‘Be orderly & regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild & original in your work.’
- Flaubert
Part 1 of my long-ish conversation with Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. I used the occasion of his third major book 'The Song of the Cell' to talk about his writings, India, the Self, and more. I think many of you might find his words & thoughts of interest.
#cancer #gene #cellular #india #columbiauniversity
https://scroll.in/article/1040661/the-siddhartha-mukherjee-interview-even-mental-diseases-have-an-impact-on-cellular-behaviour
Where does the word ‘bazaar’ come from?
Hittite (wahā)+ Avestan/Sanskrit (čarana)
A place where you circulate to make purchases.
#etymology #sanskrit #avestan #indoeuropean #bazaar #persia #India
In Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto’, a love story b/w an Indian journalist & a married Japanese woman called Sachiko. In it, Iyer writes about a Japanese word ‘hidamari’: a small patch of sunlight along the otherwise cold stone of a nearby shrine. He writes: “In the dark of the Kyoto winter, Sachiko was my ‘hidamari’”. While thinking of that line, I asked an AI bot to paint me Sachiko - a young Japanese woman, worn out but still hopeful, as it were done by Caravaggio.
"But what a path it has been! I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment & sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew."
-- Siddhartha, Herman Hesse [translated by Hilda Rosner]
The sense of calm around this Chola bronze which I saw a few weeks ago is perhaps understandable, for the artisans were supreme craftsman; but harder to fathom is the inwardness of her gaze, the sense of being there and yet being beyond the here-and-now. Traditional treatises stipulate that Hindu deities have perfectly straight shoulders unlike her. She is, all too human.
['Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, mother of "Madhurantaka" Chozhan | Chola dynasty, ca. 990 | Bronze
The Virgin Annunciate, marble, c. 1455/1460, Mino da Fiesole -- that I saw a few weekends ago. There is a hint of a smile, there is melancholy too, upon learning she is with child.
