'घरकुली' एकटी आणि अडकलेली 'कुलवधू'...Henrik Ibsen@190

#HenrikIbsen190
Today March 20 2018 is 190th birth anniversary of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Ibsen's 'A Doll's House', 1879 became a very popular play in Maharashtra of 20th century.  The play  was translated into Marathi - Gharkul (घरकुल ), 1941 by Anant Kanekar (अनंत काणेकर). Also M G Rangnekar's (मो.ग.रांगणेकर) play 'Kulvadhu' (कुलवधू) is inspired by it.

I have also felt that Jabbar Patel's (जब्बार पटेल), 1982 Marathi movie 'Umbartha' (उंबरठा )- featuring brilliantly acted Nora by Smita Pail (स्मिता पाटील)- was influenced by it.

This is how Ibsen's play ends: 

"...Nora (taking her bag). Ah, Torvald, the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen.

Helmer. Tell me what that would be!

Nora. Both you and I would have to be so changed that—. Oh,

Torvald, I don‘t believe any longer in wonderful things happening.

Helmer. But I will believe in it. Tell me? So changed that—?

Nora. That our life together would be a real wedlock. Good‐bye. (She goes out through the hall.)

Helmer (sinks down on a chair at the door and buries his face in his hands). Nora! Nora! (Looks round, and rises.) Empty. She is gone. (Ahope flashes across his mind.) The most wonderful thing of all—?

(The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.)"

I read the play while in school and it made a deep impression on me. 

Hilton Als says in The New Yorker, March 10 2014:

"...Actually, part of what makes the story feel so desperate and urgent in our hearts—we never want it to end—is that it so resembles life’s rhythms, with its various elisions and polite misdeeds and yearnings, and yet it’s better than reality, since “A Doll’s House” cannot be explained away, or treated merely as a distant object; once it enters our consciousness, it sweeps us up in its emotional irresolution. It is a knowing work but an innocent one.."

The most wonderful thing I read about it was: The sound of a door shutting was not just heard below but all over Europe!

As I have said earlier on this blog,  I was always scared in my childhood if mother would do Nora some day and later I had the same fear about my wife. 

Hilton Als concludes  his review with these words: "...Before Nora leaves, she tells Torvald that he’s a stranger to her, and she can’t live in a house with a stranger. But that’s not true. Torvald was Nora’s self, or that part of herself which was once ravenous for the security that comes from being a citizen of a limited, calculable world."

I agree with Mr. Als: Most of us want to be a citizen of a limited, calculable world.

                                                             Isolated and trapped?

'Room in New York', 1932

Artist: Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

Gail Levin, ‘Edward Hopper: the art and the artist’, 1980:

“...In ‘Room in New York’, an oil painting of 1932, a man reads his newspaper, while the woman he is ignoring turns halfheartedly toward a piano and picks out a tune. The viewer, looking in through the window, has been assigned the role of voyeur...”

' मी लाय' कत्तल@50...Kill Anything that Moves

#MaiLaiMassacre50  #मीलायकत्तल

Today March 16 2018 is 50th anniversary of one of the sorriest chapters in human history: The Mai Lai Massacre (मी लाय कत्तल), Vietnam

Barbara W. Tuchman , ‘The March of Folly : From Troy to Vietnam’, 1984:

“Ignorance was not a factor in the American endeavor in Vietnam pursued through five successive presidencies, although it was to become an excuse. Ignorance of country and culture there may have been, but not ignorance of the contra-indications, even the barriers, to achieving the objectives of American policy. All the conditions and reasons precluding a successful outcome were recognized or foreseen at one time or another during the thirty years of our involvement. American intervention was not a progress sucked step by step into an unsuspected quagmire. At no time were policy-makers unaware of the hazards, obstacles and negative developments. American intelligence was adequate, informed observation flowed steadily from the field to the capital, special investigative missions were repeatedly sent out, independent reportage to balance professional optimism—when that prevailed—was never lacking. The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.

The question raised is why did the policy-makers close their minds to the evidence and its implications? This is the classic symptom of folly: refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence, addiction to the counter-productive. The “why” of this refusal and this addiction may disclose itself in the course of retracing the tale of American policy-making in Vietnam...”

