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."

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Grandma Stories Will Always Go Strong

Business Line reports on September 24, 2007: Grandma stories still going strong:

“In the age of hi-tech movies with brilliant sound effects, constant television, multimedia games and blockbuster book series of the likes of Harry Potter, the 'Ek tha raja, ek thi rani' type of stories of the yore narrated by grandmothers still remain uniformly popular among children across the world.
Fairytales, and tales of adventure of swashbuckling pirates and sailors, legends, myths and folklores predominantly form the substance of tales traditionally used to regale children over centuries remain an eternal favourite among children according to a large number of bards and authors who had gathered in the capital recently.

Hailing from across 18 countries they had come to participate in a storytelling conference organised by the Indian chapter of the International Board of Books for Young People, the Association of Writers and Illustrators for children.”

My son had a rare distinction. Until my mother passed away, he was one of the few in his class whose all four grand parents were alive! Since we stay very close to where my in-laws live, my son gets to spend lots of quality time with his maternal grandparents. How lucky!

We weren’t that lucky. We were estranged from my father’s family until I was 26. I never met my father’s mother, met very briefly my father’s father. My mother’s father passed away when I was only 5. I spent some quality time with my mother’s mother though.

I don’t think I heard too many stories from my grandparents. However, my mother filled the role of all our grandparents when it came to stories. Each dinnertime, for number of years, was a storytime. Panchtantra, Ramayan, Mahabharat, Shivaji (Hirkani was a favourite) dominated prime time.

Her father, for whom fact and fiction were often interchangeable, was a great raconteur! So too was my mother’s elder sister. Listening to Tai-mavashi’s narration of stories of Hindi films like Mehmood’s Sadhu Aur Shaitan (1968) and Bombay to Goa (1972) was a funnier experience than watching those films on big screen.

Listening to mother’s stories was like returning to her womb and falling asleep there.

The experience has been summed up very well by author Shrinivas Vinayak Kulkarni in his story: आम्ही वानरांच्या फौजा (We Monkey Armies, डोह,Mauj Prakashan, 1965).

Author’s grandma is telling him a story as he falls asleep:

तुम्ही अवतरले गोकुळी आम्ही गोपाळांच्या मेळी
तुम्ही होते रामराजा आम्ही वानरांच्या फौजा...

(You incarnated at Gokul, we in cowherd gathering
You were King Ram, we monkey armies)

Not everyone is of course impressed with being a grandma!


Artist: Peter Arno The New Yorker January 30 1960