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."

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Americans, you peel Indian mangoes ONLY yourself for sheer pleasure and not because some stupid manual tells you so

Indian mangoes seem to be now available in US. First, exports to middle-eastern countries made them expensive for people like me. Now, it is US’s turn.

However, I don’t mind. I have had a shot at the best of mangoes for a long time because I was born and raised in western Maharashtra-truly a mango country.

For us, lunches in summer were subservient to mango. Every thing else on the plate was distant second. We ate almost six chapattis daily for a lunch, a number that would dwindle to two or three once mangoes departed for the year. Mango aroma (particularly of Payari and Hapus, characterized for their juice and meat respectively) filled the air of April, May and part of June. By the way- mangoes never left us fully because our parents would cook a mango jam (known in Marathi as Muramba or Sakharamba) with the last crop of Hapus (Alphonso) that hit the market every year.

Americans are obsessed with sex. Now, they have some thing equally sensuous to fuss about. This summer I see pictures of white Americans, wearing jackets, sitting at the table with knife and fork to eat Indian mangoes. I feel they need some training eating mangoes. Kamasutra of eating mangoes.

Here is the Chapter I:

“Eat them with your bare hands. First feel them up. Then smell them for a while. Now peel them slowly, eat portion sticking to its skin. Remove the entire skin continuing this process.
Now feel the naked fruit in your hand. You are ready to eat it. Tuck into it until you reach the seed. Lick the seed until no meat is left there. If your mango is indeed the original Hapus, the licked seed should leave no fiber on its shell or in your mouth.
Clean your bloodied hands but not with strong soap. A true mango should leave behind its aroma long after hands are washed.”



Artist: Alan Dunn The New Yorker 31 July 1943