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."

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Sherpas Can Put Even Homer Simpson on the Everest

Lukas Eberle:

"Since the first ascent on May 29, 1953, by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, some 3,836 people have climbed Mount Everest, with almost three quarters of them making the ascent in the last 10 years. The Himalayan peak has become "an amusement park," says top Italian alpinist Simone Moro, who has summited Everest four times."

(Spiegel Online International, Oct 5 2012)


I never liked the disclosure by Tenzing Norgay that it was Sir Edmund Hillary who put the first step on the Everest.

Why couldn't it be that both of them did it together?

MICHAEL J. YBARRA writes in his review of 'Buried in the Sky' By Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan:

"The real climbing isn't done by the publicity-seeking adventurers with corporate sponsorships who lug satellite telephones up the mountain so they can blog about their exploits while relying on fixed lines to lead them upward."

(WSJ, June 21 2012)

[p.s. Mr. Ybarra was killed on June 30- July 1 2012 in a fall during a weekend mountain-climbing trip in the Sierra Nevada. The area where Mr. Ybarra is believed to have been climbing doesn't have trails and is used mostly by experienced mountain climbers.]

It is done by either Nepalese Sherpas or the Pakistani equivalent.

"It has become fashionable among the adventurers who attempt K2 to link their efforts to a worthwhile cause, however far-fetched, such as bringing attention to water conservation. The Nepalese and Pakistani climbers who help them also have a good cause: feeding their families. Given that the average worker in Pakistan earns the equivalent of less than $3 a day, the mountain work is enticing. A porter carrying loads to base camp makes $9 a day, and the high-altitude workers rake in much more: Climbers who make it to the summit customarily pay a $1,000 bonus. "When your family needs that money," Pasang Lama tells the authors, "sometimes you don't insist a weak climber turn back."

The money means little to the 8-year-old son of Jehan Baig, a Pakistani porter who died in the K2 tragedy when his son was 4. "I hate foreigners," the boy says. "Why do they come to climb mountains and kill our fathers?" K2 used to be known as the mountaineer's mountain. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be true anymore..."

There was a lot of noise on Marathi TV channels when a few Pune based climbers came back after climbing the Everest. I wonder if any of them- surely part of the 350 people mentioned below- spoke about the Sherpas.

"On Everest—where about 350 people reached the summit over two days this spring—Sherpas do virtually all the work, fixing lines to the top and sometimes even attaching the clients' ascenders (a metal device that clamps onto the line) so that they don't have to remove their mitts."

TV can be so shallow.

Sherpas always bring to my mind "King of the Hill", 23rd episode of the ninth season of "The Simpsons" first aired on 3-May-1998.

Homer agrees to climb the tallest mountain in Springfield, "The Murderhorn". He is aided by two Sherpas as guides. They drag Homer up the mountain as he sleeps. During one of these nights, Homer wakes up to discover that he is being secretly dragged, and fires the two Sherpas.

courtesy: The Simpsons

Bart: Oh, Dad's gonna die and it's all my fault!
Marge: Don't worry, kids, your father will be just fine as long as he's with those Sherpas.

Marge doesn't know so far that he's NOT with those Sherpas.

Lucky those who are!

And when they are, the climb is as smooth as an escalator like in the picture below:

Artist: Gahan Wilson, The New Yorker, July 3 2000
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