1871

Saraswati:

Two hands kneaded the dough, broke off a piece, rolled it into a ball and ran the rolling pin over it. She picked up the rolled out circle of dough and threw it into the air, her nimble fingers making a game of the catching and the throwing. She landed her little continent of dough onto the griddle. The flame shuddered in the earthen fireplace, throwing a light on Ma's face. Drops of sweat shone on her skin like early morning dew reluctant to be woken by the day. Ma turned and looked and found that Dhundiraj had crawled on all fours to the door where he was digging the earth, readying to eat the mud.

She leaped up and picked him onto her lap. She pushed a finger into his mouth and picked out the mud. Slapped him across his face, twice over, and dumped him on the ground.

Dhundiraj howled.

Dwarkabai: Cry all you want.

A thought struck her and she got up and found a torn bit of saree. She tore it further, and tied the two pieces onto her child's hands, making horse hooves of them.

"Go on, eat more mud, your hands are going to stay like this"

Lying in his cradle, the child looked one glance at Dwarkabai, and one at the sky. There was a single cloud in the blue expanse... After a few seconds, as the cradle stopped rocking, the cloud started moving, and came up, right over Dhundiraj. His crying suddenly stopped. He lay quietly in his rocking bed, a mute witness to an event that thinned the boundaries dividing the worlds.

His pupils dilated and floated like boats towards his nose. A strange bird on long grey legs settled near the cradle. He was composed of a porous grey material.

Ma had covered the embers of the fireplace and was sitting, lost in thought, when the silence woke her up. Why had Dhundiraj's crying stopped so suddenly? She ran to the cradle with her heart in her mouth. Dhundiraj looked like he was in a samadhi. His palm was half open like it was Tukaram's palm holding the kartal. His face had a unsettling smile, but he made no sound and the cradle was still. As though that small piece of cloud in the sky had hypnotised him.

And then, the sudden excitement in the atmosphere subsided, restoring movement to the air once more, and bore that cloud away. The cloud had barely moved when the cradle began to rock again, and Dhundiraj came out of his trance and cried out aloud.

Dwarkabai was relieved " You scared me, son. Oof, forgive me! I will never tie your hands again".

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5th annual tour B.A. Bamber's

Dime Show

The Planet arium

Natural Scenery

The Ill Fated Ship

The Highland Lover's Courtship for Marriage

Statutary

Miscellaneous- Numerous Comic SCenes

Electricity witout Extra Charge

Positively everyything advertised on this Bill will be Shown

Only 10 cents for Anybody and Everybody

we paid for the patches of light that slowly swam out of the darkness. Not constant patches, they were soft outlines of shapes that slowly revealed themselves, aided by our willing eyes, as illusions of the world as we know it. Heavenly dramas controlled by us this time. The stars came on and went off with beautiful precision above painted houses. Or we made day, where silly suitors knelt in yellow sunlight. His lips could move, repititively, the way you could say suitors lips do, especially when they are pressing a fruitless suit. Thick pears bunched up on the trees above him. A ship tossed. A man fell off his bed. Three things- a light source, a glass plate with a picture on it and a screen, and the pictures we were making were beginning to flicker with signs of imminent life.

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Professor Pepper on The Siege of Delhi

The optical effects were assisted by various sounds in imitation of war's alarms, for the production of which more volunteers than were absolutely required would occasionally trespass behind the secenes, and produce those terrific sounds that some persons of a nervous temperament would say were really stunning"

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Lord Napier, Governor of Madras wanted the development of an Indian style that 'deals with the ideal and the allegorical', in which 'the virtues, the graces.. and other abstract conceptions and agencies are clothed in human forms which owe their majesty or their terrors to the Artist"

He saw the endless possibilities of re-imagining the treasures of the epics "All that is needed to promulgate their beauty and fame is that, in their purest and nobler passages and with the powers of European Art, they should engage in the service of the national pencil as they have fastened on the national memory and animated the national voice"

European perpective, the drawing of objects, people and space, as 'they really are', in relationship to each other, in the visible world, was being retaught to the native. The idea somewhere was also that this would change the way the native thought, it would enable the process of rational thinking, so lacking in the idol worshippers.. It seemed implied that the flat, frontal images that were popularly made and worshipped, were representative of a equally childish way of judging and looking at the world. The gods needed to be 'unstraightened' a bit to straighten out the native! Perhaps, once seen in perspective, they would lose their ubiquitous power.

matsya

The screen of a framed picture is like the sky, the abode of the gods. A piece of sky before me where from his world, God looks me in the eye. The person on the screen sees me as I see him, he knows me, I can see it in his eyes.

Should he look away at some one else on the screen, then what is the picture to me?

A little girl wants to visit Sharukh Khan's house in Bandra.. he knows me, she says, when her mother points out the bad manners of barging into an unknown person's house. "He sees me from the television every day".

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