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."

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Ms. Tagore's body trembles---Why? Lack of Footwear, Not Her Lover's Touch

Paul Johnson:

"The power of a pocket...

For women have no pockets. Why? The question takes us into the murkier depths of the sex war as well as the arcana of sartorial history...

The record shows that the absence of pockets was a huge disadvantage to females and one reason why male superiority was so steadfastly maintained..."

(The Spectator, June 4 2011)

I was taken aback when a few years ago my wife Anju asked me if I had ever noticed that heroines in Hindi films seldom wore footwear while singing a duet (song) outdoor.

Be it in on farms, in jungle, on rubble, in snow, through fire, on glass, in water, on boulder, in rain...

I hadn't.

Since then I have always paid attention to the feet of dancing dames and found, to my horror, that Anju is almost always right.

Another thing we often notice- while watching Hindi film songs- is, even in severe cold, those Indian dames don't wear clothes covering their entire body while men wear suits and even headgear!

"palako.n ke piichhe se kyaa tumane kah Daalaa phir se to faramaanaa" (पलकों के पीछे से क्या तुमने कह डाला फिर से तो फ़रमाना) is one of the best songs I have heard.

[Film: Talaash (1969) Music Director: S D Burman, Lyricist: Majrooh, Singers: Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar]

Notice, how, even in snow, Sharmila Tagore is walking barefoot while Rajendra Kumar is wearing nice shoes. Also, notice the difference in the kind of clothes they are wearing.

There is a line in the song:

...दुनिया ना देखे धड़के मेरा मन रस्ता सजन मेरा छोड़ो
तन थरथराए उँगली हमारी देखो पिया न मरोड़ो...

तन थरथराए? Body trembles?...Lack of footwear, Ma'am.




Surely Two Species: One from cold Mars, One from boiling Venus
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