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."

Friday, December 27, 2013

His Secular AK47 Became the Coca-Cola of Small Arms

When Suredra Paul, owner of the Apeejay group and brother of UK-based Swraj Paul,  was brutally murdered by militants in Assam near Chabua on May 9 1990, my wife and I almost heard the gunshots because we lived only a few kilometers away from the scene at Doom Dooma.

Later we came to know that the murder was done with a weapon called AK-47 and any 'idiot' could operate it with ease and that it was easily and cheaply available in Assam.

I still remember that eerie afternoon. Luckily we did not see any AK-47 while we lived there. It seems as of today the rifle has killed more people than any other firearm in the world!

In the wee hours of November 8 1990, we were asked to leave our tea-garden homes, with as little baggage as possible,  on a gun-mounted Indian military truck before being airlifted from Sookerting airfield- almost never used for nondefense purpose- in an Indian Airlines Boeing flight to dodge the bullets of Ulfa's AK-47's.


courtesy: Frontline dated December 8-21 1990

(I knew well all the employees from the picture above and the late Mr. Deepak Sen lived in the bungalow above.

By the way,  the cars were not "abandoned" by any definition of that word. They were parked in the head office because the military convoy  carrying us started from that point. Managing Director was NOT evacuated with us. He was already in Kolkata.)

A lot of blood has since been shed in the streets of India. 

Mikhail Kalashnikov, credited with creating the AK-47, the most popular assault rifle in history, died at age 94 on December 23 2013.

Nigel Fountain  writes in the Guardian while reviewing Michael Hodges's 'AK47: The Story of the People's Gun', on  July 28 2007:

"...With 650 rounds pumped out a minute, Kalashnikov's cheap and cheerless, charismatic assembly of tube and wood has, with added global trickle-down, put mass slaughter inside the budgets of ordinary Joes - and Abdullahs and Reiks - everywhere..."

Not just Joes,  Abdullahs and Reiks but also Baruah's, Singh's, Prabhakaran's...


Artist: Tome Toles, July 2009