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."

Monday, March 24, 2008

I wish Painting is All Winston Churchill Did

The Asian Age March 21, 2008 reported:

“UK kids say Churchill was 1st man on moon!:
…Nearly three quarters of children between 4 to 10 years cannot even identify the moon in the night sky, let alone any stars or planets…(and say) Sir Winston Churchill, the UK Prime Minister during the second world war, was the first man to walk on the moon…”

I don’t see Churchill on moon but surely see him in hell.

Amartya Sen wrote in Economic & Political Weekly February 16-22, 2008:

“…Winston Churchill’s famous remark that the Bengal famine of 1943 was caused by the tendency of people there to breed like rabbits belongs to this general tradition of blaming the colonial victim. This had a profound effect in crucially delaying famine relief in that disastrous and easily preventable famine. The demands of cultural nationalism merge well with the asymmetry of power and can have quite devastating effects…”

(India was hardly alone. Sample cruelty of Britain towards Ireland:

"Charles Edward Trevelyan, the head of the treasury in London during the famines, who had a huge role in the making of public policy in Ireland, even took the liberty of speculating: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato”. There, it seems, we see the birth of a putatively great explanation of a famine – people starved because the Irish peasant woman could not cook beyond boiling a potato!"

It is estimated that between 500,000 and 1.5 million people died as a result of the famine.

"The famines of the 1840s also changed the nature of Ireland in a decisive way. It led to a level of emigration – even under the most terrible conditions of voyage – that has hardly been seen anywhere else in the world. The Irish population even today is very substantially smaller than it was more than 160 years ago, in 1845, when the famine began.")

Although Churchill once said: “One of our great aims is the delivery on German towns of the largest possible quantity of bombs per night”, he still had some concern left for Germans as exemplified in para below.

“…Even Churchill came to regret the extent of the bombing, in March 1945 writing to the RAF’s head saying that ”the terror bombing must stop” and remonstrating over the destruction of Dresden…”

But for Indians, he only had scorn. “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

Considering that he also said: ”I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.”, Bengalis should be considered lucky that they were killed by famine and not by Agent Yellow!

I really wish Churchill indeed did only paintings….


Artist: Charles E. Martin 6 February 1954
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