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."

Friday, May 09, 2014

फणसाचा गरा लागतो बरा, नाकतोड्यापेक्षा परवडला खरा ...We Also Serve Jackfruit



Simone Weil:


"What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict." 


Wikipedia:


"The jackfruit is one of the three auspicious fruits of Tamil Nadu, along with the mango and banana, known as the mukkani (முக்கனி). These are referred to as ma-pala-vaazhai (mango-jack-banana). The three fruits (mukkani) are also related to the three arts of Tamil (mu-Tamizh).[30] Jackfruit is the national fruit of Bangladesh. It is also the state fruit of the Indian state of Kerala."

Eating jackfruit in summer, when the fruit used to compete unfavourably with the mangoes for attention, at our home in Miraj (मिरज), was a family activity.

Twice or so the summer, my father used to buy the fruit and, with the help of my mother, used to cut it and we would sit around and eat the whole of it. There were two types of the fruit available- 'kapa' (कापा) and 'barka' (बरका). Apparently, you need the former type to eat it the way I have described it.

Suzanne Goldenberg writes in The Guardian on April 24 2014:

"The World Bank and United Nations warned recently that rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall had already reduced yields of wheat and corn, and could lead to food wars within the decade."

So contrary to what great Ms. Weil has said, wheat could be a cause of  international conflict !

 "Researchers say jackfruit — a large ungainly fruit grown across south and south-east Asia — could be a replacement for wheat, corn and other staple crops under threat from climate change.."

 "...Efforts in India to exploit the fruit’s potential coincides with a global push to expand food production, especially in developing countries which are expected to face growing challenges to feed their people in the coming decades.

Jackfruit can fill the gap on a number of counts, said Danielle Nierenberg, president of Food Tank, which works on sustainable agriculture.

“It is easy to grow. It survives pests and diseases and high temperatures. It is drought-resistant,” she said. “It achieves what farmers need in food production when facing a lot of challenges under climate change.”
The fruit is rich in potassium, calcium, and iron, said Ms. Reddy, making it more nutritious than current starchy staples..."

Killian Fox wrote in The Guardian June 16 2013:

"Two billion people around the world, primarily in south-east Asia and Africa, eat insects – locusts, grasshoppers, spiders, wasps, ants – on a regular basis. Now, with food scarcity a growing threat, efforts are being made to normalise the concept of entomophagy, or the consumption of insects, for the other 5 billion. Last year, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published a list of more than 1,900 edible species of insects; the EU, meanwhile, offered its member states $3m to research the use of insects in cooking.

Why? Because insects, compared to livestock and fish, are a much more sustainable food source. They are available in abundance: for every human on Earth, there are 40 tonnes of insects. They have a higher food conversion rate than even our fastest-growing livestock (meaning they need to consume less to produce the same amount of meat) and they emit fewer greenhouse gases. As a fast-food option, which is how people treat them in countries such as Thailand, insects are greatly preferable to the water-guzzling, rainforest-destroying, methane-spewing beefburger. They are nutritious too: rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol, high in calcium and iron..."


                                                            "But Wait, We Also Serve Jackfruit"

Photograph/ courtesy: Photomorgana/Corbis,: The Guardian

p.s.

Rajyasree Sen, WSJ, July 6 2014:


"...Ripe Jackfruit –The green unripe jackfruit is used extensively in cooking across India for its texture that resembles meat. And then there is a pungent-smelling ripe jackfruit, which is India’s answer to the durian, famous for its strong odor which is said to resemble anything from rotting onions and gym socks to raw sewage..."
 
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