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."

Monday, April 06, 2015

बन्सीधरा, आता तू कोठे रे जाशील?...In Assam, Noah on a Raft

The Hindu reported on March 25 2015 how a photo taken by The Hindu's Guwahati-based Special News Photographer Ritu Raj Konwar, was an inspiration for the Malayalam film 'Ottal' , which won two National awards on Tuesday March 24 2015.


courtesy: The Hindu and Ritu Raj Konwar

The power of the photograph does not surprise me.

But this is not the only such picture that has moved me in recent years.

Here is a recycled post of mine  dated 27 October 2008:

"This year I have received a Diwali greeting card from Madhukar Dharmapurikar (मधुकर धर्मापुरीकर) that speaks volumes about his sensitive eye and his panache...

See the picture below.


Dharmapurikar calls the boy in the picture ‘Balkrishna' (बाळकृष्ण). 

It reminded me of S M Mate (श्री. म. माटे) calling his child  protagonist- an orphan- ‘Banseedhar' (बन्सीधर). A title of one of his stories reads "बन्सीधरा, आता तू कोठे रे जाशील?" (Banseedhara, Where will you go now?)

But there is no trace of sentimentality, implicit in Mate’s rhetoric question,  in the posture of Balkrishna, above. He is not wasting any time in crying or playing. He is busy rescuing his mom and navigating his own destiny.

He perhaps is telling his mother:

"तू आणि मी मिळून अजूनही त्या भडव्या नशिबाला टांग मारू" [G A Kulkarni, 'Pingalavel', 'Kairee', 1977 (जी ए कुलकर्णी ’पिंगळावेळ’ कैरी १९७७ )]

Or is it even one better, the way Balkrishna has anchored himself?  "तू आणि मी मिळून अजूनही त्या भडव्या नशिबाला पोलवाँल्ट करू."..."