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, July 02, 2009

Sanskrit, That’s Why You is Dead

My 15-year-old son enjoys learning Sanskrit. I too liked it at his age.

In school, I read and reread a story- there exist a couple of variations on this- of Kalidasa.

It ran something like this:

“A poor Brahmin enters Dhara- the capital town of King Bhoja- where Kalidasa lived. He aspires to visit the court of King Bhoja and earn a prize on demonstration of his knowledge of Sanskrit.

It’s an early winter morning. He sees a young woman drawing rangawali in front of Kalidasa's house. Poor Brahmin thinks she is not adequately protected against the winter chill and asks her- in Sanskrit- if she is not afraid of getting harmed by the cold.

She answers that she is not being hurt by the cold but by the faulty grammar of the poor Brahmin.”

Then I thought- very smart. Now I say: What hubris!!!

In Sanskrit, the exchange in Dhara reads as follows:

“
अपि शीतं ते बाधती इति
सा अवदात
ना तथा बाधते शीतं
यथा बाधती बाधते

api shiitaM te baadhati iti
saa avadat
na tathaa baadhate shiitaM
yathaa baadhati baadhate”

[api shiitaM te baadhati iti= does cold bother (trouble) you?

saa avadat = she said

na tathaa baadhate shiitam = no, cold doesn't bother (trouble) me in that manner

yathaa baadhati baadhate = just like the word 'baadhati' bothers (troubles)

baadhati is incorrect usage and the correct usage is baadhate ]

Over the years, I have heard native speakers of Marathi teasing native speakers of Kannada when they speak Marathi. Even some big names in Marathi literature have fallen prey to this temptation in their writings.

It's so vulgar.

When I lived in Kolkata, Bengalis encouraged my wife and me to speak Bengali without any fear.

And finally English. It's as flexible as a Chinese gymnast.

Michael Skapinker writes in FT June 15, 2009:

“…But in their study “Was/were variation: A perspective from London”, Jenny Cheshire and Sue Fox of Queen Mary, University of London, write that those who say “you was” have history on their side. “You was” is hundreds of years old.It has been used in many parts of the English-speaking world…

… But there is no single standard of correct grammar. “You were” would be as much of a howler in some (non-Bangladeshi) parts of east London as “you was” would be in this newspaper…

… In his book, The Fight for English, David Crystal says: “The only languages that do not change are dead ones.”…”

Why didn’t Sanskrit change? Are today’s Indo-European languages, that are native to India, changing fast enough to survive the onslaught of Hindi?

Look at the picture below...She is concerned about his grammar...Is he talking dirty in Sanskrit?


Artist: Zachary Kanin, The New Yorker, May 25 2009

For more pictures of Zachary Kanin, click here.
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