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, April 16, 2010

Mr. Aamir Khan, We ALL are a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies

Kundan Shah when asked by Hindustan Times if a script like 'Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro' would find a financier: "...Maybe if a star backs a project, it may be possible but my experience is that all of them without exception are highly illiterate." (February 7 2010)

Naseeruddin Shah: "I've lost the hope of seeing a truly great film being made in this country, at least in my lifetime." (March 20, 2010)

Susan Sontag: "...To be sure, there was always a conflict between cinema as an industry and cinema as an art, cinema as routine and cinema as experiment. But the conflict was not such as to make impossible the making of wonderful films, sometimes within and sometimes outside of mainstream cinema. Now the balance has tipped decisively in favor of cinema as an industry. The great cinema of the 1960's and 1970's has been thoroughly repudiated..."

They say "3 idiots" is the biggest hit in the history of Hindi films. Maybe it is.

Aamir Khan, a star, aggressively promoted it using 'innovative' methods.

In December 2009, in temple town of Mahabalipuram, a tour guide took Mr. Khan by surprise when he admitted to never even having heard of the actor.

I have always found Mr. Khan, a narcissist, an average actor who happens to be very successful.

He never mentions luck while talking about his success.

It's always his hard work, his body, his scalp, his dedication, his patriotism, his intelligence, his creativity, his wife, his family, his vision...

See the episode at Mahabalipuram here.

I was quite amused by it and thought it was very ironic.

Mahabalipuram, that appears on this blog here, dwarfs every one. Occasionally even the neighbouring Bay of Bengal!

Reviewing "The Earth After Us : What legacy will humans leave in the rocks?" by Jan Zalasiewicz, Robin McKie says:

“… the planet's constantly shifting geology will, inevitably, crush and bury every one of our greatest creations, our skyscrapers, motorways, bridges, churches and temples. Tectonic trashing, then, is to be the fate of most of humanity's handiwork.

Not all will be lost, however. Odd clues will emerge when seismic activity will push up a slice of petrified city. "Here there will be metres-thick layers of rubble, of outlines of tunnels and pipes, of giant middens of rubble and waste." That, then, will be our legacy. It is not much of a memorial. Indeed, by contrast, Ozymandias did well with a couple of headless trunks of stone.”

“…we still dig up plenty of 100-million-year-old dinosaur bones today. However, those ancient animals thrived for tens of millions of years. By contrast, Homo sapiens has lasted around 100,000. By that reckoning, we are a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies.” (The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009)

Sadly even Mahabalipuram may do only as well as Ozymandias.

('Ozymandias', 1818 is an example of how a great work of art persists.

In last few years, I have seen it being quoted by scientists like Jared Diamond in 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed', 2005 and Richard Dawkins in 'The Ancestor's Tale', 2004.)


‘Own up, Narcissus, you’re responsible for this graffiti, aren’t you?’
Artist: Richard Jolley (rgj), Spectator
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