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."

Sunday, May 01, 2022

लम्बकर्णगंधा, मत्स्यगंधा, वराहगंधा, कुकुटगंधा...कंपोस्टगंधा...Everyone had Pimples and Smelled of Compost

While reviewing Anthony Harvey's 'The Lion in Winter', 1968, Alex von Tunzelmann writes in her remarkable book 'Reel History: The World According to the Movies', 2015:

"...The Lion in Winter takes place at Chinon, a French residence of English king Henry II, over Christmas 1183. Henry’s heir, Henry the Young King, had died just months before. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was his prisoner. Relations with his three remaining sons, Richard the Lionheart, John and Geoffrey, were on a knife edge.

People: The events shown did not actually take place at Chinon over Christmas 1183. The film elides a meeting of Henry with his sons at Angers earlier that year, with a summit between him and Philip II of France at Gisors on 6 December. Still, the prickly family Christmas is an event with which many in the audience will identify, though most families only plot each other’s grisly demises as a whimsical fantasy. Not so the Plantagenets, who are ready and waiting with actual armies to take each other out if the division of the turkey (or the kingdom) goes the wrong way. Peter O’Toole gives the same performance as Henry II he gave in Becket, with the same delicious result. This time, though, an Eleanor of Aquitaine has been found to match him in the form of Katharine Hepburn. ‘I haven’t kept the great bitch in the keep for ten years out of passionate attachment,’ growls Henry. ‘I could peel you like a pear and God himself would call it justice!’ bellows Eleanor.
Romance: Henry has decided to marry his young mistress, Alys Capet, to his drippiest son, John. Petulantly, Alys objects: ‘I don’t like your Johnny. He’s got pimples and he smells of compost.’ Goodness, you couldn’t be that picky in the twelfth century. Everyone had pimples and smelled of compost...."



Peter O'Toole as King Henry II and Jane Merrow as Alais


 courtesy: AVCO Embassy Pictures

That was the reality of 12th century: Everyone had pimples and smelled of compost...

Sadly no history book, movie, play captures the smells....

George Orwell has said: "One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil war."

No literature in Marathi on Panipat, 1761 quite captures the smells that must have prevailed when Marathas were caught in a siege for weeks before the famed battle that broke out on January 14 1761. 

For some one like me, with ultra sensitive sense of smell,  it would have been hell, probably enough to kill me much before the battle!

On this blog, I have written lovingly about the days we spent at Kolhapur during our childhood. What I never mentioned while writing that was the smell of night soil that prevailed around our aunt's house where we stayed. Manual scavenging was still practised. The bucket of the bucket-toilet that was used by almost half a dozen families was located just a couple of meters away from the entrance of my aunt's house!

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