Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

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."

Friday, April 11, 2008

Indian Museum, Calcutta. This time they could not bury it!

The only place I really like to take visitors to Pune is classy Kelkar museum. Aga khan Palace flatters to deceive.

Pune has not bothered to preserve almost anything else. Shaniwar-wada- once the most powerful habitation in whole of South Asia- is a ghostly relic.

In Calcutta, I really liked visiting Belur Math and Indian Museum. I must have visited them half a dozen times each.

And I must confess I always smelt a rat at the museum. It is too rich to escape the attention of India’s highly corrupt government servants. Before I came to live in Calcutta, I had seen rampant corruption in Assam and knew that West Bengal if anything was even worse. (I have never seen more corrupt person than Calcutta-based resident manager of the multi-national company where I worked.)

Outlook April 7, 2008 said:

“…it's not just artifacts that are coming out of the cavernous vaults of the 194-year-old Indian Museum in Calcutta. Now that the Union ministry of culture has ordered a full audit of all the art treasures in this oldest museum in the Asia-Pacific region, a number of skeletons are also tumbling out. Among the objects missing from the vaults are some priceless relics dating to the Indus valley civilisation, sculptures, and gold and silver coins. And some recent acquisitions, shown in the books as ancient, for which the museum paid crores of rupees, have now been discovered to be not even five decades old!

The CBI, which started probing complaints of financial irregularities in end-2006, has now also unearthed a Rs 22 crore scam in purchase of security and other equipment, printing and travel expenses,

… The CBI probe revealed that some senior officers of the museum had amassed huge properties. The agency's sleuths found Rs 1 crore in cash at the residence of the former keeper of the museum's anthropology gallery. The design and drawing officer—suspended earlier this month—had recently purchased 3.25 hectares of land in the city's suburbs.

…Shockingly, senior officers used to remove priceless relics from the galleries and display them in their chambers and, if some employees are to be believed, in their homes as well…”