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."

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Just a Scratchy Throat...But No Ranbaxy Generic Please!

T N Ninan wrote in Business Standard on May 25 2013:

"A Country for scandal?/ What do IPL and Ranbaxy tell us?"

"Pillorying the government of the day for pervasive corruption is the easy thing to do, whereas it might just be an escapist option. It helps those of us who are neither in politics nor in the government to pretend that we are not tainted, and therefore have the right to point fingers at politicians, who we assume are not. The truth, as recent events have brought home forcefully, is that corruption has permeated fields that have nothing to do with politics and government...

...And what does one make of Ranbaxy - once a poster boy for the emerging India, but which now stands exposed for falsifying its research results, and then selling what must presumably be described as adulterated drugs to unsuspecting consumers, at home and abroad? The US authorities have slapped a penalty of half a billion dollars (about Rs 2,800 crore), but where have India's own drug authorities been all this while? What about the criminal liability of all those who were in the company and part of the fraud? What is the responsibility of the company's directors of the time, including many well-known worthies - who, according to the whistle-blower, chose to ignore the red flag that he waved?..."

Bishan Singh Bedi, The Hindu, May 26 2013:

"IPL bares the soullessness of some of the giants of Indian cricket who cannot stop raving about it. It is nauseating to observe, day in day out, India’s former greats competing with each other to outsmart the cricketing dictionary."

Kanti Bajpai  wrote on May 25 2013 in The Times of India:

"...Our national game is corruption — nothing gives us more pleasure than for our media to uncover the next great scam, bigger and bolder than the last great scam, and there is no doubt a league table of corruption in our heads that excites us. The only right we truly care about is to do whatever we please and devil take anyone who objects. And our consuming passion is yammering endlessly, mostly to criticise everyone else.." 

Look at me, an ordinary man, in the picture below. On the left. And any corruption scandal these days for me is just a scratchy throat.

But No Ranbaxy Generic Please!



 Artist: Richrd Decker, The New Yorker, November 27 1937

p.s.

After I published this post, this is what I read on FB: "Mumbai hospital advises doctors against prescribing Ranbaxy drugs".