मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Nothing except facts

I am not perfect , I never was, I never will be in anything I do , have done or will do.

Let me please belong!

Artist :James Thurber Publication: The New Yorker 12 Dec 1936

To help corporations find their soul ?

Adman Bruce Barton in 1923 said that the role of advertising was to help corporations find their soul.

"I like to think of advertising as something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it. . . . Institutions have souls, just as men and nations have souls,"

Artist : Frank Modell Publication: The New Yorker 5 Nov 1960

What is ‘meaning’?

What is the real meaning of life? What is my purpose?.........

Mario Pisani reveiwed the book "THE MEANING OF LIFE by Terry Eagleton" for FT on March 2, 2007।

It has these lines : " I decided to put the book’s analytical framework to the test। I identified three people with very different perspectives on life, and asked them what it meant to them।

A British friend, a member of the international policy-making elite, answered with a dry “it means nothing.” A German colleague said something along the lines of “to be happy.” My Turkish corner-shop-keeper answered “What is ‘meaning’?”

It looks like Eagleton got it right, after all."

Artist: Lee Lorenz Publication: The New Yorker 10 Dec 1960

Mother's Love

Sigmund Freud : "He who knows his mother's love and is secure in that knowledge will never know failure।"

Tom Wolfe: “The demise of Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium”.


Artist :Alan Dunn Publication: The New Yorker 14 Nov 1936

is smoking evil?

I have always felt that so-called 'vices' bring people together.

When in college, I always envied smokers who could make friends so easily and had no trouble in passing time anywhere and on any occasion.

Even at work, especially in non-smoking offices, smokers gathered outside and networked.

Artist : William Hamilton Publication: The New Yorker 31 Jan 1994

if we didn't make it somebody would!

Money for the sake of money has become the objective of many (most?) of us. It has become a favourite habit and past time. If every excuse fails, this could work : if we didn't make it somebody would!

Masahiko Fujiwara - author of best selling Japanese book "The Dignity of a State"- says: "Japan used to despise money, just like English gentlemen. But after the war, under American influence, we concentrated on prosperity."

Similar thing has happened to educated Indians.

Does money make us more happy? There is overwhelming evidence against it.

Consider a paradox outlined by London School of Economics economist Richard Lay­ard in Happiness (Penguin, 2005), in which he shows that we are no happier even though average incomes have more than doubled since 1950 and "we have more food, more clothes, more cars, bigger houses, more central heating, more foreign holidays, a shorter working week, nicer work and, above all, better health."

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert goes deeper into our psyches in Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf, 2006), in which he claims, "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future." Much of our happiness depends on projecting what will make us happy (instead of what actually does), and Gilbert shows that we are not very good at this forethought.

Michael Hecht- author of The Happiness Myth (Harper, 2007)- writes, "The basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense." Take sex. "A century ago, an average man who had not had sex in three years might have felt proud of his health and forbearance, and a woman might have praised herself for the health and happiness benefits of ten years of abstinence."


Artist : Richard Decker Publication: The New Yorker Jan 30 1960
Artist : Bruce Erik Kaplan Publication: The New Yorker 4 Apr 1994