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."

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Inflation Hurts Literature too! तानी मावशीचे दोन आणे.

Christian Lorentzen,

‘Fictitious Values/ Boom and bust in twenty-first-century lit’, Bookforum, June/July/August 2012:

"The banality of money may be a reason writers shy away from quoting dollar amounts. If we can’t escape prices in our daily lives, can’t we at least escape them in novels? Besides the risks of committing an embarrassing inaccuracy and alienating the reader, who may have completely different notions about what constitutes a living wage or a reasonable price for a sandwich, quoting actual numbers dates the work in a way that it didn’t in the relatively inflation-free bullion-backed nineteenth century."

Although it continues to be legal tender, 25-paisa coin (Hindi चवन्नी , Marathi पावली) is no longer accepted at Pune.

I have used 1-paisa, 2-paisa, 3-paisa, 5-paisa, 10-paisa and 20-paisa coins in the past. They all gave me tremendous pleasure because all of them once could buy me some favourite food- candy, peppermint, peanuts, puffed rice, biscuits etc.

Thanks to inflation, they are now dead as dodoes.

The Economist, December 8th 2007 confirmed: "The Economist's food-price index is higher today than at any time since it was created in 1845." (see chart at the bottom of this post).

Inflation kills poor and those who don't own assets.

SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR said in his essay ”Independence & the Bengal famine” of August 20, 2003:

“…(during the world war II) Massive inflation was the inevitable outcome, something that did not happen in Britain itself. The food price index (1937=100) shot up to 311 by 1949 in India...The data reflect the rationed price of food in India: the black market price was even higher.

Now, inflation is very good for producers and asset owners. All property owners saw property values skyrocket. Rising agricultural prices benefited all landowners, and even small ones got out of debt and bought fresh land. Many new salaried jobs were created by the war, and the problem of the educated unemployed disappeared. Above all, the business class flourished…

… The real wages of factory workers declined 30% between 1939 and 1943…

…The rural landless in India were the worst hit. They had neither access to the new urban jobs or rationed urban supplies. Ranging from a quarter of the rural population in Bengal to over half in Madras, they bore the brunt of spiralling prices..."

Inflation affects even literature.

Marathi literature, cinema contain many references to monetary aspects of everyday life- salary, loan, food, education, marriage, illness, land price- expressed in rupees and paise. Understanding them is very vital to appreciate the art.

Inflation makes us numb to them.

Here is an example.

तानी मावशी: “…अणि हे घे दोन आणे तुला, वाटेत फारच भूक लागली तर काहीतरी विकत घे …”

(Tanee Maternal-aunt: “..and take this two annas for you, if you feel very hungry during the journey, buy something…”)

[जी ए कुलकर्णी “कैरी” पिंगळावेळ G A Kulkarni “Raw Mango” Owl Time 1977]

Two annas meant 12 paise.

G A Kulkarni-sir, two annas won’t buy me anything today and worse, my son doesn’t even understand this currency.

I wonder if we need to print consumer price index of the year against each such reference!


‘A shilling? How long have you been drunk?’

The Spectator 2007


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