मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च 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: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Languages that are understood all over the Country

U.R. Ananthamurthy says (India Today, August 20, 2007): “The only two languages that are understood all over the country are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.”

He could as well have added one more- Ganga (Ganges) because he himself touchingly says:
“My grandfather, deeply religious and orthodox, would never have said something like “I am an Indian” in his whole life. Yet India was still an idea, a concept derived mostly from her rivers. When he drew water from our well and poured it over his head he recited a mantra which prayed that the waters of the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada and Kaveri be present in the well-water of our home and sanctify him… Both globalised, rootless modernity and ferocious, fundamentalist communalism will weaken the Puranic sense of unity that is present among the people of India.”

My son, my wife and I might have stopped chanting names of rivers while bathing but I remember my mother doing it. I think it’s a beautiful tradition.

Business Standard September 04, 2007 says: “The Ganges figures on the list of the world's ten most endangered rivers, according to a report of the World Wide Fund for Nature. But the Ministry of Environment and Forests has claimed in Parliament that the quality of water has improved since 1985, when the first Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was launched… The World Health Organisation says that an estimated 114 towns release waste into the Ganges. The Centre for Science and Environment, which brought out a report on polluted rivers last year, has said the claim does not hold ground because the hardware created under the GAP is inadequate.”

Let us hope the government is right.

Julian Crandall Hollick has recently written a book “Ganga”. Business Standard has reviewed it.
“……how come Indians venerate the Ganga so much and yet seem bent on destroying it with such vigour with their pollution, dams and other acts of the most frightening vandalism?
Hollick has also taken the trouble to speak to many scientists whose views would not otherwise become known to the lay public. They appear to confirm what the godmen have been saying about the Ganga — that, thanks to the amount of dissolved oxygen in it, not to mention other things like its high rate of aeration and its amazing ability to retain dissolved oxygen, it is something of a scientific marvel.”

Do you want to read Hollick’s book?

Artist: Helen E. Hokinson The New Yorker 22 Feb 1947
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