एकशिंग्या सिंधू संस्कृतीमधील बागेत....James Thurber, Satyajit Ray and The Indus Valley Civilisation

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Modesty of History”:

“A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.” 

जेम्स थर्बर या महान कलावंताने 'The Unicorn in the Garden' या नावाची गोष्ट द न्यू यॉर्कर मध्ये १९३९ मध्ये प्रसिद्ध केली. त्याची नंतर ऍनिमेशन फिल्म झाली: १९५३.

युनिकॉर्न हे नाव सिंधू संस्कृतीशी निगडीत आहे...

“...A puzzling, one-horned animal is very frequently depicted on the seals (over 60 per cent of the Mohenjo-daro seals and around 46 per cent of the Harappan), and is also modelled in several one-horned terracotta figurines (from Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Chanhu-daro). It is generally termed a ‘unicorn’, a creature legendarily associated with India by ancient Greek writers; its zoological identity, if it actually existed, is much debated....” (Andrew Robinson , ‘The Indus: lost civilizations’, 2015)

शिवाय सत्यजित रे यांचा ह्या सगळ्याशी संबंध असा:

 “...About the aesthetic quality of the Indus seals there is virtual unanimity. Wheeler’s admiration has already been mentioned. Marshall considered the best seals to be ‘distinguished by a breadth of treatment and a feeling for line and plastic form that has rarely been surpassed in glyptic art’. Piggott – no admirer of Indus aesthetics, as we know – nonetheless conceded that the seals were ‘frequently carved with a brilliant sureness of touch’. Independent India’s great artist Satyajit Ray – a graphic designer and illustrator who became a writer and celebrated film director – was so enchanted by the seals that he wrote a short story inspired by the ‘unicorn’. Speaking for myself, I first became interested in the Indus civilization after seeing its seals...” (ibid)

(Ray’s  ‘Ek Shringo Abhijan’, adventure of Professor Shonku:

“Shonku goes to Tibet, to find out about a Unicorn which is reported to be seen there. In the adventure, Shonku discovers a place where everybody's dreams come true... a Utopia.”)

(बहुदा) पत्नी, उठवले गेल्याबद्दल प्रचंड चिडलेली : "एकशिंग्या हा पौराणिक (mythical) प्राणी आहे"

Hafez and Heisenberg

 One of the best books I have read of all time is 'When We Cease to Understand the World', 2020 by Benjamín Labatut.

"A year before the Munich conference, Heisenberg had become a monster.

In June 1925, while he was working at the University of Göttingen, an allergic reaction to pollen had deformed his face so that he was no longer recognizable. His lips looked like a rotten peach with the skin ready to come off, his eyelids puffed up until he could barely see. Unable to tolerate even one more day of spring, he boarded a ship to travel as far as possible from the microscopic particles that were torturing him.

His destiny was Heligoland—the name translates as “holy land”—Germany’s only outlying island, so dry and inclement that trees barely rise from the ground and not a single flower blossoms amid its stones...."

"...Sweating from head to toe, he (Heisenberg) spent the day memorizing the West-Eastern Divan, a book of poems by Goethe that a previous guest had left behind in his room. He read the poems aloud, over and over, and certain verses echoed from his room and through the empty hallways of the hotel, to the bafflement of the other guests, who heard them as if they were the whispers of a ghost. Goethe had written them in 1819, inspired by the Sufi mystic Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, known simply as Hafez. The German genius encountered the great Persian poet of the fourteenth century in a bad translation published in his home country and came to believe he had received the book at the behest of the divinity. He identified with him so closely that his voice changed completely, melding with that of the man who had sung the glories of God and wine four hundred years before. Hafez had been a drunken saint, a mystic and a hedonist. He devoted himself to prayer, poetry and alcohol. When he turned sixty years old, he traced a circle in the desert sand, sat down in its centre, and swore not to rise until he had touched the mind of Allah, the one and only God, mighty and sublime. He spent forty days in silence, tormented by the sun and wind, and when he broke his fast with a cup of wine given to him by a man who had found him on the verge of death, he felt a second consciousness awaken within him, superimposing itself over his own. That other voice dictated more than five hundred poems to him, helping Hafez to become the pinnacle of Persian literature...."

 inside a 19th-century copy of the Divān of Hafez (courtesy: Wikipedia)

पर्वत स्तनाकार...60 Years of Silicone Breast Implants

 विंदा करंदीकर, जातक, १९६८-१९८३: "स्तन्यसूक्त : स्तनाकार आकाश । पर्वत स्तनाकार ।..." (मूळ प्रसिद्धी : मौज, १९६०)

In January 2022, Witness History Podcast of BBC  had: "How a Texas woman became the first in the world to have the popular cosmetic procedure in 1962."

Kira Cochrane

"...The implanted breast is obviously sexual, but has often lost some, if not all, sexual sensation. It represents fertility, but can interfere with breastfeeding. Kimball sees it as an image of health, which is also often the case for women who have had mastectomies, whose breast implants allow them to look in the mirror without seeing their surgical scars, without being reminded of a horrible disease. But unfortunately the implanted breast isn't exactly synonymous with health. The function of the breast that's enhanced for cosmetic reasons is its sexual display. The implanted breast represents a "perfect, unused breast", says Marilyn Yalom, author of A History of the Breast, "and I say unused, because they're not there for nursing. And that attitude goes back at least to the Renaissance, where you have men not wanting their wives to breastfeed, because the breasts will be used by the babies, they'll change their shape, and so wet nurses come in. There have been times and places, historically, where it was uncommon for women of a certain class to breastfeed."

The popularity of cosmetic breast implants also reflects just how utterly in thrall we are, as a culture, to gender distinctions. The breasts are the biggest physical sign we have of difference, and perhaps, at base, that's why they're so enormously popular. "It's an external symbol of a woman's gender, and we need and want that affirmation," says Biggs...."

 Breast augmentation: Late-generation models of silicone-gel breast implants, a spherical model (left), a shaped model (center), and a hemispheric model (right).

courtesy: Wikipedia