here.

I once was a chess 'nut'. 

I then thought the film "North By North West" described the knight's move on a chessboard. Munshi Premchand / Satyajit Ray's 'Shatranj Ke Khilari', 1977 remains one of the better films I have seen as much for its cinematic qualities as its title. As a kid I was attracted to a lousy Hindi film (despite very good music) 'Shatranj',1969 once again because of its title.

I have watched Ray's film a few times and I feel there is a lot of truth in Michael Chabon's quote above.  Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali are 'closer' to each other than to their wives.

When I was a 'chess-nut', I too felt a kind of 'closeness' to fellow chess playing men, I have seldom felt later.


At Miraj, as kids, occasionally, we used to stop by a Muslim graveyard and witness, and even participate in, the chess being played near its entrance. I never thought it was a big deal but some of our relatives were 'concerned' with our visits to a graveyard.

A lot of Marathi speaking people have become very good chess players, indeed Grandmasters, but there is hardly any art-  including poetry, short stories, novels, music, paintings- created by Marathi speaking artists focused on the sport.

Vladimir Nabokov has written a novel 'The Defense'. It is considered far and away the best novel written about chess players.



Dominic Lawson writes about the book:

"It deals with chess and madness, which is an intriguing topic, because it’s often said that chess grandmasters have a propensity to insanity. Statistically, it’s probably not true, but, nonetheless, people think about Fischer, they think about [Wilhelm] Steinitz, the first undisputed world champion who went insane, and there were others as well, such as [Paul] Morphy and [Akiba] Rubinstein. The great mystery to me, which this book touches on, is that it’s often said that these people are driven mad by chess, when actually it might have been the other way around – chess was the only thing that kept them from going off the deep end. It’s when they get away from chess, or try to break away from it, that their characters disintegrate. Fischer’s lunacy, if that’s what it was, broke out in full force when he abandoned playing the game. Within chess he was sublimely rational. They are often people who can be slightly awkward outside chess, but in chess are completely balanced.


There's a very wonderful passage in the book, showing that there are problems with chess itself for the human brain. Luzhin is playing a game in a world championship match and he’s lighting a cigarette – those were the days when you were still allowed to smoke during games – and while he’s contemplating the move he leaves the match lit and burns himself by mistake. Nabokov writes: “The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess.” Which is true because the variations are unfathomable. The computer has done a great deal, but it hasn’t solved it, and probably never will. So you think that you’re battling another person, but there is actually something much more powerful that you’re battling, which is chess itself. And chess itself, it seems, will always win."


 


Benjamin Franklin getting mated by Lady Howe

Artist: Edward Harrison,  May 1867

courtesy: FB page 'Chess' 

Chanting Vedas In The Mud: In Devas and Thailand Shallows... काय खर्ज लागतो एकेक बेडकाचा

Tomorrow November 8 2013 is 94th Birth Anniversary of  P L Deshpande (पु ल देशपांडे)
 
Kakaji:

"...in our Devas thousands of frogs croak in the rain on Mendaki road, oh..oh..oh! What deep (bass) sound each one creates- one feels, it's as if  Brahmins with the command of the ten great books are chanting Vedas ! What?"

(P. L. Deshpande, "Tujhe Ahe Tujapashi", January 1957 / August 2000)

[काकाजी:
"… आपल्या देवासला पावसात हजारो बेडकं ओरडतात मेंडकी-रोडवर, ओहोहोहो! काय खर्ज लागतो एकेक बेडकाचा- असं वाटतं, की  कोणी दशग्रंथी ब्राह्मण वेदपठण करून राहिले आहेत बेटे ! काय ?"

(पु ल देशपांडे, 'तुझें आहें तुजपाशी')]

Location : the Thailand shallows 

 Photo Artist : Daniel Trim

Courtesy: REX/ Daily Mail November 2013

नमोस्तुते...Lakshmi, Yakshi, Ishtar, Ereshkigal, Lilitu...India, Egypt...

