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."

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Did Bhau Padhye Draw Dramatic Pictures 劇画 or Whimsical Pictures 漫画?

No Indian media informed me that Yoshihiro Tatsumi died on March 7 2015. He created a dark, noirish style of Japanese manga he called gekiga, meaning “dramatic pictures". 

Apparently the term gekiga (劇画)- dramatic pictures- was coined by Mr. Tatsumi because he did not like the term manga (漫画), whimsical pictures.

Even in Marathi (मराठी)  there is no agreement on what cartoons should be called: हास्यचित्रे का व्यंगचित्रे? And there are Americans who started calling erstwhile comic books as graphic novels. 

I feel very shy  including Marathi in this discussion because Marathi does not hold a candle to the vast graphic literature that exists in Japanese and English.

I remember, on my first visit to Japan in the 1990's, I was overwhelmed by the huge stacks of manga books in even the smallest of the kiosks in and around Tokyo. I bought one adult manga book. I was not sure if Indian customs would allow it. They never bothered with my baggage.  


The title page of “Unpaid.” 

Artist: Yoshihiro Tatsumi (辰巳 ヨシヒロ)

courtesy: The Paris Review

Imagine if we had the tradition of gekiga/manga in India, what possibilities would have opened up to describe the life in Mumbai? 

 One the greatest chroniclers of Mumbai, Bhau Padhye (भाऊ पाध्ये) would be a gekiga artist! Or was he already a  manga artist?

Artist: Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे)
In this caricature, Sarwate seems to have drawn Bhau as 'whimsical picture' 漫画!
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