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, October 07, 2014

Remove Outsiders from the Ajanta Murals!

A young photogenic leader was thundering in Marathi at an election rally..the crescendo of "down with outsiders" in his speech had reached skies over Aurangabad- just 100 km from Ajanta- as I surfed the TV channels on October 2 2014.

On October 3 2014, I read William Dalrymple's article in The New York Review of Books dated October 23 2014.



courtesy: Charles and Josette Lenars/Corbis

"...The early rock-cut cave monasteries of western India also predate almost all the extant texts of Buddhism (written beginning in 100 BC but mostly surviving in much later copies), and all we know about them comes from the Sanskrit and Pali inscriptions left on the rock walls by the monks, their patrons, and devotees. By then the great monasteries of ancient India appear to have been as powerful as those in medieval Europe, and often had their own mints and owned landed estates, some of which were worked by slaves.
The second century BC was a period of great expansion of international trade, and these monasteries, remote as they may seem now, were originally built on the great trade routes of their time. The valleys they crown once saw the frequent passage of caravans bringing luxury goods—ebony, teak, and sandalwood, ivory and translucent Indian textiles, pepper and cinnamon—to the coast where they would then be shipped, usually by Jewish and Greek middlemen, to the Red Sea and thence to Rome.
The inscriptions show how surprisingly middle-class and mercantile early Buddhism was, and it is clear that the patrons of these early monks were often traders or their bankers. More surprising still, some of them designate themselves as Yavanas—“foreigners,” probably Greeks. As Walter Spink’s pupil Pia Brancaccio has pointed out, the Ajanta murals
portray a prosperous and multicultural environment filled with people wearing golden jewels and…enjoying imported goods. Even the pigments used in the paintings indicate international trade connections—the blue, for example, was obtained from lapis lazuli imported from Iran or Afghanistan…. Recognizable among the crowds are many foreigners, easy to spot because of their different clothes, hairdos, and in some cases even skin colors…. Foreign figures appear so commonly in the murals that they must surely have been part of the social scene at the time..."
...Jewish, Greek, Read Sea, Rome, Iran, Afghanistan...dance of the then almost entire human civilization...

 "Foreign figures appear so commonly in the murals that they must surely have been part of the social scene at the time"