एखादा दरबारी छबिना चौघडे-तुताऱ्या वाजवत डौलाने यावा...Kesarbai's Malkauns: Act of Cosmic Boasting

September 16 2014 was 37th Death Anniversary of Kesarbai Kerkar (केसरबाई केरकर).

Philip Ball:

"Music is the most remarkable blend of art and science, logic and emotion, physics and psychology, known to us."

जी ए कुलकर्णी, 'घर', 'पिंगळावेळ', 1977:

"…तिला एकदा तिचे घर  मिळाले की मी सुटलो. मग मोडीत निघालेल्या माझ्या ठोकायंत्राची मला भीती  नाही. केंव्हा का बंद पडेना ते ! मग शेजारी सिगरेटचे एक पूर्ण पाकीट असावे. एखादा दरबारी छबिना चौघडे-तुताऱ्या वाजवत डौलाने यावा, त्याप्रमाणे  वाटणारा मालकंस टेपरेकॉर्डवर तासभर उलगडत असावा ..."

Yuval Noah Harari, author of 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind', 2014, in The Guardian podcast:

 "...But if you take an outsider's perspective, a kind of cosmic perspective, what did humans do for the rest of the cosmos, the rest of the planet, then it is a very gloomy conclusion. I don't think we have done anything positive for anybody except ourselves so..."

Maybe we have done something positive for the rest of the cosmos. By sending there the Voyager Golden Records aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts that were launched in 1977.

Kesarbai's is the only Indian voice on them. The title of her song there is Jaat Kahaan Ho (जात कहाँ हो)...Where Are You Going? She seems to be asking Voyager and us.

Voyager-  in August 2014 at a distance of 1.919×10¹⁰ km away from earth- may answer that with more accuracy than us, homo sapiens. 

Why did we send Kesarbai and a few others to the stars?

Philip Ball has written a whole book-'The Music Instinct / How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It', 2010- to answer that.

Mr. Ball writes at the start of his book:

"...Fourteen billion miles away from Earth, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music is heading towards new listeners. An alien civilization encountering the Voyager 1 or 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977 and now drifting beyond our solar system, will discover a golden gramophone record on which they can listen to Glenn Gould playing the Prelude and Fugue in C from the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. You couldn’t fit much on a long-playing record in 1977, but there was no room for a more extensive record collection – the main mission of the spacecraft was to photograph and study the planets, not to serve as an interstellar mobile music library. All the same, offering extraterrestrials this glimpse of Bach’s masterwork while denying them the rest of it seems almost an act of cruelty. On the other hand, one scientist feared that including Bach’s entire oeuvre might come across as an act of cosmic boasting..."

Sending Kesarbai's Malkauns- as elaborated by S Anand in The Caravan, September 16 2014- too might come across as an act of cosmic boasting.

Raga Lalat and Raga Malkauns

Artist of disc jacket: Unknown to me

Picture courtesy: HMV/ EMI India and  Blog Anthems for the Nation of Luobaniya

Why Did Mata Hari Become a Household Name?

Today September 18 2014 is 109th Birth Anniversary of Greta Garbo

Richard Attenborough, maker of Gandhi (1982), died recently.

I started taking interest in the Mahatma only after watching the film.

Earlier, throughout my school and college days, I had heard and read only propaganda like stuff about Gandhi. That made me dislike Gandhi.

1969, Gandhi's birth centenary year, and my first at high-school, was particularly bad because they just went on and on with their boring songs, books and speeches.

I think future generations will learn more about Gandhi from the Attenborough film than any books or speeches. This is the power of a well made cinema and visual images.

Jonathan Yardley has written a review of Karen Abbott's book on September 5 2014 in Washington Post. Its title: "Mata Haris of the Civil War".


Mr. Yardley's assumption: readers of WP recognize Mata Hari.

I don't know now, but once Mata Hari was a well known name in middle class Maharashtra.

I often wondered why.

When I saw these pictures of Greta Garbo, from 1931 film "Mata Hari", I seemed to partly understand.

courtesy: FB page 'The Golden Age of Hollywood'

लेगोत् लेगोम् उदच्यते!...But Ram in Hanuman

Independent, UK reported on September 14 2014:

"...Nathan Sawaya has built a global following with works crafted in the blocks that have inspired generations of children. He represents the artistic end of a growing movement among adults for whom Lego is anything but a toy. His giant sculptures, many of them human figures, include Yellow, a man ripping open his own chest and spilling out Lego innards (11,014 pieces make up the work)..."

 Artist: Nathan Sawaya

courtesy: Independent, UK

The picture above reminded me of the legend of Hanuman when he shows how Ram resides in his heart.

