मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Friday, November 07, 2025

The New Original Wonder Woman Aired First 50 Years Ago...Lynda Carter

 Wikipedia: 

"Warner Bros. and ABC did not give up on the idea, and instead developed another TV film pilot, The New Original Wonder Woman, which aired in November 1975. This film was directed by Leonard Horn and starred Lynda Carter, and its Wonder Woman more closely matched the original character created by William Moulton Marston, down to the World War II setting (Crosby would later claim that she was offered the chance to reprise the role in that film). This second film was more successful and immediately led to production of the series Wonder Woman."


 

Wednesday, November 05, 2025

G A Kulkarni's 'Astistotra' and Joseph Conrad's 'The Mirror of the Sea'

 जीएंचे अस्तिस्तोत्र जोसेफ कॉनरॅड यांच्या The Mirror of the Sea , 1906 कडून आले आहे का?

The Mirror of the Sea is Joseph Conrad's true-life account of his seventeen-year odyssey at sea, told through a series of essays. Portraying the ocean as a metaphor against which men could measure themselves, Conrad hints at the themes of his later fictional works.

जी कुलकर्णी :

"... समुद्राचा अवजड करडा पडदा स्थिर आहे. त्याच्यात आपली प्रतिबिंबे आहेत म्हणून आपण अस्तित्वात आहो  असे निःशंकपणे खडकांना वाटते.   ते अलिप्तपणे उभे आहेत.

        समुद्र केवळ निरीक्षक आहे..."

('अस्तिस्तोत्र', १९७१, 'सांजशकुन', १९७५,२०१५)

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea': 

"...Already I looked with other eyes upon the sea.  I knew it capable of betraying the generous ardour of youth as implacably as, indifferent to evil and good, it would have betrayed the basest greed or the noblest heroism.  My conception of its magnanimous greatness was gone.  And I looked upon the true sea — the sea that plays with men till their hearts are broken, and wears stout ships to death.  Nothing can touch the brooding bitterness of its heart.  Open to all and faithful to none, it exercises its fascination for the undoing of the best.  To love it is not well.  It knows no bond of plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to long companionship, to long devotion.  The promise it holds out perpetually is very great; but the only secret of its possession is strength, strength — the jealous, sleepless strength of a man guarding a coveted treasure within his gates...."


'Miranda', 1875  by John William Waterhouse  (1849–1917)

 

Sunday, November 02, 2025

तो सूर्य पाहिलेला माणूस, म्हणजे सॉक्रेटिस, नव्हताच !...Socrates In Prison

 सूर्य पाहिलेला माणूस, म्हणजे सॉक्रेटिस, कसा होता हे ऐकायचे असेल तर हा पॉडकास्ट ऐका  spotify वरती  "Socrates In Prison " (In Our Time, Feb 20 2025)

Episode Description

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Plato's Crito and Phaedo, his accounts of the last days of Socrates in prison in 399 BC as he waited to be executed by drinking hemlock. Both works show Socrates preparing to die in the way he had lived: doing philosophy. In the Crito, Plato shows Socrates arguing that he is duty bound not to escape from prison even though a bribe would open the door, while in the Phaedo his argument is for the immortality of the soul which, at the point of death, might leave uncorrupted from the 'prison' of his body, the one escape that truly mattered to Socrates. His example in his last days has proved an inspiration to thinkers over the centuries and in no small way has helped ensure the strength of his reputation.

With

Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield

Fiona Leigh
Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University College London

And

James Warren
Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

David Ebrey, Plato’s Phaedo: Forms, Death and the Philosophical Life (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Dorothea Frede, ‘The Final Proof of the Immortality of the Soul in Plato’s Phaedo 102a-107a’ (Phronesis 23, 1978)

W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 4, Plato: The Man and his Dialogues, Earlier Period (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Verity Harte, ‘Conflicting Values in Plato’s Crito’ (Archiv. für Geschichte der Philosophie 81, 1999)

Angie Hobbs, Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025), especially chapter 5

Rachana Kamtekar (ed.), Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology and Crito: Critical Essays (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004)

Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton University Press, 1984)

Melissa Lane, ‘Argument and Agreement in Plato’s Crito’ (History of Political Thought 19, 1998)

Plato (trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy), Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo and Phaedrus (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2017)

Plato (trans. G. M. A. Grube and John Cooper), The Trial and Death of Socrates: Euthyphro Apology, Crito, Phaedo (Hackett, 2001)

Plato (trans. Christopher Rowe), The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo (Penguin, 2010)

Donald R. Robinson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

David Sedley and Alex Long (eds.), Plato: Meno and Phaedo (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

James Warren, ‘Forms of Agreement in Plato’s Crito’ (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 123, Issue 1, April 2023)

Robin Waterfield, Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths (Faber and Faber, 2010)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production


 artist: Paul Noth

Thursday, October 30, 2025

१७व्या शतकाचा महाराष्ट्राचा इतिहास पर्यावरणाच्या दृष्टिकोनातून कोण लिहणार? History of Seventeenth Century Maharastra from Climate Perspective

Geoffrey Parker, "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century":\\"‘The times here are so miserable that never in the memory of man has the like famine and mortality happened’  (East India Company officials, letter, Surat, India, 1631)

Few areas of the world survived the mid-seventeenth century unscathed. North America and West Africa both experienced famines and savage wars. In India, drought followed by floods killed over a million people in Gujarat between 1627 and 1630; while a vicious civil war in the Mughal empire intensified the impact of another drought between 1658 and 1662. In Japan, following several poor harvests, in 1637–8 the largest rural rebellion in modern Japanese history broke out on the southern island of Kyushu. Five years later famine, followed by a winter of unusual severity, killed perhaps 500,000 people.

Voltaire went on to consider the careers of Cromwell in England, Li Zicheng in China, Aurangzeb in India, and others who had seized power by force, concluding that the mid-seventeenth century had been ‘a period of usurpations almost from one end of the world to the other’."

कै. दिलीप पुरुषोत्तम चित्रे , 'पुन्हा तुकाराम', १९९० :

 "... इ स १६२९च्या दुष्काळात तुकोबांची पहिली पत्नी अन्नान अवस्थेत त्यांच्यासमक्ष तडफडत मेली. देहूतील अनेक नात्याची आणि ओळखीची , इतर लोक , गुरेढोरे सर्वच जीव दुष्काळात होरपळून निघाले...."


रा भा पाटणकर,  'अपूर्ण क्रांती', १९९९:

 "...शिवाजीने रयतेच्या भल्यासाठी केलेल्या गोष्टी सर्वश्रुत आहेत. पण तरीही तेथील सामान्य रयत सुखात होती असे म्हणता येणार नाही... अव्वल दर्जाच्या जमिनीची कमतरता , पावसाची अनिश्चितता , नेहमीच युद्धाचा प्रसंग, २/५ सारा व वतनदारांच्या विविध पट्ट्या , सावकारांचे मोठे दर- अशा परिस्थितीतला शिवकालीन शेतकरी संपन्न असू शकेल का? "

कमल गोखले, 'शिवपुत्र संभाजी':