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, May 19, 2012

Sudhir Tailang Is Making Shankar New!

Ezra Pound: Make It New

Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.”

André Gide: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

John Barth:

"And originality—“making it new”—has many forms. The mainspring of Somadeva’s (सोमदेव) epical eleventh-century Sanskrit tale-cycle, Kátha sarit ságara कथा सरित सागर, or “Ocean of the Streams of Story” (longer than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined), is the goddess Parvati’s request that her consort Siva, as her reward for a particularly divine session of love-making, tell her a story that no one has ever heard before or will ever hear again. In fact, however, the multi-volume “Great Tale” that her lord comes up with includes whole cycles of earlier tales, such as the centuries-old Panchatantra पंचतंत्र (“Five Principles”) and the Vetalapanchavimsati वेतालपञ्चविंशति (“Twenty-five Tales of a Vampire”). And Siva’s tale is overheard by one of the house-servants, who repeats it to his wife, who repeats it to Parvati, who is so incensed by the violation of her for-my-ears-only contract that many consequences follow—including, fortunately, the Great Tale’s transcription and its passage down the ages to us."

I have already written a post on the NCERT cartoon issue.

Cartoonist Sudhir Tailang has been agitated over this. His agitation is understandable because this issue was preceded by Mamata Banerjee cartoon issue.

I have already hailed Mr. Tailang as the best political cartoonist in India today.

And here is another example why.

If you have still not seen Shankar's NCERT cartoon, you can see it here.

Now watch following cartoon by Mr. Tailang.

Although I on an average see more than a funny picture almost every day, seldom I laugh out loud. Especially when I am alone.

This picture made me laugh really loud when I was alone. I did not expect the artist to go out on this limb.

This is Mr. Tailang's tribute to the late Mr. Shankar. The only major difference between the two pictures is the presence / absence of people of India. For some reason, Mr. Tailang's picture doesn't have them.

I see a design even there.

Politicians were accessible then. Now they aren't.

Taya Zinkin, (1918-2003) a prominent English journalist and author writes

“I watched Nehru who had been so accessible even after his country became independent, become increasingly isolated, until one day in Amritsar, an old man who only wanted to touch his feet and receive darshan was nearly killed by a lathi and was carried away by the police in mufti. I watched the slow erosion power works on those who enjoy it and slowly, one by one, I lost my old friends in politics. Constructive criticism, at first welcome, soon grew sour compared with the sycophancy of those who had axes to grind and beds to feather. Power corrupts because it isolates and because in the modern world there is no room for the traditional fool of Shakespearian days.”

(“Sahibs Who Loved India” Ed. Khushwant Singh)

Therefore you now have no one watching them when they are whipping India's 'snail' economy unlike then when they were creating India's constitution!

Remember, Dr. Manmohan Singh is NOT whipping Mr. Pranab Mukherjee. He is about whip the snail. (Even that looks cruel to me now!)


Artist: Sudhir Tailang, The Asian Age, May 17 2012

(My Asian Age issue dated May 17 was delivered on May 18. Lucky me, I did NOT miss it! AA is worth most times because of Mr. Tailang's cartoon alone.)