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."

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

What has got Freud to do with India’s World Cup Victory? He helped create Dr. Dreud!

SIGMUND Freud died 68 years ago. It’s still not clear whether Freud was the genius of the 20th century, a comprehensive absurdity or something in between. So says, MARK EDMUNDSON (NYT September 23, 2007).

“…But he has been different from all the other aspiring masters in that he has taught nothing so insistently as the need to dissolve our illusions about masters, and to be responsive to more moderate, subtle and humane sources of authority.

Such a figure — authoritarian and anti-authoritarian at the same time — cannot help but be confusing. But once we understand our confusion, Freud can also be quite illuminating. Among other things, his ideas about authority help us understand (and in some measure sympathize with) the hunger for absolute leaders and absolute truth that probably besets us all, but that has overwhelmed many of our fellow humans who find themselves living under tyrannical governments and fundamentalist faiths.

But the best of Freud will not be available to us until we can work through the transference he provoked. We need to see him as a great patriarch, yes, but as one who struggled for nothing so much as for the abolition of patriarchy.”

Rahul Dravid in his quiet yet firm ways got rid of patriarchic duo of Tendulkar and Ganguly from Indian T20 cricket. Result? India trumped big.

Personally, I had stopped cheering Indian team for last few years because of this duo. I was feeling like the child in Peter Arno’s picture below. “Knock about…. Just on the estate” Why?

When I heard T20 team was going to be without them, I told my son that I was back in the camp...Count me in.

Our team played some great, lively, fearless cricket.

I have always felt that Dravid is not only India’s best batsman since Sunil Gavaskar but also a very conscientious man. He always plays tactfully but with a straight bat. He did that when he withdrew himself out of T20 world cup. That forced Tendulkar and Ganguly to do the same. He also quit captaincy on the eve of India’s first match in T20 to force cricket administration to announce Dhoni as the captain even for F50.

I have said on this blog few times earlier that most of our heroes overstay their welcome because we tolerate their tyranny. Other than Sunil Gavaskar almost none of our megastar sportsmen/women- absolute leaders- retired at the top or near the top.

Tendulkar’s is a story that proves George Orwell’s point- “Our civilization is decadent”. Tendulkar WAS a great cricketer, almost a genius, who in last century played without fear but in this century, seems to have allowed himself to be increasingly used by greedy corporates. Sponsors control everything he says or does. We the people never get the correct picture because his sponsors control even the media and the cricket administration.

We needed an insider like Dravid to do what many of us wanted to happen some time ago. Thank you, Dr. Dreud!



Artist: Peter Arno The New Yorker 21 June 1941
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)