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, January 07, 2011

All I know I already live in Hong Kong

I just finished reading John Lanchester's "Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay".

I found some parts of it very good.

You can read it on Google books here.

Go to page 12 and read it from "How did we get here?" to the end of page 14 (In physical book it is from page 6 to page 8)..."because home was coming to me":


"...I grew up in Hong Kong at the time when it was the most unbridled freemarket economy in the world. There were no rules, no taxes (well, eventually there was a top-rate tax of 15%), no welfare state, no guarantee of healthcare or schooling. The ugly edge of no-rules capitalism was everywhere apparent. Shantytowns sprawled halfway up the hillsides. But the ways in which capitalism created growth and wealth were everywhere apparent too.

Refugees from communist China swam, crawled and smuggled themselves into Hong Kong in every imaginable way, and they regularly died in the attempt. What they were trying to get to wasn’t the place so much as the system. So the system must be something of extraordinary power. Even a child could see that. You could see it mainly in the sheer speed of change. It was a regular event to go round a corner and experience the jolt of not knowing where the hell you were, because some regular landmark had disappeared.

At that time, Hong Kong was like an experiment, a lab test in free-market capitalism. Britain seemed much slower, more cautious, more regulated, warier of change. But in the three decades after I left Hong Kong, it was as if there were a kind of reverse takeover, in which Hong Kong’s rules took over the rest of the world. The unbridled and unregulated operation of the free market became the new normal.

It wasn’t so much that this version of capitalism won the argument as that it won by sheer force: countries that had adopted it were growing their economies faster than those that weren't. You can't accurately measure subjective changes in the texture of people's experiences, but you can measure growth in GDP, and the evidence from GDP was irrefutable. With Ronald Regan in power in the US and Mrs Thatcher in power in the UK, a Hong Kongite version of free-market capitalism took over the world. I couldn't go home again, but in some important respects it made no difference because home was coming to me..."

It's interesting some people want a "work permit" system for Mumbai, a kind of 'visa' for Indians.

Apart from being certain about rampant corruption- Octroi like- indulged by the natives, one can imagine what might happen to migrant workers in such a setup:

"They, huddled masses and wretched refuses from the picture below, will swim, crawl and smuggle themselves into Mumbai in every imaginable way, and they will regularly die in the attempt."

Maybe it will be the last chapter in Hong Kongisation of this country.


Artist: William O'Brian, The New Yorker, March 17 1973
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