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, September 05, 2014

Vodka: Nobody in the World Knows What it is Made out of

The Hindu, August 27 2014: "Kerala bars to be closed by September 12. 15 days’ notice will be served on all bars except 20 bars in five-star hotels."
 
Mark Lawrence Schrad:

“…Yet even as drinkers of the world raise a toast to vodka, we should all be reminded of its dark past: the generations of Russians who found not only consolation at the bottom of the bottle but also grief, illness, and death. We must remember that such incredible human costs were—and still are—attributable not just to the lowly drunkard, but to the autocratic political system that reaped unimaginable profits from the people’s misery, generation after generation.

With history in mind, the cowboy philosopher’s alcoholic musings sound even more fitting: “Now that is the whole story to Vodka,” Rogers surmised. “Nobody in the world knows what it is made out of, and the reason I tell you this is that the story of Vodka is the story of Russia. Nobody knows what Russia is made out of, or what it is liable to cause its inhabitants to do next.”

The story of vodka truly is the story of Russia: not just its culture and society, but its history and statecraft as well. Whether it can ever break free of the shackles of vodka politics—and the autocratic system that nurtures it and is nurtured by it—may well be the most fundamental political question facing the future of Russia.”
 
Old Russian Proverb:


“A man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end—and in the meantime, it is good to drink a sip of vodka.” 

 The Times of India, July 2 2013:
"India's vodka consumption declined 3% last calendar — first fall in more than a decade — suggesting the odorless spirit's waning honeymoon with the youth."


The Economist, December 20 2001:
"...It may be small—each molecule is less than a billionth of a metre long, and consists of a handful of atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen—but ethyl alcohol makes an excellent time machine. People have enjoyed alcoholic drinks since prehistoric times, making drinking one of the few strands that runs throughout the history of western civilisation. Appreciating the art, music or literature of long-vanished cultures can require years of study; recreating their drinks, and comparing them to what we enjoy today, is simple in comparison, not to mention more fun. The consumption of alcohol is so widespread in history, says Patrick McGovern, an archaeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania, that drinking is, in effect, “a universal language”.."


When I drank little more than occasionally, I liked vodka, beer and rum. I hated (and still do) whiskey's taste including even Scotch's.

These days I hardly drink and don't miss it but I enjoy many aspects of drinking. For instance: What do people drink, how much and how they change in the process?

The chart in The Economist dated June 17 2013 is very informative.

China's national liquor baijiu accounts for a whopping 99.5% of all spirits consumed there. So China does not even feature in rankings of the best-known internationally consumed spirits in The Economist charts. Indi
India does figure there in rum and gin charts.  I wonder how. Isn't India's national liquor arrack/ toddy/ hathbhatti (हाथभट्टी)/desi-liquor (देशी दारू)?

Among branded liquor, Vodka is the most popular in the world, 4.44 litres, billion.

On Vodka drinking, Serge Schmemann wrote in NYT April 15 2007:

 "...The European Union would define vodka simply as diluted ethyl alcohol, which is, of course, what it is. ...vodka is a Russian word, a diminutive of “water” (before you adopt an ironic smile, be aware that “whiskey” comes from the Gaelic for “water of life”)...My beef is with the whole brouhaha over a liquor whose greatest, and only, virtue is that it is colorless and tasteless...the proliferation of premium vodkas, in ever fancier bottles and at ever higher prices, is understandable, given the decadence of the Western world. The endless debates about which vodka “tastes” better are less so..."




Running Amuck dated November 16, 1904, 

cover of the satirical magazine Puck depicting Russia—clutching a jug of vodka—stumbling into war against a Japanese hornet. 

Artist: Unknown to me

Courtesy: 

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 
                                  and
‘Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State’, 2014 by Mark Lawrence Schrad