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."

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Will the President of India Receive Shankaracharya the way the Pope was in US?

George W. Bush and his family never looked happier on TV than when they received the pope at the White House. They celebrated pope’s birthday there. With more imagination, they could have got him to conduct Mass on the lawns.

BBC claimed it was the grandest reception ever seen at the White House.

I wondered if any head of the state in India would receive any religious leader in similar fashion.

I bet even L K Advani would not do it. India’s first prime minister J L Nehru frowned upon the overt religiosity of India’s first president- Rajendra Parsad.

The White House ceremony also partly explained why some of my Hindu NRI cousins and friends have turned rabidly religious since they went to USA.

America is a Christian nation and has been one since its birth. No wonder it’s always working on promising new treatments for what it calls ‘heresies’ around the world.


Artist: Ed Fisher The New Yorker 4 December 1989
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2 comments:

Chetan said...

It was indeed disconcerting to watch pope being received in such an obsequious fashion by the head of the State. It was even more surprising since people here love to emphasize that America is a Christian (meaning protestant) nation as opposed to a Catholic one and are very proud of that fact as they perceive Catholicism as ritualistic and corrupt.

However, your observation that such overt displays of Christian/Catholic religiosity may explain your cousins' and friends turn to rabid Hindutavavad is not consistent with what I have observed here. As regular practice such displays of religiosity are very rare and there is hardly any insecurity that stems from them. Also, the Indian community being so tight knitted here allows for Hindu displays of religiosity as well. I think the reasons are much more perverse than some kind of pop-psychology explanations of insecurity and alienation.

April 20, 2008 at 10:30 PM
Aniruddha G. Kulkarni said...

I agree with you Chetan. Reasons are very complex.

They have turned rabid, there is no question about it.

I was perhaps seeing one possible reason on the lawns of the white house.

April 21, 2008 at 3:21 PM

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