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, March 20, 2007

Where do you suppose Bhau Padhye learned such terrible words?

“SACRED GAMES” of Vikram Chandra has received a lot of praise across the world.

Donald Morrison in his review for FT on Sept 29, 2006 says:

’……… the real star of Sacred Games is Mumbai, described with the fond precision of Joyce’s Dublin - from Colaba to Bandra, gang-ridden Dongri to graceful Marine Drive….

Chandra gets the sounds and smells, as well as Mumbai’s mix of smugness and longing, rural atavism and mobile-phone modernity, filmi (film music) glitz and gangster strut. He also evokes the close links between those last two realms, in an almost painfully hilarious account of Gaitonde’s attempt to produce a Bollywood movie.

For added authenticity, Chandra sprinkles the pages with enough Hindi, Urdu and Marathi to fill a dictionary. It helps to know your blenchods from your maderchods, your lakhs from your crores. He never offers translations - or italics - yet clarity prevails. When one of Gaitonde’s girlfriends says: “Give a boy a ghoda, doesn’t make him smart. Just makes him a chutya with a gun,” you get the picture.’

In Bhau Padhye, Mumbai had her best chronicler of all time.

Marathi speaking people often say- in day to day life they speak Tukaram’s (17th century saint-poet) Marathi. Similarly, a lot of Bambaiyya Hindi / Marathi is deeply influenced by Bhau Padhye’s Marathi. Or is it the other way round?!

Literary stalwarts like Durga Bhagwat दुर्गा भागवत, Vijay Tendulkar, Bhalchandra Nemade and Dilip Chitre have all called Bhau Padhye world-class artist. Quite rightly so.

Unfortunately, Bhau’s royalty income from his entire life’s work would never equal even a fraction of Chandra’s advance (US$ 1 million) for this single book!






Artist: Helen E. Hokinson The New Yorker 9 June 1945
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