Nick Turse:

“As I came to see the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants — the endless slaughter that wiped out civilians day after day, month after month, year after year throughout the Vietnam War — was neither accidental nor unforeseeable.”

Kendrick Oliver, History Today, February 2006:

“...The silence that generally surrounds the massacre in contemporary American discourse contrasts not just with the urgent babble of voices offering opinions on the subject at the turn of the 1960s, but also with the persistence of debates about the Vietnam War as a whole...

... Americans, indeed, were far more interested in the character and fate of the perpetrators than those of their victims. As many media commentators noted, there seemed to be nothing in the background of the soldiers involved that explained how they had come to engage so willingly in slaughter...”

Max Hastings, London Review of Books, January 25 2018:

"...The damage inflicted by My Lai on the image of the US and its armed forces as ‘crusaders for freedom’ persists to this day. As so often with stories of this kind, the institutionalised cover-up and the surge of public support for those who carried out the offences, make even uglier reading than the narrative of the original massacre. The apologists for C Company, and indeed for the US army, tried to make a case that, while it may not have been entirely acceptable to murder Vietnamese peasants, it was understandable and excusable. .."

Photo courtesy: Ronald Haeberle, November 1969/ Getty

Viet Thanh Nguyen, ‘Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War', 2016:

“...On a smaller scale and in the middle of the country, the Son My museum that commemorates the My Lai massacre focuses on the singular tragedy of the five hundred people murdered—some raped—by American troops. The aftermath of their story is the same as the common narrative, the triumphant revolution eventually transforming the war-blasted landscape of village and province with verdant fields, new bridges, lively schools, and lovely people. While the photographs that decorate these museums feature real people, the captions underlining them have stamped them flat, as in the Son My museum’s display of Ronald Haeberle’s most famous photograph, underwritten with this: “The last moment of life for villager women and children under a silk cotton tree before being murdered by the U.S. soldiers.” Whoever these civilians and soldiers were in their complex lives and complicated histories, they exist in the caption as victims and villains in a drama that justifies the revolution and the party. The caption as genre echoes the slogan as genre, from Follow Uncle Ho’s Shining Example to Nothing Is More Precious than Independence and Freedom. Slogans like these exemplify the Communist Party’s story of itself, which has become, for now, the official story of the country and the nation...”

महात्मा फुले आणि आईड्स ऑफ मार्च....Mahatma Phule and Ides of March

#IdesOfMarch

Josephine Quinn, The New York Review of Books, March 2018:

"...Altogether, later sources plausibly claim, Caesar fought more than four million Gauls, killed one million, and took as many prisoners—most of whom would have been sold into slavery. The Germans too suffered terrible losses, including one episode when Caesar imprisoned a delegation of German migrants who came to negotiate a truce, stormed their camp, killed the men who resisted, and then sent his cavalry to run down and slaughter the women and children as they fled. Those who were not caught drowned in the Rhine. Other sources tell us that 400,000 people died. Was that the culture then? Not everyone’s, it seems, or not exactly: although the Senate voted sacrifices of thanksgiving on news of the victory, Cato the Younger and other senators proposed that Caesar be extradited to the Germans, not for the massacre itself, but for breaking a truce...."

महात्मा फुले यांनी जुलियस सीझरच्या हत्येबद्दल लिहल आहे..... आज मार्च १५, २०१८ला त्याची नोंद....   

Richard Johnson as Cassius, John Gielgud as Julius Caesar, and Jason Robards as Brutus in Stuart Burge’s film Julius Caesar, 1970
courtesy: International Pictures/Photofest

स्टीफन हॉकिंग आणि जयंत नारळीकर ....Things of Which We Cannot See the Bottom Are Not Necessarily Profound

#STEPHENHAWKING

 

Alexander Waugh, The Spectator, 2010 reviewing Stephen Hawking's 'The Grand Design' :

"If Hawking were really serious about answering the ‘ultimate questions of life’ he should have realised long ago that mathematics and geometry are not the right tools for the task....Stephen Hawking has written a short, occasionally facetious, but generally reliable and informative history of classical and quantum mechanics. That is all. That he has adverted to it as an answer to the ultimate question of life is both annoying and inaccurate, but no doubt commercially sensible. Richard Feynman, the American physicist on whose work Hawking bases much of his own theory, wrote: ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ Nothing has changed since Feynman’s death in 1988, and although Hawking may have a far deeper knowledge of quantum mechanics than anyone else on this planet, he still doesn’t understand it. With a little less chutzpah he might also have realised that things of which we cannot see the bottom are not necessarily profound."

