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, March 07, 2008

IPL is Not Rape of Cricket but a Promise of Million Mutinies

Vinod Mehta has called IPL and/or its auction of cricketers “the rape of cricket”. (Outlook March 10, 2008).

“…The BCCI is a destructive body determined to kill cricket. If anyone is planning a coup d’etat against it, count me in. The present lot must be removed before they inflict further damage. Meanwhile, all cricket lovers must hope the IPL is a complete and total flop. And the people who conjured up this dreadful scheme are badly burned.”

National leaders of all hue from Gurudas Dasgupta to Bal Thackeray via Sharad Yadav have already lambasted IPL, some of them calling for its ban.

I disagree with all of them as far as IPL is concerned.

While growing up, I played and watched gulli sports from kabaddi to cricket and I strongly feel that people should get an opportunity to play/participate in a sport locally. And those who do should make reasonable living out of the same.

Fan like me should get an opportunity to see a sporting action on a local ground and not just on TV. I have always enjoyed watching a gulli game far more than the one on TV.

IPL and ICL are those opportunities.

Many people have called auction of the players vulgar.

If it’s so, most other things should also be called vulgar: Highly educated people changing three jobs in two days for more money, film stars charging obscene money to inaugurate shops, TV serials propagating pseudosciences, citizens changing nationality like soiled clothes, goons lynching poor labourers because they don’t speak a particular language, society at large that holds the poor criminally responsible for their position, news media that will catastrophize anything they can, people that worry about their own children but don’t feel hurt or pained when they see others’ children exploited or treated badly…

I feel IPL is likely to give huge opportunity to young people from weaker sections of Indian society to make it big. It is a promising tool to promote social mobility in India. Today BCCI may be controlling this localization of Indian cricket but tomorrow may throw a lot of surprises at it.

If a boy enjoys his cricket, is prepared to work hard for it, cannot afford expensive higher education, with a bit of luck, he needn’t study his textbooks.

Therefore, following picture is no exaggeration.


Artist : R K Laxman Times of India February 25, 2008
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