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."

Monday, September 28, 2009

At Pokhran-II, did they swear or remember Bhagavad Gita?

John Gray:

"Towards the end of his life Oppenheimer turned against the Bhagavad Gita's philosophy of detachment, which had consoled him for so many years. 'If I cannot be comforted by Vishnu's argument to Arjuna,' he declared in a speech to the Congress of Cultural Freedom, 'it is because I am too much of a Jew, much too much a Christian, far too much an American. For I believe in the meaningfulness of human history, and of our role in it, and above all of our responsibility to it.' In effect, he was reaffirming the humanist creed he had imbibed at the Ethical Culture School. But it was the lack of substance of that creed that had led him to mysticism, and when he renounced detachment he must have known he had by then forfeited any chance of meaningful action." (November 2012)

Many Indians have a soft corner for J. Robert Oppenheimer because he knew Sanskrit! Maybe it's like having Indian-Americans in Obama team.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson: Suckers!

Oppenheimer supposedly thought: "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." (verse 32, Chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita) after he saw the first nuclear explosion "Trinity" on July 16, 1945.

It reads in Sanskrit as follows:


"Kalo Asmi Loka-ksaya-krit Pravardho, Lokan Samartum iha Pravattah"

Did he say it?

“...According to a colleague, however, what he actually said was, ‘Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.’…”

(Judith Flanders, Spectator, January 23, 2008)

K. Santhanam and Ashok Parthasarathi say in The Hindu on September 17 2009:

"Several inaccuracies in the claims made by BARC and in the articles published in the press, including The Hindu, on Pokhran-II need to be corrected. We have hard evidence on a purely factual basis, to inform the nation that not only was the yield of the second fusion (H-bomb) stage of the thermonuclear (TN) device tested in May 1998 was not only far below the design prediction made by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), but that it actually failed..."

So what happened at Pokhran-II?

If the test "failed", no one could have said either "Now we’re all Sons-of-Bitches" or "Kalo Asmi Loka-ksaya-krit Pravardho, Lokan Samartum iha Pravattah"!

But if this failure was hidden from the nation, aren't ordinary Indians entitled to say: "sons-of-bitches"?
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7 comments:

Abhijeet said...

I like your posts and never miss any.

I couldn't get your email address, so writing this in a comment.

Actually, i was looking for Bhagvat Geeta copy with a good-quality Marathi translation. Could you pass on some names?

Thanks, Abhijeet (dabhijeet at gmail dot com)

September 29, 2009 at 12:43 PM
Aniruddha G. Kulkarni said...

Thanks AD.

We can continue to use posts to exchange info.

The best translation remains Gitai by Vinoba Bhave but I don't find it on the market.

Other than that I don't find a single quality Marathi translation of Geeta which should have, say on left page Sanskrit original and on right Marathi translation...I mean pure translation, not interpretation.

Will update if I find any.

September 29, 2009 at 1:02 PM
Chetan said...

I think you are being unfair when you say that many Indians have a soft corner for Oppenheimer just because he knew Sanskrit. There are many other reasons to like the great man and I trust the ones well-read enough to know that he knew Sanskrit to also know his other qualities. Respecting Oppenheimer is definitely not analogous to feeling proud of Indian Americans in the Obama team.

October 7, 2009 at 9:04 PM
Aniruddha G. Kulkarni said...

Thanks Chetan.

There are probably number of Indians who like JRO. "Many" of them for Sanskrit...and many of them for his other qualities...

October 8, 2009 at 9:28 AM
Anonymous said...

who cares about oppenhimer guy?

December 25, 2010 at 4:17 AM
Unknown said...

Hello ,

I find this all very interesting , so thank you .

My one question i have is , can you say with 100% confidence that the Sanskrit translation at the top of the page is of " now , i am become death , the destroyer of worlds . " this is very important to me .

Kind regards

Craig Walker

April 19, 2012 at 1:10 PM
Aniruddha G. Kulkarni said...

Thanks

The first line is:

कालोऽस्मि लोक-क्षय-कृत्-प्रवृद्धो

कालोऽस्मि could mean both "Time am I" and "Death am I".

लोक-क्षय-कृत्-प्रवृद्धो means "I have grown in stature to destroy people"

(In Hindi: "मैँ काल हूँ. लोकोँ का नाश कर के मैँ बढ़ा हूँ.")

This is best I could do. I am sure this can be improved upon by experts many times over.

best,

April 19, 2012 at 2:31 PM

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