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."

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Godlessness is Not a Threat to Us. Too Much of God Is!

BJP ideologue Balbir K. Punj attacked the Indian left in Asian Age September 28, 2007: “Godless Left is a threat to unity.”

I wonder why godlessness feature of the left has to be a threat.

Bhagat Singh belonged to “godless left”. He united the country as much as Lokmanya Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi and, at any rate, more than BJP and its affiliated organizations like RSS/ Jansangh/ VHP/ Hindu Mahasabha.

M V Dhond म वा धोंड, arguably the greatest living scholar of Bhakti literature in Marathi and art critic, is an atheist and, not just that, claims even Sant Tukaram was one!

"...तुकाराममहाराजही माझ्यासारखेच नास्तिक होते. ते म्हणतात:

आहे ऐसा देव वदवावी वाणी । नाही ऐसा मनीं अनुभवावा ।"

[source-ऐसा विटेवर देव कोठें! ("Where on bricks, the god like this!") Rajhans Prakashan 2001]

In November 2006, Times of India conducted a survey across 10 major cities of India on the subject of god. The survey asked “What’s more important?”- Believing in God or To Be a Good Person. 43% replied, “to be a good person”. Tukaram would be happy.

Many bright minds in the West are attacking the god.

Richard Dawkins in his best selling book “God Delusion” has lampooned religion and railed against the devout.

Tukaram was more tactful. He might say: “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.” (Peter De Vries “The Mackerel Plaza” 1958).


Artist: Geoff Thompson The Spectator
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