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."

Wednesday, February 26, 2025

The Neglect of Asia was the Great Failure of Yalta@80...But China, not India?

 Stephen Kotkin has written an article for The Economist on Feb 11 2025 titled: "Jaw-jawing at Yalta, 80 years ago:The neglect of Asia was the great failure of Yalta".

 Not a word on India!

My favorite writer Diana Preston has written a book : "Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World",  2019.

It has India. How Churchill was reluctant to talk about India's independence with FDR.

I quote a few lines from the book.

"...Roosevelt acquiesced in Stalin’s proposal that he should stay in the Soviet Legation in Teheran so he would be safer from Nazi agents. At their private meetings he emphasized disagreements with Churchill on issues such as India, the role of France and the date of the cross-Channel invasion...."

"...(Churchill’s fellow anti-appeaser but reluctant wartime Secretary of State for India Leo) Amery complained that Churchill had a ‘Hitler-like attitude towards India’ and was ‘shouting’ about India and claiming its then 500 million inhabitants were ‘breeding like rabbits’. On one occasion Amery questioned whether ‘on this subject of India he [Churchill] is really quite sane – there is no relation between his manner, physical and intellectual, on this theme and the equability and dominant good sense he displays on issues directly affecting the conduct of the war.’..."  

"...Perhaps partly because of his generally hostile attitude, Churchill had been slow to realize the seriousness of the 1940s Bengal famine in which more than 1 million people died. The press in America as well as in Britain and India castigated the feeble relief attempts by the British government and also by local Indian authorities. Nevertheless, it took considerable pressure, including a threat to resign by the British viceroy in India Lord Wavell, as well as from Leo Amery and Parliament to overturn the government’s ‘scandalous’ inaction. Finally convinced, in April 1944 Churchill wrote to Roosevelt asking to borrow American merchant ships to import wheat to India from Australia...."

"...Churchill’s almost hysterical opposition to any suggestion of Indian independence was well known to both Roosevelt and Stalin. Roosevelt himself at Teheran discussed Churchill’s stance privately with Stalin, who agreed that the empire was a sore spot for Churchill. In Washington over the New Year of 1941/2, Roosevelt suggested that Churchill promise India independence and propose a timescale for achieving it as the US had for the Philippines. Churchill responded that he would resign before he would ‘yield an inch of the territory that was under the British flag’. On the fringes of the Casablanca Conference, after jocularly offering to hand Gandhi over to the United States – ‘He’s awfully cheap to keep, now that’s he’s on hunger strike’ – Churchill continued:

There are always earnest spinsters in Pennsylvania, Utah, Edinburgh or Dublin persistently writing letters and signing petitions and ardently giving their advice . . . urging that India be given back to the Indians and South Africa back to the Zulus or Boers, but as long as I am called by His Majesty the King to be his First Minister, I shall not assist at the dismemberment of the British Empire...."

"...Roosevelt also reflected, ‘The British were in too embarrassing a situation from the standpoint of the make-up of the British Empire to oppose the Russian request. India was not self-governing – and Churchill had made it clear earlier that he did not favor Indian independence – and yet India was to have a vote.’..."

India appears 40 odd times in the book, and China 50 odd times. Fair.  


Sarah Churchill, Anna Roosevelt and Kathleen Harriman (from left) at Livadia Palace, the site of the Yalta Conference