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."

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Going Insane with MADhukar!

Indian Psychiatric Society, Western Zonal Branch is organizing their 40th annual conference on October 9th, 10th and 11th 2009 at Nanded, Maharashtra. The theme of the conference is Women’s Mental Health.

A novel feature of the conference is the exhibition of cartoons- on the subject of mental health- by artists around the world.

Creative writer and a renowned critic of the art of cartooning, Madhukar Dharmapurikar मधुकर धर्मापुरीकर, is in-charge of the exhibition.

Dharmapurikar has created a booklet, for private circulation, ‘Delight in Madness’, that contains all the cartoons that will be exhibited…and more.

The booklet says: Insanity destroys reason, but not wit. Dharmapurikar proves it. He has gone in his usual possessed (insane?) ways to create these 66 pages that celebrate insanity on every single page!

It's said Ludwig Wittgenstein's intellectual brilliance and erratic behaviour provided Bertrand Russell with an opportunity to meditate on the link between logic and madness.

The same 'mad' Wittgenstein has said: 'The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that makes the problem disappear.'

The participants of the conference (and their patients!) will realise that their problems have disappeared, albeit briefly, when they read this book.

They say: good is the enemy of great. Dharmapurikar is never happy with just ‘good’. He wants perfection not only in his ideas but their execution. His last book, ‘Reshalekhak: Vasant Sarwate’ (a compilation of Vasant Sarwate’s cartoons from the defunct weekly ‘Manoos’ माणूस), is a testimony to that. This book is an encore.

Psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips says he hates the 'intrusiveness' of psychoanalysis, that 'most people are essentially private and the demand to articulate oneself is quite often a strain, and, in the process, can be a diminishment.

At the bottom of this post see a picture from the booklet.

Poor peahen already feels so diminished before she even has opened her mouth.

This indeed is the mascot image of the conference whose theme is : Women’s Mental Health!

Adam Phillips also says: “I don't have theories, I have sentences. I don't want people to come away thinking, this is what Phillips thinks about X or Y. My wish is not to inform people, but to evoke things in them by the way the writing works. That, I value. Ideally, I want the books to return you to your own thoughts.”

If so, ‘Delight in Madness’ will not disappoint in your journey of returning to your own thoughts.


Artist: Robert J. Day, The New Yorker, December 22 1962
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