John Horgan, ‘Hey, Physics, Get Real!’, 2011:

“.... But more than new ideas, physics desperately needs new facts. Budget cuts have forced into retirement the biggest American particle accelerator, the Tevatron, which helped flesh out the standard model of particle physics. Physicists pining for new data are now pinning their hopes on the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland. If and when that hypersensitive contraption gets up to full speed, perhaps it will stumble into a discovery so bizarre that it entices theorists lost in simulated and parallel universes back to reality.

Until then, I tell my students, if you're looking for science books that pose profound metaphysical puzzles, don't bother with the physics best sellers. Instead, check out works by Oliver Sachs, V.S. Ramachandran, and other intrepid explorers of the brain. Science's most thrilling frontier is the one inside our skulls.”

 

मी स्टीफन हॉकिंग यांची दोन पुस्तके*  विकत घेतली पण त्यातले एकही पान कधी वाचले नाही.  (* खूप महाग, हार्ड कव्हर ठोकळा  'God Created the Integers', 2005  आणि स्वस्त पेपरबॅक 'A Brief History of Time', 1988)

मी त्यांचे एक चरित्र मात्र विकत घेतले आणि थोडे फार वाचले आहे. त्यातील डॉक्टर नारळीकरांवरील भाग वाचा.

"...As well as developing his theory of the origin of the Universe, Hoyle acted as supervisor to a select group of students. One of his charges was a graduate student named Jayant Narlikar. Narlikar had been assigned the task of working through some of the mathematics for Hoyle’s theory as part of the research material for his Ph.D. He also happened to occupy the office next to Hawking’s. Hawking became very interested in Narlikar’s equations. Without too much persuasion, Narlikar shared the research material he was working on and Hawking began to develop the theories further.  During the next few months Hawking spent more and more time walking between his friend’s office and his own, clutching pages full of  mathematical interpretations in one hand and leaning heavily on his newly acquired walking stick with the other.

At this point it should be emphasized that Hawking had no malicious intent toward Hoyle or, indeed, Narlikar. He was quite simply curious about the material and was floundering with his own projects. The equations and their meaning were fascinating and perhaps initially more stimulating than his own research. Besides which, the whole approach within the department was one of shared goals and ideals.

Before too long things came to a head. Hoyle decided to make a public announcement of his findings at a meeting of the Royal Society in London. Although it was certainly not without precedent, some of his colleagues considered that he was being overly keen in doing this because the work had not been refereed. Hoyle gave his talk to around a hundred people; at the end there was warm applause and the usual post-lecture hubbub of conversation. Then he asked if there were any questions. Naturally Hawking had attended and had followed the arguments closely. He stood up slowly, clutching his stick. The room fell silent.

“The quantity you’re talking about diverges,” he said.

Subdued murmurs passed around the audience. The gathered scientists saw immediately that, if Hawking’s assertion were correct, Hoyle’s latest offering would be shown to be false.

“Of course it doesn’t diverge,” Hoyle replied.

“It does,” came Hawking’s defiant reply.

Hoyle paused and surveyed the room for a moment. The audience was absolutely silent. “How do you know?” he snapped.

“Because I worked it out,” Hawking said slowly.

An embarrassed laugh passed through the room. This was the last thing Hoyle wanted to hear. He was furious with the young upstart. But any enmity between the two men was short lived—Hawking had demonstrated himself to be too good a physicist for that. But Hoyle considered Hawking’s action to be unethical and told him so. In return, Hawking and others pointed out that Hoyle had been unethical in announcing results that had not been verified. The only innocent party, who no doubt had to bear the full brunt of Hoyle’s anger, was the middleman, Narlikar...."

(‘STEPHEN HAWKING: A Life in Science’ by Michael White and John Gribbin)

   सौजन्य : कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स