मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च 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: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Being symbiotic with people

In Indian epic Mahabharata, dog is part of a very moving story.

After fighting bloodiest battle of the time, Pandavas, the victors, began their final journey towards heaven atop Himalayas, a dog accompanied them.

All except the eldest brother- Yudhishthira- died on their way. Only Yudhishthira and the dog reached the door of the heaven. Indra came on his chariot to get pious and truthful Yudhishthira to heaven. Yudhishthira paid his respect to Lord Indra and asked his companion dog to get into the chariot. Indra was shocked, “A dog to heaven?” When Yudhishthira refused to go to heaven without the dog, the God of Death, Dharmaraj Yama emerged out of the dog and blessed Yudhishthira. Yama was testing the steadfastness of Yudhishthira.

If there was any other animal instead of dog, it may not have understood when Yudhishthira motioned it to get into the chariot!

The Economist in Feb 2004 had a story "Sensitive souls" on dogs. Why did dog become man's best friend?

It says: "NO SPECIES has developed a closer relationship with humanity than the dog. But that relationship's basis—what it is about dogs that allows them to live at ease with people—is still little understood. After all, dogs are descended from wolves, which are big, scary carnivores that would certainly have competed with early man for prey, and might not have been averse to the occasional human as a light snack……

sensitivity to human social cues is a recent genetic adaptation that has evolved specifically to allow dogs to enter a new ecological niche—that of being symbiotic with people."

Therefore no amount of teaching or coercion will help a cat to wag its tail!


Artist : Tom Cheney Publication: The New Yorker Nov 11 1985
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