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."

Monday, November 19, 2007

On Greatest Plague of Today, Lok Sabha Speaker Says...

Nicholas Taleb
"....journalism may be the greatest plague we face today- as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification". (Fooled by Randomness, 2004)

P. Devarajan
“Journalists will have to face up to a bruising fact: The poor are not their concern any more. Reporting the rich and their ways matters. The public does not believe them any more. They do not take them seriously.”

David Foster Wallace
"TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

Vinod Mehta
"Since most of the media is run by brand managers, and since nearly all restaurants (excluding dhabas) are potential advertisers, it is considered prudent not to annoy them."

Asian Age on November 17 2007 reported:

" Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee on Friday said he found it difficult to distinguish between "page one of many newspapers and the famous page three" which, at times, was only a reference page for all the numerous pages in the day’s newspaper.

Speaking on "Media as People’s Voice — Pre and Post-Independence" at the national press day celebrations organised by the Press Council of India, Mr Chatterjee said the basic feature of post-Independence media is the change in the nature of ownership.

"Owning a channel or a newspaper is now seen as a profit-making venture, as indeed it is in all countries where advertising sustains the profitability of a channel or paper," he said.

Commenting on the change in priorities of the media, the Lok Sabha Speaker said:

"We have the spectacle of newspapers and new channels spending considerable space and their time either telling us about the latest developments in the social lives of those who are in the entertainment industry or some favourite sportspersons or giving unsolicited astrological advice or covering extramarital affairs of even ordinary people sometimes and bizarre stories from remote corners, like snake gods drinking milk in a particular home."

Note- Following picture was drawn pre-independence of India and published post-independence.


Artist: Barney Tobey The New Yorker 16 August 1947