मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Sarpa Satra: Made in India. Practised in Americas, Germany, Russia...

'Sarpa Satra',2003 is an English poem of Arun Kolatkar (अरुण कोलटकर). It has been beautifully produced in the form of a book by Ashok Shahane (अशोक शहाणे) for PRAS PRAKASHAN.

The poem is based on an episode where a sacrifice was performed by King Janamejaya with the object of annihilating the Nagas, or the Snake People.

The late Irawati Karve (इरावती कर्वे) in her book “Yuganta” (Marathi,1969 / English,1974) calls this pogrom of Naga people Hitlerian.

(Ms. Karve completed her Ph D in Anthropology from Berlin in 1930. I haven't read anything she has written, if any, about her days in Weimar Republic. Did she have any inkling that Third Reich was just three years away!

by the way- the news of 'Bajaj Auto' to stop manufacturing scooters' brought to my mind how Ms. Karve was supposedly one of the first women in Pune to drive a scooter. Reportedly onlookers looked at her in awe.)

In her words: “…. The need for expansion explains the burning of the forests, but the question still remains: Why was it burned so mercilessly?...

The land was usurped after a massacre, a massacre which is praised as a valorous deed. This was because the victims were not Kshatriyas or their Aryan subjects. All the high sounding morality of the Kshatriya code was limited to their own group...

There were rules which applied to all animals, but apparently no rules applied to all human beings. If you spared an animal today you could always kill it tomorrow. But if you spared a human being- even to make a slave out of him-he would in course of time acquires certain rights. There was indeed great danger in sparing the lives of those who owned the land. Krishna and Arjuna, therefore, must have felt the necessity of completely wiping out the enemy...

In the burning of Khandava no rules of conduct seem to have been observed. The sole aim was the acquisition of the land and the liquidation of the Nagas. But the cruel objective was defeated.

Just as Hitler found it impossible to wipe out a whole people, so did the Pandavas. All they gained through this cruelty were the curses of hundreds of victims and three generation of enmity. The only man deliberately spared was Maya, the asura. In gratitude he built the famous palace- Mayasabha……Mayasabha was not only ill-omened; it was even more insubstantial than the city in which it was built. Born in violence, its dazzling demonic splendour turned out be fleeting dream”

The poet Kolatkar gives expressions to these poignant words of an anthropologist.

Charles C. Mann has written a book -'1491'- on the Americas before the Europeans began their formal invasion in 1492.

KEVIN BAKER says in a review (NYT, October 9, 2005):

"...What emerges is an epic story, with a subtly altered tragedy at its heart. For all the European depredations in the Americas, the work of conquest was largely accomplished for them by their microbes, even before the white men arrived in any great numbers. The diseases brought along by the very first unwitting Spanish conquistadors, and probably by English fishermen working the New England coast, very likely triggered one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. Before the 16th century, there may have been as many as 90 million to 112 million people living in the Americas - people who could be as different from each other "as Turks and Swedes," but who had cumulatively developed an incredible range of natural environments, from seeding the Amazon Basin with fruit trees to terracing the mountains of Peru. (Even the term "New World" may be a misnomer; it is possible that the world's first city was in South America.)

Then, disaster. According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the Indians may have died almost immediately on contact with various European diseases, particularly smallpox. That would have amounted to about one-fifth of the world's total population at the time, a level of destruction unequaled before or since..."

Kolatkar's poem ends as follows:

"And the fire that Parashara produced
for the destruction
of rakshasas

still rages, they say,
in the great forest beyond
the Himalayas

where the great sage tried
to dispose of it
when he stopped the sacrifice

at the urgings of Poulastya;
and there, to this day,
they say, it continues to consume

rakshasas
rocks
trees"


Death to Stalin: "You were always a great friend of mine, Joseph"

Artist: Herbert Block, Washington Post (1909-2001)