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."

Saturday, June 03, 2023

पुस्तकात बोस्टन टी पार्टी आहे पण फूमेन अफू पार्टी का नाही?.. Humen Opium Party@184

 #HumenOpiumParty184

विकिपीडिया सांगतो:
"The destruction of opium at Humen began on 3 June 1839 and involved the destruction of 1,000 long tons (1,016 t) of illegal opium seized from British traders under the aegis of Lin Zexu, an Imperial Commissioner of Qing China..."

 सौजन्य : विकीपिडीया

माझ्या ९वीच्या इतिहासाच्या पुस्तकात (१९७३-७४) बोस्टन टी पार्टी, १७७३ बद्दल पुष्कळ माहिती होती पण मी आयुष्यात फूमेन (उच्चार सुद्धा नक्की माहित नाही) अफू पार्टीबद्दल कधी वाचले नव्हते.


२०१७साली ब्रिटिश साम्राज्यावर घणाघाती हल्ला करणारे पुस्तक ('Inglorious Empire') शशी थरूर यांनी लिहले.
फायनान्शियल टाइम्स (FT) चे व्हिक्टर म्यॅले (Victor Mallet) त्या पुस्तकाच्या परिक्षणात लिहतात :

"...Summoning evidence from British and American historians as well as Indian thinkers, Tharoor charts the destruction of pre-colonial systems of government by the British and their ubiquitous ledgers and rule books; the punitive taxation of farmers and mismanagement of famines in which millions died; the imposition of laws against homosexuality and sedition used to this day by authoritarian Indian governments; and the extreme protectionism (in everything from textiles to shipbuilding) that crippled India’s world-class manufacturing sectors and its pre-existing international trade networks. “Britain’s Industrial Revolution,” he writes, “was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries.”

The statistics are worth repeating, the more so because India is now often neglected in favour of China when historians recall the economic dominance of Asia. When the East India Company was established in 1600, Britain accounted for 1.8 per cent of global gross domestic product and India for 23 per cent. India was one of the richest and most industrialised economies. In 1750, India and China together accounted for nearly three-quarters of world industrial output, but India “was transformed by the process of imperial rule into one of the poorest, most backward, illiterate and diseased societies on earth by the time of our independence in 1947”. By then, India’s share of world GDP was just 3 per cent, while Britain’s was three times as high..."

त्याच ब्रिटिश साम्राज्याने मुंबईतील मूठभर व्यापारी हाताशी धरून चीनला अफूचे व्यसन लावले. अमिताव घोष यांनी त्याविषयावर तीन कादंबऱ्या लिहल्या (opium war trilogy).

घोष म्हणतात:
 “The first opium war was a very Indian war. It was fought by Indian sepoys and largely funded by merchants from Bombay, using many weapons developed by Indian soldiers and kings such as Hyder Ali, fighting against the British army. Yet, the opium war is hardly talked about in India, unlike China, where the war is remembered and so is the Indian contribution…
... We have forgotten the Opium Wars, if ever we remembered it. But China has not. They are a civilisation with great historical consciousness, it is something they pay great attention to. The war is extensively memorialised in China. And they are intensely aware that Indians participated in the war, and against them.”

म्हणजे भारत-चीन मधील प्राचीन काळापासून चालत आलेले सौहार्दपूर्ण संबंध ब्रिटिशांनी अफूच्या व्यापारापोटी बिघडवून टाकले, ज्याची किंमत आज स्वतंत्र भारत मोजत आहे.

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