Today November 3 2013 is Diwali,  goddess Lakshmi Puja day in India
 
Some experts regard Lakshmi as a pre-Aryan goddess just like Yakshis.


 T.S. Subramanian says in Frontline, June 15 2012 issue:

"You will find them everywhere, as sculptured figures of women hanging from a tree laden with mangoes, on the gateways to Buddhist stupas, adjacent to Jaina tirthankaras as exquisite bas-reliefs on the rock faces of hills, in wayside shrines, as terracotta figurines and stucco idols, as beautiful bronzes elsewhere, and as murals in temples. They are yakshis, popular folk goddesses of pre-Aryan days who metamorphosed into protective deities during the time of the brahminical religion and later as female attendants of Jaina tirthankaras. Yakshis are also celebrated deities in the Buddhist pantheon.

The history of the yakshi cult in India is a fascinating one. Yakshi sculptures have been found in Mathura in Uttar Pradesh; Didarganj and Basarh in Bihar; Bhopal, Sanchi and Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh; Ellora in Maharashtra; Udayagiri and Khandagiri in Odisha; Tiruppanmalai, Vallimalai, Anaimalai, Tirumalai, Samanamalai, Sithamur and Sitharal in Tamil Nadu; Aihole and Shravanabelagola in Karnataka; and Nagarjunakonda, Kondapur, Peddapur and Amaravathi in Andhra Pradesh. About 50 bronze statues of yakshis have been found in different parts of India..."

 

Photo Credit: V. VEDACHALAM

 "The Sanchi Stupa in Madhya Pradesh has eight yakshis sculpted on its four gateways. Since yakshis are associated with trees, these yakshis are shown standing under the mango tree or other trees or a banana plant. While the Sanchi stupa itself was erected by Emperor Asoka (third century B.C.), the Sungas renovated it by erecting the railings in the second century B.C. and the Satavahanas built the four gateways circa the first and second century A.D. These yakshis, two each on each gateway, look sensuous and realistic."

The Guardian Art Weekly reported on October 11 2013:

"the Queen of the Night relief was acquired for the British Museum's 250th anniversary"

 Old Babylonian, 1800-1750 BC From southern Iraq

Picture courtesy: Trustees of the British Museum  

"This large plaque is made of baked straw-tempered clay, modelled in high relief. The figure of the curvaceous naked woman was originally painted red. She wears the horned headdress characteristic of a Mesopotamian deity and holds a rod and ring of justice, symbols of her divinity. Her long multi-coloured wings hang downwards, indicating that she is a goddess of the Underworld. Her legs end in the talons of a bird of prey, similar to those of the two owls that flank her. The background was originally painted black, suggesting that she was associated with the night. She stands on the backs of two lions, and a scale pattern indicates mountains.

The figure could be an aspect of the goddess Ishtar, Mesopotamian goddess of sexual love and war, or Ishtar's sister and rival, the goddess Ereshkigal who ruled over the Underworld, or the demoness Lilitu, known in the Bible as Lilith. The plaque probably stood in a shrine.

The same goddess appears on small, crude, mould-made plaques from Babylonia from about 1850 to 1750 BC. Thermoluminescence tests confirm that the 'Queen of the Night' relief was made between 1765 and 45 BC."

How Would a Stegosaurus Cope With Diwali's Noisy Crackers?

Michael Ruse, June 2013:

"...In the cool of the morning, as the sun came up, they (the plates) helped the animal to heat up quickly. In the middle of the day, especially when the vegetation consumed by the Stegosaurus was fermenting away in its belly, the plates would have helped to catch the wind and get rid of excess heat. A superb adaptation. (Sadly for me, no longer a favoured explanation, since latest investigations suggest that the plates may have been a way for individuals to recognise each other as members of the same species). 

 So what’s a Stegosaur for? We can ask what adaptive function the plates on its back served, as good Darwinian scientists. But the beast itself? It’s not for anything, it just is — in all its decorative, mysterious, plant-munching glory."

