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, November 13, 2007

Indian Culture Devoid of Picture?

Talking to Lokmat लोकमत October 21, 2007, artist Ravi Paranjape रवी परांजपे said:
“…We are culturally poor. But no one talks about it. We don’t have picture-literacy. The British misguided us that we could become cultured without picture-culture. Our education system was based on that belief….”

If we consider the times during and after the British Raj, this assessment, with the exception of Tagore’s Shantiniketan, may be fair.

However, we had very robust “picture-culture” before the Raj. The late D G Godse द ग गोडसे has convinced me about it long ago. If you need any proof and can’t access D G Godse, just follow 25-part series on Indian Art being published by Frontline.

Indic art, which is on display all over India, does not strive to convey photographic reality. Instead, it depicts the grace that is inherent in all creation.

I have been reading Orhan Pamuk’s books and the thing that strikes me most is the importance of miniatures, the highly stylized paintings, in Turkish life.

ORHAN PAMUK too talks about grace:

“My miniaturists saw the world through the God's eye, so that's a very communitarian world where the rules are set and there is an endlessness of time.”

Orhan Pamuk compares and contrasts Western and Eastern art forms like painting and miniature. He claims that the Western portraiture is a more popular art form since the artist imitates reality as it is, as if immortalizing the one painted. However, the Eastern miniatures are more original in content since they turn out to be the expression of the miniaturist's synthesis of the external reality through his own prism.

One of Pamuk’s character says: “Believe me, none of the Venetian masters have your poetic sensibility, your conviction, your sensibility, the purity and brightness of your colors, yet their paintings are more compelling because they more closely resemble life itself... Indeed, [the Venetian masters] paint what they see, whereas we paint what we look at. Beholding their work, one comes to realize that the only way to have one's face immortalized is through the Frankish style... Just a glance at those paintings and you too would want to see yourself this way, you'd want to believe that you're different from all others, a unique, special and particular being.”

Most popular Marathi writers of 20th century have not much demonstrated their “picture-literacy”. Versatile artist P L Deshpande पु ल देशपांडे is almost mute when it comes to paintings and cartoons. If he were to, Punch and The New Yorker would have figured in his writings. He would have paid more than just lip service to the art of great cartoonist like Vasant Sarwate वसंत सरवटे.

Pictures and we go back long way. Even in caves, our vanity was expressed through them. Worse, our wives caught us RED-handed!


Artist: Ed Fisher The New Yorker 11 Feb 1956
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