विनोबा भावे: सर्वच फार लहान वाटले...When Life is An Affair of Places

Today September 11 2014 is 119th Birth Anniversary of Vinoba Bhave (विनोबा भावे)

Wallace Stevens, Adagia:

“Life is an affair of people not of places. but for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.”

G. K. Chesterton has said : "There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place..."

What if one takes the second way?

Vinoba and Orwell did that. This is what they had to say:

 Vinoba Bhave  (1895-1982), 'जीवन-गाथा', 'ज्ञान ते सांगतो पुन्हा', 2004/2006 :

"...गावात एक मोठा तलाव होता. त्या तलावा  जवळ एक उंच झाड व एक मोठे मंदिर होते. खूप वर्षानंतर जवळजवळ चाळीस वर्षानंतर मला पुन्हा गागोदे गावी जाण्याचा योग आला तेव्हा ते मंदिर, झाड, तलाव सर्वच फार लहान वाटले. तलाव इतका लहान की एका तीरावरून पलीकडील तीरावर दगड फेकणे शक्य होते. झाड इतके लहान की सहज त्यावर चढता येईल. पण बालपणी आपल्या दृष्टीला हे सर्व खूप मोठे दिसत असते .."

(...there was a large lake in the town. Near the lake there was a tall tree and a big temple. After many years almost forty years I happened to go to Gagode. Then the temple, the tree, the lake all were felt to be very small. Lake so small that it was possible to throw a stone from one bank to the other. Tree so small that it could be climbed easily. But during the childhood all this looked big to our eyesight...)


George Orwell (1903-1950). '‘Such, Such Were The Joys’, c 1947:

"...If I had to pass through Eastbourn I would not make a detour to avoid the school: and if I happened to pass the school itself I might even stop for a moment by the low brick wall, with the steep bank running down from it, and look across the flat playing field at the ugly building with the square of asphalt in front of it. And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!..."


Artist: Whitney Darrow,Jr. ,  The New Yorker,  17 July 1948

Not so high when you return as a grown man, kid

Mice with PTSD?

 Alisa Solomon, The Nation, Sept 15 2014:

“… Maus became the proof text for academic study of the transgenerational transmission of trauma and its representation. It was in her discussion of Maus that the scholar Marianne Hirsch coined the term “postmemory” to describe the experience of second-generation children being so intimately and powerfully shaped by the stories and images of events that preceded them that they take on the force of their own memories.

Spiegelman likely still wishes to get out from under the shadow of the giant mouse—“a monument I built to my father,” though “I never dreamed [it] would get so big,” as a strip in Portrait puts it. But Maus is one of the great artistic works of the twentieth century, so what can he do? It is also a monument to the medium he has championed, and expanded, for decades.”

  

Assaf Sharon, The New York Review of Books, September 25 2014:

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long ago become a shouting match over moral superiority. With seventy Israelis and more than two thousand Palestinians, most of them civilians, dead, the latest round of violence in Gaza, too, is being analyzed and discussed mostly on ethical grounds. But as fighting goes on, moral condemnation will likely do little to prevent the next round…”

 Maus, 1991 by a legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman is considered one of the greatest books of 20th century. 

According to Wikipedia " It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The book uses postmodern techniques—most strikingly in its depiction of races of humans as different kinds of animals, with Jews as mice, Germans as cats and non-Jewish Poles as pigs."

This is what Spiegelman feels about Israel today.

"I've spent a lifetime trying to NOT think about Israel—deciding it has nothin more to do with me, a diasporist, than the rest of the World's Bad News on Parade. Israel is like some badly battered child with PTSD who has grown up to batter others."

(PTSD= Posttraumatic stress disorder)

Artist: Art Spiegelman, The Nation

Vodka: Nobody in the World Knows What it is Made out of

The Hindu, August 27 2014: "Kerala bars to be closed by September 12. 15 days’ notice will be served on all bars except 20 bars in five-star hotels."

 
Mark Lawrence Schrad:

“…Yet even as drinkers of the world raise a toast to vodka, we should all be reminded of its dark past: the generations of Russians who found not only consolation at the bottom of the bottle but also grief, illness, and death. We must remember that such incredible human costs were—and still are—attributable not just to the lowly drunkard, but to the autocratic political system that reaped unimaginable profits from the people’s misery, generation after generation.

With history in mind, the cowboy philosopher’s alcoholic musings sound even more fitting: “Now that is the whole story to Vodka,” Rogers surmised. “Nobody in the world knows what it is made out of, and the reason I tell you this is that the story of Vodka is the story of Russia. Nobody knows what Russia is made out of, or what it is liable to cause its inhabitants to do next.”

