मला अलीकडे आर के नारायण यांच्या गाईड मध्ये आणि जी ए कुलकर्णी यांच्या स्वामी मध्ये साम्य वाटू लागले आहे...  गाईड, १९६५ या सिनेमातील शैलेंद्र यांनी लिहलेले आणि एस डी बर्मन यांनी गायलेले अप्रतिम गीत पहा...  "वहाँ कौन है तेरा/  मुसाफिर जाएगा कहाँ /दम ले ले घड़ी भर /ये छइयाँ पाएगा कहाँ/ वहाँ कौन है तेरा / मुसाफिर जाएगा कहाँ/ वहाँ कौन है तेरा...  बीत गये दिन, प्यार के पलछिन/ सपना बनी वो रातें / भूल गये वो, तू भी भुला दे/ प्यार की वो मुलाक़ातें - २ सब दूर अन्धेरा, मुसाफ़िर जायेगा कहाँ ...   ..read more

 Cody Cassidy's "How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History's Deadliest Catastrophes", 2023 is an exciting book, a thriller. I refer to chapter on "How to Survive the Ice Age". I did not understand everything in it such as stuff on carbon dioxide but stuff on mammoth is telling.  Our ancestors had to hunt mammoth for survival. And they were some brave people. "...The evidence is by now unequivocal: Stone Age steppe cultures not only hunted mammoths, they did so to near exclusion. In modern times, the gre ..read more

I read Diana Preston's "Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World" sometime ago. Reading it I realized, FDR cared for India's independence although he was so unwell at Yalta. Some examples from the book: "...Roosevelt deliberately set out to woo Stalin, whom he saw as the leader of an emerging superpower. One means by which he hoped to win Stalin’s trust was by distancing himself from Churchill, the leader of an empire in decline, much to the latter’s dismay. Pleased with the opportunity it gave him to engineer separate meetings with Stalin, Roosevelt a ..read more

 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 ..read more

 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 themsel ..read more

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 5 202 ..read more

  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 ..read more

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 outl ..read more

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 beautifu ..read more

 सप्टेंबर २०२३, माझा मित्र सतीश कुलकर्णी याने मला मिरजेतील एक फोटो पाठवला. तो सोबत लावला आहे.  मिरजेच्या एकेकाळच्या मध्यभागी असलेल्या किसान चौकातील एका स्टेज चे पाडणे त्यात सुरु आहे असे वाटते. त्या स्टेजवरून झालेली कित्येक भाषणे आम्ही ऐकली आहेत. मला असे वाटते की बहुदा इंदिरा गांधी सुद्धा तिथे काही काळासाठी आल्या होत्या.  मोठे करून चित्र पहाल तर तुम्हाला तिथे "ओके हेअर ड्रेसिंग सलून" ही पाटी सुद्धा दिसेल... ते दुकान आमच्या डोळ्यादेखत १९७०च्या उत्तरभागात सुरु झाले आहे.  ..read more