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, November 12, 2019

Great Guru Nanak Was An Angry Young Man

#GuruNanak550
 
Today November 12 2019 is Guru Nanak Jayanti


“…I found so many venerable, staid old women and men of Indian history were actually rebellious, angry, upstart young people! Guru Nanak was extraordinary with radical ideas about women, food, dress. He was an angry young man! But the history we’re taught drains out the human interest to produce a single-file procession of figures leading to the end-point of the nation. I’m saying, instead of this neat orderly line, what we have is a rabble of critiques, dissent – we’re a nation of rabblerousers! That’s why we had great moments of challenge and reform, because people were reckless enough to say, i’m not going to put up with this now. We underplay that individuality to produce this conformist past…”

Sunil Khilnani, 'Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives', 2016:

“Indian religions love their wandering heroes. There’s the Buddha, who wandered for six years; Mahavira, who doubled that; and the many saints and yogis of Hinduism who meander homeless all across the Indian past. The fifteenth-century founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Nanak, also took to the road—for some twenty-three years. He made it as far afield as Mecca and Medina, and to the mythic mountain Sumeru, meeting emperors and carpenters, sages and thugs along the way—or so say the Janam Sakhis, a collection of hagiographical stories about his life.
But there’s a crucial difference between Nanak and the Buddha or Mahavira, who renounced their families and communities to find spiritual truth. After Nanak achieved enlightenment, he returned to the fertile fields of his homeland, the Punjab, and made room in his religious life for members of his previous, unenlightened domesticity. For him, devotion did not require asceticism, renunciation, or an attachment to holy men and their institutions, but what scholars of the Sikh religion have called a “disciplined worldliness.”...” 
 
Guru Nanak:
"The Creator, fearless, without rancour,
Timeless, unborn, self-existent
By God’s grace he is known
Meditate on Him
He was true
In the beginning, in the primal time …"


Guru Nanak with his companions Bhai Mardana and Bhai Bala.

Courtesy: Roland and Sabrina Michaud / akg-images