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."

Thursday, July 22, 2021

जॉर्ज बरनार्ड शॉ, मराठी रंगभूमी, आणि गिरीश कर्नाड ...Once The Presiding Deity of Indian Theatre G B Shaw Promoted Eugenics, Opposed Vaccination

 गिरीश कर्नाड म्हणतात : "... In the years following Independence, the presiding deity of Indian theatre was the English playwright, George Bernard Shaw. Shaw believed that theatre’s responsibility was to discuss social issues and the playwright’s aim was social upliftment. This corresponded with a philosophical belief underpinning the Indian independence movement: ‘To become eligible for independence we must wash away traditionally handed down evils from society and purify ourselves.’ Further, it was possible to sit back and enjoy Shaw’s plays since they were mainly comedies. From beginning to end, his dialogue threw up lines that elicited laughter. To him, humour and irony were devices to bring about social change.

There was the practical aspect as well: since Shaw’s plays were all about middle-class family troubles, they only required a living room set. This was in contrast to company theatre, which demanded elaborate sets and scenery, costumes, accompanying music, and so on. Plays in Shaw’s style were affordable to middle-class organizers of performances. The middle-class audience could relate to them since they were seeing on stage the problems of their own living rooms, and it was palatable to them since it was sugar-coated with humour.

In Marathi, beginning with the generation of playwrights that moved away from the company tradition to write exclusively for cultured audiences – Mama Varerkar, P.K. Atre, Mo Ga Rangnekar – and continuing into my own generation – Vasant Kanetkar and Vijay Tendulkar – almost every play was written in this style. In Kannada, it was Kailasam and Sriranga who wrote plays in this tradition.

As a result, our epics and the puranas found no place in contemporary urban theatre. To this ‘modern’ sensibility of theatre, stories from the puranas or our folk literature were not only ridiculous but also politically regressive. At a 1956 seminar on Indian theatre organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, left-leaning critics branded traditional forms and literature a regressive temptation that would take us away from contemporary reality...."

('This Life At Play: memoirs', २०२१) 

वरील मराठी नाटककारांत एक नाव नाहीये : 'ती फुलराणी' ह्या शॉ यांच्या Pygmalion  वर आधारित प्रचंड लोकप्रिय नाटकाचे लेखक पु ल देशपांडे. 

हे वाचून मी थक्क झालो. किती खुजेपणा हा की त्याने आपले लोकसाहित्य, महाकाव्ये आणि पुराणे झिडकारले...आणि पुरोगामी,  ज्या शॉ चा उदोउदो करत होते , ते शॉ कसे होते, या बद्दल जॉन ग्रे लिहतात :

“…For George Bernard Shaw, Nazi Germany was not a reactionary dictatorship but a legitimate heir to the European Enlightenment….”

“…Shaw’s view of Nazism was not so far-fetched. It chimed with Hitler’s self-image as a fearless progressive and modernist. 

Shaw viewed both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as progressive regimes. As such, he held, they were entitled to kill off obstructive or superfluous people. Throughout his life, the great playwright argued in favour of mass extermination as an alternative to imprisonment. It was better to kill the socially useless, he urged, than to waste public money locking them up…” (‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals’, 2002)

 "...In a speech to the Eugenics Education Society in 1910, Shaw declared: “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time looking after them.” Here Shaw was not speculating about a hypothetical future society. In his introduction to Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s English Prisons Under Local Government (1921), he explicitly advocated large-scale use of the lethal chamber as an alternative to imprisonment. In The Crime of Imprisonment (1946), he reiterated his view of how anti-social elements should be treated: “If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way.”

Shaw’s belief that many human beings were “not fit to live” was a recurring theme among early-20th-century progressive thinkers...." (‘A History of the Future: how writers envisioned tomorrow’s world’, New Statesman, November 12 2017)


 'Pygmalion and Galatea' by Ernest Normand