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, December 19, 2007

White King Vs Red Queen: 1972 Regressed the Cause of Chess

1972 was an exciting year for Chess.

It was the first occasion in the 20th century when chess fired the public imagination. It surely did.

12 year old I caught the chess fever. It almost drove me crazy.

Great Shripad Krishna Kolhatkar श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर (1871-1934) has described what it's like to become insane, playing chess, in his essay: "Our Sitting Games आमचे बैठे खेळ" from his book "Sudamyache Pohe/ Literature's Thirty-two Teeth" (सुदाम्याचे पोहे/ साहित्य-बत्तिशी).

It's so easy to relate to antics of Bobby Fischer (described below) after reading Kolhatkar!

In 1972 at Reykjavík, Iceland, from July through September 1972, Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky fought to become world chess champion.

The championship was covered in Marathi newspaper, Maharashtra Times महाराष्ट्र टाइम्स, extensively. That is to say as much as cricket. All the moves of every game were printed and commented on.

I haven’t seen such coverage of any chess tournament, save perhaps Kasparov-Anand PCA World Championship 1995, in any Marathi publication since then.

Daniel Johnson has written a new book on this: “White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard”.

Raymond Keene , The Spectator, December 8, 2007 says: “Daniel Johnson’s excellent new book agrees with me that Fischer’s victory in the World Championship in 1972 might actually have regressed the cause of chess, in spite of the great publicity achieved. Those in the know always suspected that the eccentric Fischer would virtually withdraw from chess were he to win the championship, and this is indeed what transpired.”

Kenan Malik says:

“…For Fischer the showdown at Reykjavik committed 'the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians'. Richard Nixon agreed, sending Fisher his 'personal congratulations' and assuring him that 'I will be rooting for you'. Henry Kissinger also put in a call. 'America wants you to go over there to beat the Russians', he told Fischer.

Fischer did beat the Russians - though as much by gamesmanship as by genius. He failed to show up for more than week and then deliberately turned up late for the rescheduled opening match. He insisted that the chairs, the chessboard, and the lighting were all changed, that the TV cameras be banished, and that a game be played in a back room away from the spectators. At one point he started shouting in the middle of a match and had to be restrained. Fischer's antics, observed Garry Kasparov, who would, a decade later, be the greatest of all chess champions, 'broke Spassky'…

…'The Cold War was the first war caused and dominated by intellectuals and it was best symbolised by the game of the intellectuals'. Fischer-Spassky 'was the Cold War's supreme work of art', embodying 'abstract purism, incipient paranoia, sublimated homicide'…

…At the same time, in his headlong rush to convict Moscow, Johnson ignores the extent to which the West itself played the ideological game, manipulating everything from the space race to sports tournaments for political ends…

… Chess, as Johnson himself points out, 'makes a good allegory, but a bad teacher'.”

Indeed Fischer was a bad teacher as kids below prove!


Artist: Robert Weber The New Yorker 29 July 1972
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