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, January 18, 2009

Times of India, a Patriot and Harold Pinter, a Traitor

I was moved by Michael Henderson’s obit of Harold Pinter:

“…Lord’s was in its midsummer majesty that afternoon. There was the lovely three o’clock murmur of a thousand conversations, and on the field England were making short work of a poor West Indies side. Best of all, Pinter had gathered around him four great pals who shared his love of the game: Gray, Stoppard, Harwood and Hare.

Seated behind the box’s glass partition, with a glass close to hand, and never empty, Pinter hardly missed a ball, because he was watching Brian Lara, the star batsman from Trinidad, who to his craftsman’s eyes represented something of the nobility he had admired in previous generations. One thought of the line Pinter put in the mouth of young Marcus Maudsley in the village cricket scene in The Go-Between: ‘Such elegance and command!’ Every stroke of Lara’s prompted some purr of acknowledgement, as Pinter saw in his mind’s eye all the days he had spent at that special place.

Returning to the box after spending an over or two elsewhere, I found him standing with his back to the cricket, about to address his friends. This time he was not talking about cricket. ‘Do you know,’ he asked them, ‘what I consider to be the most beautiful line in all literature?’ …

…Simply this: ‘That beautiful evening Compton made 70.’…” (The Spectator, 29th December 2008)

And then I read Times...

A report in The Times of India January 15, 2009 is headlined: ‘Hayden greater than Sachin.’

“ Donald Bradman - the unquestioned supreme deity of batting - said Sachin Tendulkar reminded him of himself more than anybody before or since. You might think Sachin can, thus, safely consider the No. 2 slot in a list of all-time greats his for the taking.”

Notice the impunity with which TOI is manipulating Bradman’s words.

Report continues: “But you would be wrong, or so says the ICC. Sachin isn’t even in the top 20 Test batsmen , according to new ICC "best ever" ratings.”

The report does not mention who those “top 20 Test batsmen” are. Therefore, I decided to find out more. I found it here.

ICC website very clearly says: ICC Best-Ever Test Championship Rating. Note it does not say: “ICC Test Championship Rating of Players.”

It is an attempt by the ICC to rate the best-ever test-cricket patch of a player. That is why Donald Bradman’s entry reads:

ID Rat. Name Nat. Career Best Rating
1 961 D.G. Bradman AUS 961 v India, 06/02/1948

If the ICC wanted to only rate players, there was no need to include the period and the opposition.

Look at following two entries:

20 916 S.M. Gavaskar IND 916 v England, 30/08/1979
26 898 S.R. Tendulkar IND 898 v Zimbabwe, 21/02/2002

It means Gavaskar’s 1978-79 patch was ‘better’ at number 20 than Tendulkar’s in 2001-02 patch at number 26.

But why did I bother about this? Isn't newspaper business only "yelling about the axe murder"?


Artist: William Steig, The New Yorker, 21 October 1933
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