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, May 19, 2008

Vijay Tendulkar विजय तेंडुलकर -A Passionate Lover of Cartoons- is Dead

He was probably the only modern Marathi ‘great’ who appreciated the art of cartooning. No one else- e.g. P L Deshpande पु ल देशपांडे, Jaywant Dalwi जयवंत दळवी who were humourist themselves- came even close.

Vasant Sarwate वसंत सरवटे acknowledges the contribution of Tendulkar brothers- Vijay and his elder brother Raghunath- shaping his vision and art.

Apart from Sarwate, Tendulkar was very fond of the art of young cartoonist Abhimanyu Kulkarni अभिमन्यु कुलकर्णी. In a Marathi letter to Abhimanyu, he wrote :”…the way a good bowler bowls six good balls in an over, sometimes your cartoons are in an issue of Lokprabha लोकप्रभा…”

Like Durga Bhagwat दुर्गा भागवत, Tendulkar liked the work of Natyachhatakar Diwakar नाट्यछटाकार दिवाकर, the most under rated writer in Marathi.

I like a lot of what Tendulkar wrote but his play “Kanyadan” कन्यादान and his essays on Raj Kapoor, Baba Amte बाबा आमटे, his own father, the theatre of the absurd and the death row inmates remain my favourite.

In “Kanyadan” (Giving away of daughter in marriage), he exposes hypocrisy of upper-caste Maharashtrian middle-class.

Tendulkar was fearless the way he took on Bal Thackeray बाळ ठाकरे and other politicians without batting an eyelid. See a related post here.

I will miss you Tendulkar-sir because…

"...पोटावरच्या बेंबीचा बिनबाहुलीचा डोळा म्हणून उपयोग करत पोट पोसत-वाढवत मुरादाड आयुष्य न काढता खरे डोळे चेहर्यावर असतात याचे तुम्ही भान ठेवलेत..."

"...Instead of using bellybutton on stomach as pupil-less eye to grow-inflate tummy and lead insensitive life, you were always conscious that the real eyes were attached to the face..."

(जी ए कुलकर्णी G A Kulkarni यात्रिक (A Pilgrim) पिंगळावेळ (Owl-time) Popular Prakashan 1977).

There must be a commotion wherever Vijay Tendulkar now has gone …


Artist: Ronald Searle The New Yorker 12 November 1966

This picture has no caption. If I were to give one...

"She like Vijay Tendulkar is so beautiful but watch out for her claws!"

3 comments:

Chetan said...

Interestingly, my take from Kanyadan was different from yours. Of course, it exposes upper caste Maharashtrian hypocrisy. However, for me, the bigger take from the play was that it highlighted the complexities of solving sociological problems through a progressive framework.

The venture of 'engineering' a society and shaping its values so that a moral order compatible with the times can be established is every thinking person's dream. But attempting to accomplish that by disbanding or trying to alter an olden cultural framework such as ban on marriage between different castes, does lead to loss of knowledge accumulated by that olden culture, however corrupt it may have been, and also results in an indeterminable risk for the person who is a victim/guinea pig for such an experiment because of the exposure to an alien knowledge frame with no prior documentation and acculatarisation to the solution of the problems that such ventures may generate.

I thought the play illustrated this conundrum perfectly without ever taking sides. The upper caste family tried to solve/diffuse the problems through their historical knowledge frame about drinking and violent behaviour while the Dalit youth tried to approach issues in marriage through his learnt/observed behaviour or cultural framework from his impoverished childhood. Since both families had no recourse to a third knowledge framework to solve, mitigate, issues arising out of an inter-caste marriage, apart from a feel good, 'everyone is equal' kind of socialist framework of the father, which might sound great as rhetoric but never gives a concrete path to resolve the problems that crop up for the unfortunate guinea pig in such experiements.

The play, I thought, tried to highlight these complexities and I always am fascinated by Tendulkar's ability to go far beyond the typical Maharashtrian upper-caste acculturisation that he himself must have underwent and write stories so raw and visceral that one would have expected from someone like Namdeo Dhasal who probably has borne the violence that Tendulkar explores so unnervingly in his plays.

Aniruddha G. Kulkarni said...

Well said.

I agree by and large.

I will return to this sometime later.

Unknown said...

well.... very nice....

by
regards
Villu stills,songs