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."

Sunday, December 01, 2013

Plucking Tea...चढे चहाचे रोप, उपटतां स्तन हाले?

Today December 1 2013 is 104th Birth Anniversary of B S Mardhekar (बा सी मर्ढेकर)
""५५.

बोंड कपाशीचे फुटे,                                                  
उले वेचतांना ऊर;                                                     
आज होईल का गोड                                                 
माझ्या हाताची भाकर!                                          

भरे भुइमूग-दाणा,
उपटतां स्तन हाले;
 आज येतील का मोड
माझ्या वालांना चांगले!

 वांगी झाली काळी-निळी,
काटा बोचे काढताना;
आज होतील का खुशी
माणसं गं जेवताना!"

 (मर्ढेकरांची कविता, पृष्ठ  64, 1959/ 1977, मौज  प्रकाशन)

As oft-mentioned earlier, I lived on gorgeous tea estates of Assam continuously for a year and then, on and off, for another.

I remember our first winter there. One evening I excitedly asked my wife why I was smelling summer flowers of Maharashtra at this time of the year in Assam. She couldn't guess. I was told later that tea plant smelled like them occasionally.

I have also stayed in, equally gorgeous, Nilgiri tea estates in the South for a while.


But to my eternal regret, I never plucked any tea.

courtesy: http://tea-plucking.blogspot.in/

 I now feel bad after reading the following by Giji K. Raman in The Hindu, September 1 2013:

"...In the past centuries, they (British) came as planters, denuding hills to plant tea. Now they come as pickers of tea, not as labourers but as tourists. So do not be astonished if you see foreigners picking tea on estates in Munnar. It is a slow change happening in the tourism sector here.

On an estate at Thalayar, tourists who come to savour the beauty of the landscape are given a chance to pick tea. That most of the tourists who grab this opportunity are from the U.K. is not lost on the local populace. It was the East India Company which started planting tea in the mountains in Idukki.
British-made historical monuments, such as hanging bridges, bungalows, remains of ropeways and a railway system in Munnar, all related to the plantation sector, remain in the district. On the Thalayar estate, tourists can pick tea leaves in the morning and visit the factory in the evening. Again, an official says, it is the British who prefer the package..."

Mardhekar's poem above says while pulling groundnuts from the ground, breasts of the lady shake (भरे भुइमूग-दाणा, उपटतां स्तन हाले;)

I wonder what happens while plucking tea.

  • A British tourist plucks tea leaves at the Thalayar estate in Munnar. Photo: Giji K. Raman


    A British tourist plucks tea leaves at the Thalayar estate in Munnar.

    Photo: Giji K. Raman for The Hindu
     
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