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, April 08, 2023

Wednesday, April 05, 2023

Monday, April 03, 2023

Patenting of Things Found in Nature or of Trivial Business Processes

जून १० २००७ ला मी पेटंटिंग या विषयावर लिहल होत : "Patenting Some Obvious Thing will Raise Inequity in the World". 

 एप्रिल २०१८मध्ये ft.com वर मार्टीन वूल्फ लिखित हे वाचल : "Who creates a nation’s economic value?"

त्यातील काही वाक्य:
"It is not just finance that is in the dock. Mazzucato also attacks what is going on in more obviously beneficial sectors of the economy, such as information technology and pharmaceuticals. One of the problems here, she argues, is the award of overly generous or simply unjustifiable rights to intellectual property, such as the patenting of things found in nature or of trivial business processes"


Artist: Chon Day, The New Yorker, September 28 1940

Friday, March 31, 2023

फॉसबोल साहेबांना जर्मन म्हटलेल बहुदा आवडल नसत!...V. Fausboll's Ten Jatakas, 1872

 

आधुनिक काळात किमान तीन ग्रेट (आणि माझ्या आवडत्या) लोकांनी मराठीत जातक कथा आणल्या आहेत: धर्मानंद कोसंबी, चिं वि जोशी,  दुर्गा भागवत.... 
 
कै. धर्मानंद कोसंबी त्यांच्या पुस्तकाच्या प्रस्तावनेत म्हणतात: 
 
"...जातकट्ठकथा प्रसिद्धीला आणण्याच्या कामीं ज्यांनी परिश्रम केले त्यांत व्ही. फॉसबोल (V. Fausboll) ह्या जर्मन पंडिताला अग्रस्थान दिलें पाहिजे. जर्मनी कोठें आणि सिंहलद्वीप कोठें ! पण 'किं दूरं व्यवसायिनाम्' ह्या न्यायानें या गृहस्थानें तेथून सिंहली ताडपत्री पुस्तकें गोळा करून त्यांच्या आधारावर, दुसर्या कोणाचें साहाय्य नसतां, रोमन अक्षरांनी जातकट्ठकथा छापण्यास १८७७ सालीं आरंभ केला; व १८९६ साली हे काम संपविलें..."
 
पण फॉसबोल (1821-1908) तर डॅनीश होते. ते कोपनहेगन मध्ये संस्कृत शिकवायचे. 
 
अर्काइव्ह.ओआरजी (archive.org) येथे फॉसबोलांचे 'Ten Jatakas. The original Pali text with a translation and notes', 1872 हे पुस्तक उपलब्ध आहे. त्यात मला कुठेही जर्मन किंवा जर्मनीचा उल्लेख सापडला नाही. त्यात इंग्लीश आहे आणि रोमन लिपीत लिहलेले पाली आहे. 
 
विकिपीडिया डेन्मार्क बद्दल म्हणतो : 
"...A nascent Danish liberal and national movement gained momentum in the 1830s; after the European Revolutions of 1848, Denmark peacefully became a constitutional monarchy on 5 June 1849. A new constitution established a two-chamber parliament. Denmark faced war against both Prussia and Habsburg Austria in what became known as the Second Schleswig War, lasting from February to October 1864. Denmark was defeated and obliged to cede Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia. This loss came as the latest in the long series of defeats and territorial loss that had begun in the 17th century. After these events, Denmark pursued a policy of neutrality in Europe...."
 
फॉसबोल साहेबांना जर्मन म्हटलेल बहुदा आवडल नसत!
 

 

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Animal knowledge is such-and-such, so ours is, too...


Anthony Gottlieb:
"...Then there is (David) Hume’s naturalism, by which I mean something different from the Greek “naturalism” mentioned earlier. Here I mean Hume’s determination to see man as wholly a part of nature and fundamentally similar to other creatures—that is, as an animal among other animals. This type of naturalism informs his treatment of our cognitive faculties, our moral sense, and, in a way, of the phenomenon of religion, which is, for him, something to be explained rather than justified. In the case of our cognitive faculties, his approach is, tellingly, the opposite of, say, that of Hobbes or Leibniz. They say: well, such-and-such can’t count as knowledge, because even animals can do that. But Hume says: animal knowledge is such-and-such, so ours is, too..."


c 1909


Artist: Clarence F. Underwood (1871 - 1929)

Monday, March 27, 2023

Friday, March 24, 2023

The Thousand and One Nights is a Marvel of Eastern Literature... Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami, ‘Kafka On The Shore’,2002:

"... The Burton edition has all the stories I remember reading as a child, but they’re longer, with more episodes and plot twists, and so much more absorbing that it’s hard to believe they’re the same. They’re full of obscene, violent, sexual, basically outrageous scenes. Like the genie in the bottle they have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom, that common sense can’t keep bottled up … Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world..."

Orhan Pamuk, 'Other Colors: Essays and a Story', 2007:
"... This brings us to the real subject: The Thousand and One Nights is a marvel of Eastern literature. But because we live in a culture that has severed its links with its own cultural heritage and forgotten what it owes to India and Iran, surrendering instead to the jolts of Western literature, it came back to us via Europe...
...I would still like to use this book to say something about reading and death. There are two things people always say about the Thousand and One Nights. One is that no one has ever managed to read the book from start to finish. The second is that anyone who does read it from start to finish is sure to die. Certainly an alert reader who has seen how these two warnings fit together will wish to proceed with caution. But there’s no reason for fear. Because we’re all going to die one day, whether we read the Thousand and One Nights or not …"
 
 

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

पाण्याचे मद्य झाले...The Wedding Feast at Cana, 1562 by Paolo Veronese

 ना. गो. कालेलकर , 'भाषा आणि संस्कृती', १९६२-१९८२, पृष्ठ ४७:

"... ख्रिस्ताच्या शेवटच्या भोजन प्रसंगी पाण्याचे मद्य झाले अशी कथा आहे..."

विकिपीडिया मधील लास्टसपर (शेवटच्या भोजन प्रसंगी) च्या वेळी अशी कथा असल्याचा उल्लेख नाही. 

माझी एक पूर्वीची (जून १५, २०१०ची) पोस्ट पहा. कालेलकर सांगत आहेत ती कथा "Marriage at Cana" च्या वेळी घडली. येशूचा तो एक (पाण्याची वाईन करणे) सुरवातीचा चमत्कार होता. 


  The Wedding Feast at Cana (1562) by Paolo Veronese

ह्या चित्राची आजवरची कथा Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Saltzman  ह्या पुस्तकात सांगितली आहे. त्याचे परीक्षण मी मार्च २०२१ मध्ये The American Scholar मध्ये वाचले.

Saturday, March 18, 2023

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Kafka Back To Arabian Nights

 Haruki Murakami, ‘Kafka on the shore’:

“…I head off to the reading room and back to Arabian Nights. Like always, once I settle down and start flipping pages, I can't stop. The Burton edition has all the stories I remember reading as a child, but they're longer, with more episodes and plot twists, and so much more absorbing that it's hard to believe they're the same. They're full of obscene, violent, sexual, basically outrageous scenes. Like the genie in the bottle they have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom, that common sense can't keep bottled up. I love it and can't let go. Compared to those faceless hordes of people rushing through the train station, these crazy, preposterous stories of a thousand years ago are, at least to me, much more real. How that's possible, I don't know. It's pretty weird….”