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."

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Did Shivaji See a Tulip at Dutch Factory in Surat?

Today February 19 2014 is 384th Birth Anniversary of Shivaji (शिवाजी)


William Dalrymple, October 2012:

"...it was India’s extraordinary wealth that drew in the merchant adventurers of the East India Company. They came to India not as part of some Tudor aid project, but instead as part of a desperate effort to cash in on the riches of the Mughal empire, then one of the two wealthiest polities in the world. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Mughal city of Lahore is revealed to Adam after the Fall as a future wonder of God’s creation: by the 17th century, Lahore had grown richer than Constantinople, and with its two million inhabitants it dwarfed London and Paris combined. It was, in terms of rapid growth, prosperity and opportunities, the Gurgaon of its day.
What eastern Europeans are to modern Brit­ain – economic migrants in search of a better life – the Jacobeans were to Mughal India. It was only after the arrival of the various colonial powers that India came to be perceived as poor..."

Jennifer Szalai, Lapham's Quarterly:

"The speculator is fixated on what everybody else is thinking, because the existence of a market in shares means that prices will be determined more often by the mentality of the herd than by the thing itself—whether it be a tulip, a pork belly, a pound sterling, or a house...Tulips may be beautiful to look at, a lovely addition to the breakfast table, but during the height of Tulipomania in the winter of 1636-7, the bulbs were in the ground and speculators were trading pieces of paper: no tulips were actually delivered"

Mr. Narendra Modi claims that Shivaji did not sack Surat in 1664 and 1670

Instead, Mr. Modi says, he plundered Mughal emperor Aurangazeb's treasure in the city with the help of local people.

Maybe. 

In any case, it looks like, we all have to start loving Mr. Modi.


As  'Aurangazeb's treasure in the city was being looted', by one account,  narrated so beautifully (maybe little speculative perhaps) by the late D G Godse (द ग गोडसे), Shivaji watched it, for some time,  from the Dutch factory. 

Dutch painter then present grabbed that opportunity to draw Shivaji's most moving portrait available to us today. 

If you read Marathi (मराठी), read a couple of pages from Godse's said essay  below:


 [ "Shivrayache Kaise Bolane....", 'Samande Talash', Shreevidya Prakashan

("शिवरायाचे कैसे बोलणे…. ", 'समन्दे तलाश', श्रीविद्या प्रकाशन , 1981) ]

On February 2 1637,  legendary Dutch tulip bubble burst. It very much happened on Shivaji's watch. Maharaj was six years old. 

Did Shivaji know (they say he was generally well informed even about European affairs)  about the speculative madness as he stood in the Dutch factory? If he knew, what would he think about the money that changed hands in Holland during the mania? He needed only a tiny fraction of it to build his own dream and that's why he was in Surat in the first place!



Courtsey: The Economist


Dan Piepenbring writes in 'Tulipomania!': 


"...Most edifying of all, though, is a list of various articles that “were delivered for one single root of the rare species called the Viceroy,” which gives an astonishing sense of just how inflated the flowers’ value was:


·        Two lasts of wheat

·        Four lasts of rye

·        Four fat oxen

·        Eight fat swine

·        Twelve fat sheep

·        Two hogsheads of wine

·        Four tuns of beer

·        Two tuns of butter

·        One thousand lbs. of cheese

·        A complete bed

·        A suit of clothes

·        A silver drinking-cup..."



Artist: Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678), 1640

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