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."

Monday, January 26, 2015

लक्ष्मणचा मोठेपणा असा की, त्याला हे मर्म बरोबर सापडले आहे...R K Laxman

The late Mr. Laxman has appeared a few times on this blog earlier, always with a picture. As he exits this world today, he enters here without a picture.

For a long time, I did not know Laxman drew 'You Said It!' for The Times of India because I was brought up looking at his pictures in a Marathi paper - Maharashtra Times (महाराष्ट्र टाइम्स) titled "Kasan Bolalat!" ( ' कसं बोललात!' )

Not every picture of Laxman was brilliant, indeed many were predictable but when he hit the bull's eye, it was sheer ecstasy.

What I thought most admirable in him was the way he appreciated and drew:  'The Bird of Birds the Indian crow'. Another guy who appreciated the species: Mark Twain!

I had a good fortune of meeting Laxman at IIT, Madras in early 1980's. Unfortunately, I had not been able to get into the hall where he had lectured and drew earlier but I lined up with hundreds to get his autograph at the end of it.  

I consider Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) the greatest cartoonist India has produced. Here is a tribute by Sarwate to Laxman, in Marathi,  from Sarwate's book 'Vyangkala-Chitrakala' (व्यंगकला -चित्रकला), 2005.

A line from that: लक्ष्मणचा मोठेपणा असा की, त्याला हे मर्म बरोबर सापडले आहे...Greatness of Laxman is that he has accurately found the nerve...



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