As I was returning home on November 1 2013 around 9 AM, near our compound wall, I saw the Greater Coucal or Crow Pheasant (in Marathi 'Bhardwaj' भारद्वाज) whose sighting is considered auspicious, squirrels, the Common Myna's (In Marathi, salunki साळुंकी), sparrows...I stopped and kept looking in different directions...all moving so gracefully, keeping a watchful eye on a dangerous Homo sapiens like me but giving him a damn in the end!

I said come November 2nd morning of Narak Chaturdashi (नरक चतुर्दशी), their world would be shattered for next three-four days. They have no idea what is going to hit them tomorrow morning.

Man will know their feeling only when the next real big asteroid will hit the earth.

Artist: Rakesh C.S.


Courtesy: Amar Chitra Katha Studio and its FB page

With Bhau Padhye at the Window, Sitting 4th Seat in Second Class Mumbai Local!...मी जरूर लिहीन, पण जमेल तेव्हा…तसे…

Today October 30 2013 is 17th Death Anniversary of Bhau Padhye (भाऊ पाध्ये)

W. G. Sebald:

“There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it.”   

Tony Perrottet:

"...Another of France’s wildly prolific authors, Honoré de Balzac, felt that the most effective spur to productivity was abject poverty. As a best-selling writer in his early 30s, Balzac looked back fondly upon his younger days as a bohemian, living in a garret and gnawing on a diet of bread, nuts, fruit and water. (“I loved my prison,” he wrote, “for I had chosen it myself.”) Even when successful, he would wake at midnight, symbolically don the habit of a medieval monk, and write for eight hours straight, fueled by pots of coffee. His biographer Graham Robb suggests that Balzac went so far as to deliberately run up debts to force himself to churn out the pages..."

As I was looking at old issues of Abhiruchi (अभिरुचि) I have preserved, I came across this letter of Bhau dated 23 November 1984, to the founder editor of the magazine P A Chitre (पु आ चित्रे), father of Dilip Chitre (दिलीप चित्रे), popularly known as Baburao (बाबुराव).

The letter was printed in the magazine's issue dated January-February 1985. 

The letter is so poignant...read this line :

"...means I don't remain occupied hence I feel miserable and since I feel miserable, I don't remain occupied. I don't know how to break this vicious circle..."

Sad and funny, typical Bhau.

Reminds me of Woody Allen:

"I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable."

('Annie Hall', 1977)

Now some boasting...This issue of the magazine has a short story of mine.

What that means is Bhau and I shared the same literary space.

B S Mardhekar (बा सी मर्ढेकर) has written:

"गेलॉ विदूषक जरी ठरुनी सुहास,
दान्ते-नि-शेक्सपिअर-संगत आसपास
कोठे तरी स्वमरणोत्तर भाग्यकाली-!
हाही विचार न कमी मज शांतिदायी."

[poem no 15, "शिशिरागम" ("shishiragam") from "मर्ढेकरांची कविता" ("Mardhekaranchi Kavita"), 1959-1977; courtesy: राघव बाळ मर्ढेकर (Raghav Bal Mardhekar)]

("Even if I pass on as a grinning joker,
company of Dante and Shakespeare in proximity
somewhere in my good fortune after my death-!
even this thought is no less consoling")

 Not for me. No heaven or hell. Whatever it's, it's right here...and now I'm imitating Bhau: I sat 4th-seat on a bench in second-class of  Mumbai local train only to discover that Bhau was sitting at the window seat, wind in the face, of the same bench!

The idea is more than consoling for me. 

I repeat the following cartoon that I used for Bhau even earlier because I simply love it. I can't take my eyes off the speaking lady's face and can't stop smiling for a while.

Artist: the late Helen E. Hokinson, The New Yorker, 9 June 1945

"Where do you suppose Bhau Padhye learned such terrible words?"