Leave her to heaven.

The world is never weary of Marilyn Monroe. The first time I saw her was in Niagara, the 1953 noir flick. She was the faithless wife planning to murder her husband, the hapless Joseph Cotton. Jean Peters, the better half of a fellow honeymooning couple unwittingly stumbled on her secret lover and got caught in the web. Marilyn was rivetting. Andy Warhol used the publicity shot from the same film as the basis for his famous Marilyn Diptych, Acrylic and silk screen ink on canvas,1962. The Tate Gallery caption to it reads inter alia: “Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.” http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=15976. Very prophetic, what? (A diptych , by the way, is a painting in two panels. http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=88.) There’s another possibility as well. Maybe, Warhol’s multiple-image, multiple-colour-combo metaphor is a pointer that, even in adulation, Marilyn is no more a person but merely a mass-consumption commodity. I wonder what Warhol, as “an expert in subverting notions of celebrity” (as the Publisher’s Weekly once famously tagged him) had he access to it, would have made of the telltale still from the verboten 16 mm Marilyn Monroe film shot in the 1950s and now consigned forever to a vault by a reverent MM devotee. Would he had blown it up and once again worked his assembly line, multiple exposure magic on it? Interestingly enough, Warhol shot in his Factory with a second-hand 16 mm Bolex camera films such as Chelsea Girls, Empire and Blow Job that have since become underground classics. http://www.warholprints.com/Bio.Andy.Warhol.html. "They're experimental films; I call them that because I don't know what I'm doing. I'm interested in audience reaction to my films: my films now will be experiments, in a certain way, on testing their reactions," is how Warhol described his work in 'Nothing to Lose', his interview by G Berg in the May1967 issue of Cahiers du Cinema in English. Sam Ishii-Gonzalès, a teacher of aesthetics and film history at New York University and the Film/Media Studies Program at Hunter College, puts a different interpretation on the most famous Warholism: "In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes." http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/14/blow_job.html. “…for Warhol, this "everyone" are the refuse of American society, and this refuse includes himself,” he argues. So, it is not just “a prophetic statement about the media celebrity accorded to serial killers, Monika Lewinsky, Amy Fisher, etc.” Did Warhol’s "everyone" include his already dead Marilyn(s), his close-to-dying Liz, his Brigitte Bardot (“BB” to her French fans) wrapped in the French tricolour and his Mao (“the ultimate star”) based on the portrait photograph in the Little Red Book?

The Red Book.

I wish I could tell you with a straight face that I learned the story of The Ramayana from my father and mother or by listening to kirtans or by watching Ramleela. It simply won't be the truth. And, although I haven't sworn with my right hand on the Bhagwatgeeta that whatever I write here will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I just cannot bring myself to lie to you so early in the game. So, I shall stick to the truth. In the bottom part of a book cabinet in my childhood home in Khetwadi, there was lurking a 12" by 7" hardbound red volume. It was waiting for me to discover it, I guess. In this priceless tome was the story of The Ramayana retold in a series of four colour pictures (one on every glossy page, back to back) drawn by someone who seemed to have learned the craft at the feet of Raja Rammohan Roy. The story started with King Dashratha's Putrakameshti Yagna (the fire sacrifice for progeny) and ended with Rama, Laxman and Sita's return from vanavasa (banishment to the forest). I read it so often and handled it so roughly that my red book got tattered in a few years. I cannot recall where it finally vanished. (Maybe, Mother Earth opened up and swallowed it like she did Sita.) I wish I had the sense to handle it with kid gloves. Had I done so, Aditi, Avantika, Armaan and Anika could have enjoyed it as much as I did. I shudder to see them reading the atrociously illustrated and slovenly written Amar Chitra Katha comic books and have a secret Fahrenheit 451 fantasy about the monstrosities.