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."

Sunday, September 02, 2012

Sadhana: Now that’s a woman. But did God Create Her with Special Care?

Today Sept 2 2012 is 71st Birthday of Sadhana Shivdasani

Stephen Marche:

"Strange gods reveal themselves in beautiful shapes, appear eternal and untouchable for the brief terms of their on-sale dates, and then vanish as swiftly as they came, generating constantly new and immediate responses to the slightest flutter of need in the public consciousness."

Shiv Visvanathan, Jan 12 2010:


"Time is a trickster, it plays pranks on you. All it needs to do is to thicken your skin, bloat your body into a puffball, and your sense of self disappears under a backstage of cosmetics.

Even Bollywood with all its magic often fails to defeat time. Icons of yesterday often fail even in terms of nostalgia. Who remembers Ranjan or Padmini or Ragini in the new generation, or even Nadira? Dev Anand appears a sad imitation of himself. Sadhana disappears seeking the aura of a Garbo-like recluse and all she receives is indifference..."


from : Rajkumar, 1964 Director: K Shankar

As a kid, watching Sadhana in 'Geeta Mera Naam', 1974, after watching her in 'Rajkumar', was learning little more about heartless, witless nature. What could happen to you in just 10 years...

Khalid Mohamed writes in his memorable essay on Raj Khosla (The Asian Age, Oct 15 2011):

"...Aware that I wasn’t getting my “serious, analytical” interview, I rounded off with film-related questions. He (Raj Khosla) answered them, too, getting particularly sentimental about Sadhana. “Now that’s a woman. God must have created her with special care,” he sighed. The woman smiled, “Raj-ji… he’s mad about his heroines, falls in love with all of them.” Not surprisingly, his women characters were infallibly steel strong. He wept a bit, then, recalling the memory of his mother..."

And then one saw her in 2010.

Sadhana (on the left) in Sept 2010

Photo courtesy: PTI

The Times of India, December 25 2010:

"Mystery surrounds the 'death' of yesteryear actress Nalini Jaywant who, neighbours say, passed away three days ago in tragically lonely circumstances at her bungalow in Chembur. Her relatives and those she had once worked with in the film industry were all unaware of the passing of the star who scaled the heights of fame in the 1940s and '50s but had turned into a complete recluse for the last many years.

Jaywant's neighbour Ajay Kapoor told TOI that the security and domestic staff in the colony saw the body being taken away in an ambulance on Tuesday. "However, by the time we got to know about it, it was all over," he says. "We heard from our staff that a man, who claimed to be a distant relative , came and took the body away. The house is locked and in complete darkness for the past three days, the servants have gone, and Naliniji's pet dogs are on the streets. We neighbours have been taking care of them."..."