The story of vodka truly is the story of Russia: not just its culture and society, but its history and statecraft as well. Whether it can ever break free of the shackles of vodka politics—and the autocratic system that nurtures it and is nurtured by it—may well be the most fundamental political question facing the future of Russia.”

 

Old Russian Proverb:

“A man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end—and in the meantime, it is good to drink a sip of vodka.” 

 The Times of India, July 2 2013:

"India's vodka consumption declined 3% last calendar — first fall in more than a decade — suggesting the odorless spirit's waning honeymoon with the youth."


The Economist, December 20 2001:
"...It may be small—each molecule is less than a billionth of a metre long, and consists of a handful of atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen—but ethyl alcohol makes an excellent time machine. People have enjoyed alcoholic drinks since prehistoric times, making drinking one of the few strands that runs throughout the history of western civilisation. Appreciating the art, music or literature of long-vanished cultures can require years of study; recreating their drinks, and comparing them to what we enjoy today, is simple in comparison, not to mention more fun. The consumption of alcohol is so widespread in history, says Patrick McGovern, an archaeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania, that drinking is, in effect, “a universal language”.."

When I drank little more than occasionally, I liked vodka, beer and rum. I hated (and still do) whiskey's taste including even Scotch's.

These days I hardly drink and don't miss it but I enjoy many aspects of drinking. For instance: What do people drink, how much and how they change in the process?

The chart in The Economist dated June 17 2013 is very informative.

China's national liquor baijiu accounts for a whopping 99.5% of all spirits consumed there. So China does not even feature in rankings of the best-known internationally consumed spirits in The Economist charts. Indi

India does figure there in rum and gin charts.  I wonder how. Isn't India's national liquor arrack/ toddy/ hathbhatti (हाथभट्टी)/desi-liquor (देशी दारू)?

Among branded liquor, Vodka is the most popular in the world, 4.44 litres, billion.

On Vodka drinking, Serge Schmemann wrote in NYT April 15 2007:

 "...The European Union would define vodka simply as diluted ethyl alcohol, which is, of course, what it is. ...vodka is a Russian word, a diminutive of “water” (before you adopt an ironic smile, be aware that “whiskey” comes from the Gaelic for “water of life”)...My beef is with the whole brouhaha over a liquor whose greatest, and only, virtue is that it is colorless and tasteless...the proliferation of premium vodkas, in ever fancier bottles and at ever higher prices, is understandable, given the decadence of the Western world. The endless debates about which vodka “tastes” better are less so..."

Running Amuck dated November 16, 1904, 

cover of the satirical magazine Puck depicting Russia—clutching a jug of vodka—stumbling into war against a Japanese hornet. 

Artist: Unknown to me

Courtesy: 

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 
                                  and

‘Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State’, 2014 by Mark Lawrence Schrad

No Space for Sindhu but for Kvitova, Bencic and Krunić!

Please read my earlier post "Simona Halep or Hans Rudi Erdt's Lady Tennis Player" dated August 26 2014 here.


It's so sad but NOT surprising that Loksatta, Pune edition and The Times of India, Pune edition dated September 1 2014 has NO picture of P V Sindhu wearing her SECOND bronze medal of WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP at Li-Ning BWF World Badminton Championships 2014 on Aug 31 2014.

Remember that Sindhu kind of made history. No Indian sports-person has that kind of record.

Loksatta has a picture of Petra Kvitová on page 14!

The Times of India has pictures of Belinda Bencic and Aleksandra Krunić , female tennis players and Carolina Marín!

Following picture,  Sindhu at extreme left, is courtesy: BWF — Badminton World Federation.

Bertolt Brecht: Labor Day Remembrance: Was Young Alexander Alone?

Today September 1 2014 is  Labor Day in the US
 

Rick Perlstein, The New York Times, August 28 2014:

"...One abandoned idea documented in his (Nelson Lichtenstein) most recent book, “A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor,” haunts me. Powerful people in the Democratic Party, like Senator Robert Wagner of New York, used to insist that the job of liberalism was to penetrate the “black box” of the corporation and turn the workplace into a more democratic institution..."

Bertolt Brecht (1896-1956), 1935:

"Questions From a Worker Who Reads

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ? 

And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times ? 

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them ? 

Over whom did the Caesars triumph ?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ? 

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves. 

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone ? 

Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him ? 

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep ?  

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it ? 

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors ?  

Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill ? 

So many reports.  

So many questions."

 

Artist:  Frank Cotham, The New Yorker, February 3 2014


I love this cartoon but on second thoughts I would modify its caption thus:

"Your people will remember you for not sacrificing  thousands of them by not building a pyramid."